You won't stop overeating until you understand this.

Transcript

there's this woman we'll call her Rebecca she's 25 years old she's struggling with binge eating she feels really obsessive around food she's got really intense Cravings she feels hungry all the time she feels like she's constantly on her diet and she's absolutely sick of it and for doing it for 10 years stuck in this way of being and to the point that she thinks this is just who she is I'm more than anything now she just wants a normal healthy relationship with food like she sees her friend have like she sees her sister have and she feels stuck and she doesn't understand she knows where she is she knows where she wants to be but she doesn't understand what more she could possibly do to make that happen and there's something very key that is keeping Rebecca stuck and that thing that's keeping her stuck is that she doesn't realize that different parts of her disordered relationship with food have become or are useful to her she sees it all as a big problem that needs to be solved or taken away and she has missed the um the point entirely that different elements of it are hard to stop because in part in a very flawed way they are useful to her when Rebecca was growing up one of the things that her parents did her wonderful loving parents they won't really want to talk about feelings all that much and when she would get down or she'd get angry or hurt or sad one of the go-to's that her parents had would either be to take her out shopping or to make her delicious food or take her for ice cream or give her a hot chocolate and so there was just a big rush to get Rebecca feeling better as quickly as possible and it worked and Rebecca would feel better to get a new item of clothing she'd get to go out for pizza what Rebecca doesn't realize as an adult he says somewhere along the line she has started to confuse food with feeling better emotional regulation because it happened so long ago 25 years ago it started happening it's just gone right over her head and she doesn't realize that food took on a different meaning to her Beyond just food and later down the line as Rebecca got older restricting her food and trying to lose weight became another way for her to try to feel better particularly about herself or to try and build confidence or to feel more self-assured so what Rebecca doesn't realize is happening is that both restriction and eating to some degree have both been placed there in an effort to make her feel better for emotional regulation right but she doesn't see this at this point so if Rebecca's trying to gain a normal healthy relationship with food without realizing this and without building up new ways of being able to handle and validate and um experience emotion and to feel confident and to feel good about herself naturally she's going to stay stuck right because otherwise gaining a healthy relationship with food would would simply mean that she wouldn't know how to manage her emotions properly and of course that's just never going to work for me when I was growing up I didn't know I had this whole thing about anger my dad would always say oh don't get angry be compassionate to other people's point of view don't get upset about these things and I had no idea that it had happened and it had impacted my relationship with food until I was older and realized well hang on a second I never get angry but do you know what I do do I restrict myself I have intense hunger I have intense cravings and I used food and restriction essentially as a way directly or indirectly to manage my anger what Rebecca also doesn't realize is that somewhere along the lines she was growing up as she felt a little bit like an outsider she didn't feel like she entirely fit in she saw these popular girls and she really wanted to be like them but she wasn't them she wasn't in that group and somewhere along the line Rebecca had fused this idea of hey if I'm skinnier I'd be prettier I'd be more well liked I'd be more popular and I'd be more confident and I'd be more fulfilled and because it's happened at such a young age and with such conviction it's a conviction that she holds on to still until adulthood where she really 100 believes that the only way for her to feel good about herself and confident and to be admired and liked and respected is for her body to look a certain way and in her mind it needs to look perfect in order to have all of those things now because she believes this so strongly this is also standing in her way of having a normal healthy relationship with food because in order to gain that healthy relationship with food and stop binge eating she also needs to stop dieting but why would she stop dieting if it feels like a complete death to any chance of ever being confident or self-assured or admired in the way that she would really really like to be so her restriction has been useful to her as a method of gaining more confidence which when she was successfully losing weight she would feel more confident temporarily and so this confirmed to her that her theory was correct and she has this internal tug of war she wants a healthy ratio of food she doesn't want to diet anymore but she feels that she has to because what's the alternative to never feel good about herself then there's the binge eating now obviously partly Rebecca's binge eating because she makes herself go hungry and because she feels so deprived and that it's quite a normal response to that but the binge eating has also become helpful for her in another way when Rebecca has a binge is that one time really in her week where she can totally just relax sort of a peculiar way but nevertheless it's the one time that she can just probably let go she can fully indulge she can fully relax and it's kind of like a a relief and although she hates doing it there's part of binging which she really really really enjoys and she gets a lot out of everything in her life is very stressful she's got to diet she's got to try and do well at school even though she's always thinking about food she's got to plan her future she's got friends that you know need her attention everything is just quite on top of her and that time when she gets to binge is the one time where she just gets to fully just relax but it goes a little bit deeper than this Rebecca hates the fact that she's always thinking about food it drives her nuts however she also finds it very entertaining to be constantly planning diets to be planning out you know her week's worth of food to be playing out sometimes cheap day days she finds it very entertaining to be planning out how much weight she's going to lose in a certain amount of time and all the things that she's going to wear and all the things that she's going to do and so she on the one hand she hates it and it's frustrating and on the other hand she finds it very entertaining and it also gives her a big sense of accomplishment so what a typical pattern that Rebecca would often find herself in is that she would binge she'd be feeling low she'd be feeling bad about herself and then she'd get to plan she get to plan her new weight loss Journey she'd get to plan out her new diet she get to plan all the things that she's going to do in three and six months time when she's a completely different person and this makes her feel really good and gives her this sense of accomplishment and then she go on to this new plan and for a few days she'll stick to it she's feeling really good about herself she's excited about the future and then of course she'd binge again which gives her a sense of relief and then knocks her back down emotionally and up and down this roller coaster goes for the times when she can stick to her diet she feels really really good about herself then on top of that when she's successfully losing weight she gets seeing comments which she perceives as compliments more often than not about how much weight that she's lost which also makes her feel really good and something that Rebecca's often done as well say at school she would often weigh things up or I can either go into school or I could stay home and focus on trying not to eat very much or I could write this essay or I could focus on trying not to eat very much and Rebecca's not even aware of the fact that she's doing this that her attempts at restriction or binge eating allow her to not focus on other areas of her life that she sees as stressful and it gives her an alternative to focus on now at this point in this video I need to be very very clear that I'm not saying if you're struggling with your relationship with you that any of these are applicable to you I'm just telling a story because parts of it may resonate with you we can get so focused on our relationship with food today and how it needs to be solved that we forget to look at why it developed in the first place and what need that it fulfilled and there will probably be lots of them if you're emotionally eating because it's one of the few things in your day that you look forward to is being able to sit on the sofa and enjoy your favorite foods if you're doing that because you lack fun or excitement or Adventure elsewhere in life then the solution to that is to not try to use willpower to stop yourself from eating the solution as I see it is how can we add in real fun and excitement and Adventure into your life and this is where I think it gets really tricky is the very things that we often need to do to get past an eating disorder genuinely are the very things that it can be very hard to do because we have an eating disorder then if the solution is to go out and have more fun and excitement and Adventure right that can be very hard to do if you're not feeling good about yourself or if you feel like you're thinking about food all the time if you feel distracted or you feel low because you're binge eating often if we're dieting because we're trying to be prettier and more confident and more self-assured and the solution to that is not to starve ourselves to become skinnier but to actually work on our self-esteem and our confidence and self-love and self-assurance doing that and getting out of our comfort zone in order to become the most confident version of ourselves is really hard if we currently feel insecure right you can absolutely go through and do that all on your own I did but if it seems a little bit complicated or overwhelming or confusing to you and you'd like to do it as quickly as possible then I'm also here if you'd like to have a chat about how all of that works or if you have any questions for me then you're very welcome to book in a discovery call with me it's completely free we'll have 45 minutes to go through everything you can also find more information on my website testimonials are also there if you're interested in Reading those