Ep. 2: The Cause of Binge Eating: Urges to Binge

Hi, it's Catherine. Before this episode begins, I want to quickly tell you about the Brain Over Binge group. You may hear references in older episodes to previous versions of the group, and I want to let you know that the group has evolved and now I personally lead it. We have four group coaching calls per week and daily support and accountability on our private forum. While you're a member, you also get full access to the Brain Over Binge course, as well as an ad-free version of this podcast. I'm offering a special discount for podcast listeners who join the group. You can use the code Freedom99 to get $60 off of your first month, making your first month just $99. And if you already subscribed to the course, you'll receive an additional discount. There's no commitment, you can stay as many months as you need. To join us, go to brainoverbinge.com/group and use the code Freedom99 at checkout. And I hope you enjoy the show. Welcome to the Brain Over Binge podcast, where we share a simple brain-based approach to ending binge eating. This is Katherine Hansen. I'm the author of Brain Over Binge and the Brain Over Binge Recovery Guide, and I'm so glad to be co-hosting this show with my friend and colleague, Cookie Rosenblum, who is a master coach and also an author herself. Hi Cookie. Hi, Katherine. I'm happy to be here and I'm happy to be with all of you listeners. Thanks Cookie. The purpose of this podcast is to share information and insights to help you stop binge eating. With each episode, we want to empower you and we want to encourage you and help you move toward freedom from binge eating. I'm excited to tell you what we have planned for today's show. We're going to be talking about the real cause of binge eating. Those of you struggling with binge eating have likely looked for a cause. And you've probably asked yourself the question of why. You may have asked yourself why am I doing this over and over again when I know it's causing pain in my life. And the very simple answer that we're going to share is that you binge because you have urges to binge. It's the urges that are the problem. In the first episode, I explained that this is a central concept of the Brain Over Binge approach. And in today's show, we're going to dive deeper into this concept. We're going to talk more about the urges so that you can understand them and then eventually overcome them. The first thing I want to do when talking about the urges to binge is to highlight the difference between the way we view urges in the Brain Over Binge approach and the way the urges are viewed in more conventional forms of treatment. In conventional treatment, it's common to hear that the urges to binge are symptoms. That they're symptoms of underlying emotional problems or psychological problems. This is a very popular and mainstream idea. The theory is that you have urges to binge because you're not able to cope with those problems or with difficult emotions in your life in an effective way. Because binge eating is seen as a coping mechanism, then the urges are viewed in a more symbolic way, like there is signal that you need to learn to cope better. This is what I was taught, but to me, the urges never felt like a need to cope. They always felt like a need to eat massive quantities of food. At a very basic level, it didn't seem any more complicated than that. And it wasn't. If you've been using this theory that binge eating is a coping mechanism, you probably believe that to recover, you need to learn healthy coping behaviors in order to make your desire to binge go away. For example, if you binge when you're alone, you may think the cause of your binge is loneliness, but you're binge eating to cope with the negative feelings that come with being lonely. So you may try to find other ways to deal with loneliness. Hoping that by doing so, you won't feel the need to binge anymore. You won't feel those urges. And it's the same with things like depression or anxiety. If you think you binge because of depression, you might try to find ways to relieve your depression or learn to cope with it better, thinking that might take your urges to binge away. Now I want to say here that if using this theory does take your urges to binge away, then that's great. If it's helping you, there's no need to abandon this theory. But the reality is, this is not a very effective strategy. And it likely hasn't been helpful for most of you listening. And you're definitely not alone in this. Even if you can manage to become, let's say, less lonely or less anxious or less depressed, the urges will still appear. As the urges aren't always predictable, they can appear in so many different situations and under countless circumstances. Even when you're experiencing positive emotions. Also, trying to solve other issues, hoping the urges will go away, can become a monumental task that simply doesn't work. And furthermore, many of the problems you're experiencing may actually be the result of the binge eating itself. It can seem nearly impossible to solve an issue like depression or anxiety or loneliness when you feel like it's actually the binge eating that's making you depressed and making you anxious and making you lonely. We know that many of you are lovers of all types of self-help material, as I am, too. But one of the things that's important for you to know very early in learning about this approach is that it may improve your life if you learn how to deal with moods. It may improve your life if you learn how to solve problems and live a better life. We know that, but the most important thing is to separate improving yourself and improving your life from stopping binge eating. It is not necessary to be the best that you can be in order to stop this problem. You may be interested in that anyway, but it's really important to know that you can stop binging and not perfect all these different areas of your life. Because we see the urges themselves as the problem, and when you look at it that way, the answer is to stop responding to the urges and eventually they will fade away. Now let me define a little bit what the urges to binge actually are. The way that Catherine defines the urges to binge in her books are any thoughts or feeling or physical sensation that encourages binge eating. We know that these urges can be very, very compelling. They can be very powerful, or for you, maybe they're a little more subtle. Or any internal state you experience that encourages you to binge. Now we're going to teach you how to very quickly recognize your urges, whether they come in the form of a physical sensation or a thought or a feeling. And when you recognize them, not responding to them is going to become easier and easier. Yes, Cookie, I completely agree with that. And that definition of the urges is so important that anything that encourages binge eating is something you don't need to respond to. Knowing that the urges are the problem simplifies your recovery. But a lot of you right now may be thinking, well, why do I have these urges to begin with? You may think, well, okay, it makes sense that the urges are the direct cause of each binge. But the fact that I have these urges must be because I'm flawed or diseased in some way. But it doesn't. The development of the urges is a rather natural consequence of being human with the brain that we have, and especially being human with the brain that we have in a world that's often obsessed with body image and with dieting. And I'm going to explain this. The urges usually develop in your life for two very simple reasons. The first is survival instincts. And this is typically brought about by restrictive dieting. Binge eating is actually an adaptive response to food restriction. If you go on a weight loss diet and limit your calorie intake, you put your body and brain in a survival oriented state, causing you to crave and seek out large amounts of food, especially a highly stimulating or highly palatable food, like foods high in sugar and high in unhealthy fats and carbohydrates. This survival state is actually a symptom of a healthy brain, not a sign of disease. It's simply your brain trying to protect you from what it perceives as starvation, and it's trying to store up calories. This is what happened in my case. I restricted my food intake in an attempt to control my weight, and then I found myself thinking about food more than I ever had in my life. My cravings increased and increased until one day it felt like my primitive brain completely took over, and I binge for the first time. I didn't understand what was happening, and it felt totally out of control. And I thought it was just because that was weak or something was wrong with me. But in reality, it was simply because I'd put my body and brain in a state where all it cared about was getting as much food as possible to protect me from starvation. There wasn't actually anything wrong with me. After my first binge, I tried to continue dieting, but the binge eating kept happening over and over, which leads me to the second reason that urges develop, and that is habit formation. Once you binge many times, your body and brain become conditioned to expect and demand these vinges. So your brain automatically sends out strong urges, as if binge eating is necessary for your survival. These urges are just a signal that your brain currently thinks you must binge to survive. The binge eating habit can develop after repeated survival driven vinges, and that's the most Comment scenario and that's what I talked about that happened in my case, or the binge eating habit can develop after a period of overeating that increases over time and develops into binge eating and habit formation. The development of the binge eating habit is basically when the primitive part of your brain becomes conditioned to react as if benches are necessary to keep you alive. Once this habit is in place, the primitive brain will keep producing urges, even if you're no longer restricting your food intake, even if you're no longer dieting. Because it senses that you need the habit, it senses that you need to do it to live. But this also is not a sign of disease. Habit formation is a vital brain function, and we wouldn't be able to live without it. We need the ability to develop and maintain habits. The problem is that habit formation has a dark side. It fuels destructive habits as well as the productive ones. Now that I've addressed the two reasons you have binge urges, survival instincts, and habit, I want to mention that there are some potential risk factors that could help explain why some people develop the binge eating habit after a period of dieting or overeating and some do not. It's common to hear that factors like low self-esteem, cultural pressure, past trauma, genetics, or personality traits might be to blame. And it's not that none of this has any validity, but we want you to know that there's nothing truly conclusive about any of these factors. Some people have these problems and a genetic susceptibility and never develop eating disorders. Some people don't have these issues and do develop binge eating. Spending a lot of time trying to figure out what possibly made you different from someone who did not develop the binge eating habit is not very practical. If you think you have to completely figure out the problem before you can solve it, it can keep you stuck. With our simple brain-based explanation of why you have urges, we want you to realize that you are not fundamentally flawed and we want you to feel empowered that you can begin to make change. By making change, you actually have the amazing opportunity to rewire your brain any race this habit and cookie is going to talk about how that process works. Now that you understand why the urges developed in the first place or where they came from, from our old brain, the survival need, it's interesting to think about them because in order for them to give you this habit of binge eating, you have had to have acted on those urges to binge over and over again. And the beautiful simple thing here is that in order to recover, all you have to do is learn how to not act on those urges to binge over and over again and this is what we teach you. When you learn to do this, you're actually utilizing something called neuroplasticity to rewire your brain and erase the habit. And neuroplasticity simply means the ability of your brain to change, to change the pathways in it that lead you to do certain things and lead you to have habitual responses. When you do something over and over again, you do form a pathway. When the urge comes up for you to do it and you don't respond, that pathway will be pruned away. So we're saying that it's not so important to try to figure out and recover through figuring out why you in particular have your urges, but to ask yourself what can I do to eliminate the urges? We see that as the whole source of the problem and the solution. That's right, Gookie. And to eliminate them, you have to stop acting on them. And right now you're probably acting on these urges because they make you feel so uncomfortable. In effect, you are binging just to cope with these urges to binge because they create just such a strong desire and make you feel like you have no choice. The only way to get rid of the urge for you right now is to binge, but that's not what you want to do because it's going to perpetuate the habit and keep you in this cycle. So what we try to teach people is to view urges in a new way so that you cannot feel so compelled to act and they don't feel so uncomfortable and you can allow them to pass. And then as they pass, like Cookie talked about, it utilizes neuroplasticity to rewire your brain to teach your brain you no longer need this habit to survive and the brain turns off the urges. So Cookie and I teach a course together using the brain over binge approach and we see a lot of questions that come up. And one of the questions that comes up when people hear that the urges are the problem relates to the fact that many of you have spent time in more traditional approaches and have heard that urges are just a symptom that these desires to binge are a symptom of underlying issues or of a disease. As we alluded to earlier in the episode, this is not usually helpful because it makes you feel like you have to solve all your other problems to make the urges go away. And even if you do manage to solve the problems, the urges usually don't go away because of the force of habit. We just want you to be open to the idea that these urges actually aren't symptoms of anything, that they are the problem in and of themselves. They are a symptom that you have created a habit in your brain or they are a symptom that you are in a survival state where your restricted calories and you are needing large amounts of food. Now you do not need to binge when you're in that survival state, but you do need to eat adequately and enough. And in the last episode, we talked about there's two recovery goals to this approach. One is to dismiss the urges to binge and two is to eat adequately. So if you are eating adequately, it allows the urges to fade away more easily when you stop acting on them. We know that most literature, older literature, talks about the urges as symptoms from all different types of emotional issues. But we believe that viewing your urges as a symptom of something deeper and bigger and underlying your entire life, we really believe that to make your recovery confusing and way more complicated than it needs to be. So sometimes people might believe that you're binge eating developed as a result of an emotional problem. You know, low self-esteem, not feeling good about yourself, family problems, mood issues, but even if you had those problems at the same time that you started to binge and somehow they became connected and you conditioned yourself that when you felt this, you also started to binge and the two of them got linked together. Even if you believe there was an original connection, the urges to binge themselves are still the reason for each time you binge. So that's all we really need to work on together. Because without those urges to binge, you would not binge. Am I right? Regardless of whatever else was going on in your life. If you did not have urges, you would not binge. But once the habit develops to do it, the emotional issues that were present, when you first started, it feels like they're linked together. But what's really driving the benches are those urges. If you didn't have the urges and you were upset about a situation in your life, without the urges, you would never say, "I think I'll binge today." That might solve this problem. We would never want that because we know what it does, too, how we feel about ourselves and the rest of our life. So it's the urges that we're really going to focus on. That wraps up today's episode about the urges to binge. Next time we'll explain how you have the ability to change the way you respond to these urges and overcome them. We want to help you start changing your brain and ending this destructive habit. Before we end today, I want to mention that you can get a free ebook about the Brain Overbench approach to help you start applying these concepts in your own life. This book is called The Brain Overbench Basics and you can get it by simply clicking the link in the show notes. And now Cookie is going to tell you how you can learn more about her. Thank you, Catherine. In the show notes, there'll also be a link to me and you can get a free download of my book that's on Amazon clearing your path to permanent weight loss if that's an issue for you. And we'll see you next time at the next episode. Yeah, we hope you join us again. And for now this is Catherine Hansen and Cookie Rosenblum reminding you that you have the power to rewire your brain and live a binge-free life. The Brain Overbench podcast is produced and recorded by Brain Overbench Recovery Coaching LLC. All work is copyrighted by Brain Overbench Recovery Coaching LLC and all rights are reserved. As a disclaimer, the host of the Brain Overbench podcast are not professional counselors or licensed healthcare providers and this podcast is not a substitute for medical advice or any form of professional therapy. Eating disorders can have serious health consequences and you are strongly advised to seek medical attention for matters relating to your health. Please get help when you need it and good luck on your journey.