What if you called all overeating bingeing?

 

Yesterday I got to hang out online with a bunch of women and teach them some simple tools to stop overeating.  If you were there, THANK YOU for coming and I hope it was useful to you.
If you weren’t, don’t worry, I recorded it just for you 🙂 Click here to watch and I hope you learn a lot – I’ve developed this list over years of working with emotional eaters, and it’s a compilation of techniques I’ve learned through over 20 years of studying mind body healing and coaching. The best part is that  I’ve distilled each tool into it’s simplest and most effective form – I’m really not one for fluff or unnecessary details!

After the webinar, I got an email asking me why I refer to all overeating as bingeing*.

Here’s why.

Emotional eaters are often filled with shame about their eating.
They believe they should know better,
And so they often minimize how much and how often they eat when they aren’t physically hungry.
They think that if they pretend to themselves, they’ll feel better.

I have found the opposite to be true.

When I was growing up, all the women in my mother’s family would gather at someone’s house for a tea party every Saturday afternoon. They were so much fun, all my aunts, great-aunts, cousins, my grandmother, and my mom. My sister and I  used to laugh at all these women, who were permanently ‘on diet’ (and premanently overweight),  cuttng ‘just a sliver’ continously until the entire cake was gone, because they were ‘being good’ or ‘watching what they eat’!
Maybe you’ve done it too?
Or maybe you take ‘just one’ candy, over and over until the entire bowl is gone.

When we try to pretend to ourselves about ourselves,
It increases our disconnection with ourselves,
Which leads to even more overeating

So if minimizing the problem leads to overeating,
Then doing the opposite – naming it in an unmistakable, blatant way brings you to your truth about it, where all your ability to heal yourself lies.

That’s why I like to use words that are usually quite loaded, and that we avoid in order not to offend ourselves.
I”ll ask a new client “why are you fat?” (I mean, she just hired me to help her lose weight, right?!)
And similarly, I’ll call any overeating episode a binge.
Then, once we have our own attention,
We can start to examine why we did it, and how to avoid it in future.

Think about it.
If you tell yourself that you never go crazy with food, you just eat a few bites too many at meals, and a few cookies a day, so you don’t understand why you’re overweight, you’re far less likely to get help and address the problem than if you told yourself that you binge 4 times a day.

And if that brings up some emotion in you, all the better.
Emotion means you’re paying attention,
And it means you care.
And that means you’re not pretending anymore,
Which is the first step in addressing the problem.

I can help. I’m starting a brand new 3 month weight loss group, where we’ll adress the physical, hormonal and emotional causes of excess weight, and you’ll develop a customized plan to address these. It’s going to be hard core. Join if you are fully committed to do this. Forever. I have a special offer until July 12, which I talk about at the end of my webinar. Come. It will change your life. And as always, email me with any questions.

*I know that there is a DSM classification of Binge Eating Disorder, and that my use of the word binge here and in the webinar differs from that definition. I have some opinions about recent entries in the DSM, but that’s a conversation for another day.