140: Stop BINGE eating with these 2 simple steps

There's really only two things you need to do if you want to stop binge eating, heal your relationship with food, become a natural eater again, and I wanted to record this episode to break these two things down for you very clearly, very practically. So you actually have action steps to take after listening to this episode. I'm Ashlyn. I'm the host of Heartlet Wellness. I'm so grateful to be here with you once again for another episode. Let's dive right in. When I was thinking about making this episode, I was thinking about what I wish someone would have told me when I was struggling with food and I was stuck in a binge cycle because if you're new here, I have struggled with food so, so, so, so much as a teenager and into my young adult years. And when I was struggling with food, I was trying everything. There's so much noise out there, not just in the like dieting obsessive food world, but also in the healing world, in the intuitive eating world. And believe me, I tried everything. I explored all of it and it felt like none of it was actually working. Like I would, I would see a little bit of progress, maybe a little bit of less food obsession or overeating or binging, but I never felt fully free. Like I felt like I was just going to have to carry around this little food issue for the rest of my life, or I was going to have to just settle into a weight or a body that didn't really feel good for me in the name of food freedom. And I wish I could go back in time and talk to my younger self and tell her these exact two things, these two steps that I'm going to tell you today. So she could actually heal her relationship with food. And when I say heal, I mean fully, fully, fully healed. Like to the point where eating feels as easy as peeing, it's not something that you think about every day. You're not obsessively planning out what you're going to eat or adding up your calories or worried that you're going to lose control. You just wake up and you know that you're going to have to pee at some point during the day, but you don't plan it out and you just trust your body. You can have that same experience with food. And I, you know, have experienced that in my own life, but now I have guided hundreds of women through the same process inside heartlet eating. And so I see it over and over and over again, no matter how chaotic your relationship with food might be, you can absolutely heal it fully and become a natural leader. You just need the right framework and the right support. So without further ado, I'm going to give you two things that you need to do to fully heal from binge eating. This is not about willpower. This is not about control. This is not about discipline. This is not about avoiding trigger foods. This is about healing your relationship with food. Are you ready? Shurong Roll, please. The number one thing that you need to do is actually heal the root cause behind why you're bingeing. Binging over eating or any food issue has very little to do with food. It is the symptom. It's the manifestation of something much deeper. And a lot of times we dance around the root cause and we try to heal our relationship with food by following meal plans or tracking your calories to make sure we're eating enough or listening to some, you know, intuitive eating advice, but we're not actually healing the root cause behind why you're bingeing. I don't believe in self sabotage. I don't believe any of us intentionally try to harm ourselves with any behavior. I believe that self sabotage is misdirected self soothing. And so when we're talking about bingeing and overeating, I know that you don't want to, you don't want to binge. You wouldn't be listening to this episode if you wanted to keep bingeing. You want to stop bingeing. You don't like the way it feels. You don't like the effects it's having on your life and your weight and your mind. And so why are you still doing it? Well, it's because it's providing you with some form of safety or regulation or relief. And the reason why you're still doing it is because there's an unhealed root cause. You can think about it like an iceberg. Like if you're out on the ocean and you see an iceberg, you just see the tip of the ice, but there's actually like 70 to 90% of the iceberg underneath the water that you can't see. Same thing with food. On the surface, what you see is, oh, I feel out of control with food every night or I feel quote, unquote addicted to sugar or I can't stop adding up the calories in my head or I'm constantly body checking. And we focus so much on those behaviors, but what's the bigger problem is everything underneath the surface, which are the root causes of your food chaos. And after working with hundreds of women throughout the years on healing their relationships with food, I identified eight root causes that I saw over and over and over again. And if you haven't taken it already, I have a free root cause quiz that you can take that will help identify which of the root causes you have. I will link that in the show notes. But for the sake of this episode, some of those root causes are perfectionism control, a lack of safety in the body. I'm going to talk about that in a minute, self-dabitatge, self-worth, lack of pleasure, scarcity and funning. And usually more often than not, you're going to have all of these root causes are at least a combination of them because they all kind of intermingle and fit in together. They kind of work as a team in some ways. But we have to actually heal these root causes at a subconscious level. A lot of times these root causes are not conscious things that you're aware of. They're actually subconscious or being held in your nervous system. And we need to shift them at a deeper level. A lot of times these things are linked to childhood experiences, whether it was capital T or lowercase T trauma. We can develop these parts of ourselves that are protective parts when we experience trauma or just situations that feel not super safe as children. So then we create perfectionism as a protection or we start to obsessively control everything because life feels out of control. Or we don't feel safe in our body because our parents didn't have all of the tools that we have now and they didn't have a super big nervous system capacity. And so we didn't actually learn how to safely be with our feelings as children as well. So what I'm saying is that in order to heal your binging, we have to identify the root cause that's driving it and then actually heal that root cause. This all correlates very heavily to your nervous system because we have to ask ourselves, why do these root causes exist in the first place? Like, why are you a perfectionist? Why do you have a control thing? Why do you have low self esteem? Or why are you not prioritizing rest in your life? Why are you a people pleaser? And I could explain why from the framework of your nervous system for every single one of these things because your nervous systems number one strategy is to try and keep you safe. And it's going to develop coping mechanisms or strategies to try and create that safety at the expense of your relationship with food. And so anything that you're doing with food that feels out of order, I like to say out of order instead of disordered, it's actually just because your nervous system is trying to create regulation and safety. Not eating is a regulation strategy. Over eating is a regulation strategy. Counting your calories is a regulation strategy. Finging is a regulation strategy. Perging is a regulation strategy. And so if we don't address your nervous system and help first remove the real root behind why your nervous system is probably hanging out in fight or flight most of the time or shut down or freeze or fawning which is people pleasing. If we don't address the root cause behind why that's happening, we're not going to be able to actually quote unquote regulate your nervous system. But we also have to grow your capacity, your capacity to be with sensations and feelings in your body. You can kind of think about your capacity like a cup and the amount of water that can fit in the cup is the size of your capacity. So if you have a bigger nervous system capacity it means you just have a bigger cup and you can be with more sensation in your body and hold it safely without it sending you into dysregulation. And so something that I think a lot of people get confused in the nervous system world and the healing world is that you hear people talk about nervous system regulation and growing your capacity and we instantly jump to okay I need to feel like calm all the time. I need to feel regulated all the time and that's not actually how it works. We're not actually looking for feeling calm all the time. We're looking for a flexible nervous system that can actually go in and out of the different states and come back to safety when stressors are no longer present. But we have to address those root causes that haven't been healed in order for your nervous system to be able to find safety more easily. If you have unhealed trauma or suppressed emotions from your past that haven't actually had the space to be processed and released it's going to be almost impossible for you to find quote unquote safety in your nervous system. And this is one of my favorite things to do with my clients in one-to-one sessions. Sometimes my clients call me the root cause wizard because I'm so good at finding root causes and bringing healing to them at a deeper subconscious level. I've developed my own method in and framework to doing that healing. I feel like it was almost given to me by God in some crazy ways. I have some crazy stories I will share someday. I love my job so much. But it's really important that we actually do that deeper subconscious healing work on your younger parts of you and experiences that you've had throughout your life. So we can free up that trapped energy in your body and take the burden off of your nervous system. 'Cause your nervous system is probably, it's like holding a beach ball under water. It's like pushing down all of this trauma and these emotions and these experiences. And it requires so much effort. And once we release that beach ball and it flies up out of the water, you can finally relax and you don't need bubble baths and red light therapy and cold plunges to do that. You need to actually heal the root cause, the heal the trauma, heal the thing that's underneath the thing. I think a lot of people get stuck in this trap of trying to gather more information. It's like, oh, well, let me just read another book about the nervous system or let me just listen to another podcast about why I'm overeating or follow this other girl on Instagram who talks about it. I'm gonna say this to you with love and with truth that you know enough, you already know enough. You've gathered plenty of information. You do not need any more information. You need someone to actually walk you through the action steps of healing. You need application. You need a subconscious deep shift in your body. And that's not gonna happen from reading another book. And this is why I created Heart Lidding. It's not just a resource for you to learn a bunch of stuff and geek out on it. I mean, believe me, I love to geek out. And if you're a nerd like me, you will love it. But we are actually applying all of this stuff in a very specific order and a specific way. It's a life change. You're going to be taking action and we're going to be doing deep subconscious nervous system healing work. And that is the thing that's actually going to grow your capacity and also heal your binging. It's not information, it's action. That's going to do that. And if that's something that you are needing support with, you know I'm here for you. This is my favorite thing to do. And I would love to support you in "Side Heart Lid Eating" with the link in the show notes. So this is the first thing. You need to heal your root cause, grow your nervous system capacity and address the root cause behind why you're actually binging. The second thing, and this is just as important, is you need to relearn how to eat. You have forgotten how to eat. You're binging because you have disconnected from the natural innate eater within you. When I walk my students through Heart Lid Eating, I'm not trying to get them to become this like new intuitive eater person who's like learned this crazy way of eating. I'm actually removing all of the gunk and the blocks and the misinformation and the dysregulation that they've accumulated over the years that has disconnected them from the innate natural eater within them. When all of us come to this planet, we are natural connected eaters. As infants, we know exactly how much food to eat. In every single moment, we are very connected to our built-in calorie and macro calculators. And you are that connected eater at your core as well. You came into this planet with that connection somewhere along the way, and it might have even been on like day two of your life. Something happened that disconnected you from that built-in guide. And so we're actually just reconnecting you to that way of eating. You're not learning something new. You're just returning to the version of you that knows how to eat. We're not following wellness rules or food rules or calories or macros. You probably know way too much information. You've studied way too much about nutrition. My most common client is somebody who is a health coach or a nutritionist or is even in the eating disorder recovery world and they're still struggling with food because you actually know too much about food and that's actually blocking you from eating like a naturally thin person. All of this obsession about wellness rules and food rules and calories and even intuitive eating rules is actually activating hypervigilance and this like surveillance in your brain and your nervous system. And it leads to I call it brain-led eating instead of heart-led eating. And when I say heart-led eating, that encompasses eating from your body, mind, and soul, making food decisions that are aligned with your complete whole self. And this is exactly how naturally thin people eat. They don't call it heart-led eating. They don't have a name for it, but this is how they eat. And when I was learning how to eat myself, re-learning how to eat myself, I started to copy all of these naturally thin people that I knew in my life because they were the ones that, they were the only people that I could find that truly weren't struggling with food, didn't have an issue with their weight like they all felt lean and good in their bodies and were able to eat whatever food they wanted and didn't struggle with food noise. All of the intuitive eating advice I saw out there, I saw people who were still struggling. They were saying that they were intuitive eaters, but they were still thinking about food all the time. A lot of them were saying that they just had to accept their body at a higher weight because that was the alternative to like obsessing about food and trying to be as thin as possible. And that just all felt not aligned for me. That didn't feel like true freedom to me. I wanted to live in a thin body and I'm not ashamed to say that and you shouldn't be either. Obviously we don't want to be underweight, but it's okay to want to be thin and lean. And I also wanted to have freedom with food and the only people that I could find that actually had that were naturally thin people. And so I obsessively interviewed and studied these people and observed them and learned how to eat like them myself. And this is a really important step if you struggle with binge eating because the reason why you probably started to binge most of the time, sometimes there's some other things going on, but most of the time it's because you tried to lose weight at some point. You went on a diet at some point and you started to restrict your food which led to a rebound of overeating and binging. And now you're scared that in order to heal from binging you're gonna have to give up your desire to be thin. You think, okay, I got myself into this mess where I restricted too hard, I dieted too hard or I just started using food as a regulator. And now I'm scared that in order to heal I'm gonna have to give up all my control. I'm gonna have to just accept my body at a higher weight and you're feeling like you have to choose between living in a body that you like or having a relationship with food that feels good to you. And I used to think this exact same thing, but I'm here to tell you there is another way. You can heal from binging and at the same time land in a thin body that's not carrying excess storage at the same time. This is the inevitable result of learning how to eat like a naturally thin person, like I teach in heart, like eating. You get to have food freedom because you're not micromanaging your food, you're trusting your built in guides. And you also get body freedom because you get to feel so good in your body. And I want you to feel good in your body. That's not something that you should be ashamed of or that should be considered disordered as it is on the internet now. It's not disordered to want to live in a healthy lean body. That is actually you connecting with the true you inside of you that knows that you're designed to live in a body that feels really good to you. And so these are the only two things you need to do. You need to heal your root cause and you need to learn how to eat like a naturally thin woman. And you need both of them because what I see a lot of people do is one or the other. They do all of the inner therapy, nervous system work and they're like super into the whole emotional, energetic spiritual world of food and eating. But they don't actually learn the nitty-gritty details of eating like a naturally thin woman. And if you do that, you're gonna be the most like spiritually emotionally informed person who still struggles with food. And I was there for so long. I knew everything about food and the nervous system and eating and emotions. And I was like so well versed in that world. But I was still overeating. I was still struggling with food. I was still obsessing about calories because I didn't actually have the right framework of the practical way to eat. And vice versa, if you just try and copy naturally thin people and try to implement all of the like tips of naturally thin eating, but you don't actually do the deeper nervous system healing work, you're not gonna ever be able to stick to it. It's gonna feel forced and you're gonna be using willpower and it's not gonna actually feel effortless. And I hear this as well from a lot of people, especially on Instagram. They'll be like, "Hey, Ashlyn, I've been following you. "I love what you're sharing. "I've been trying to listen to my built-in calorie calculator, "but I'm still binging. "I still feel out of control. "Like this isn't gonna work for me." And I always ask them, "Have you actually healed your root cause? "Have you actually done subconscious reprogramming? "Have you done nervous system work in somatics?" And 10 times out of 10, they say, "No." And I'm like, "Well, that's the reason." Because you haven't actually healed the root cause. So that eating, that way of eating is not gonna work because your nervous system is still leaning on food for regulation. We have to unlink those neural pathways. So you're not using food as a regulator. And you can actually genuinely eat like a naturally thin person without force. So if you're struggling with binging and/or overeating or any form of food chaos and you wanna heal once and for all, what I want you to do is these two things. Heal your root cause and learn how to eat like a naturally thin woman. And this is exactly what I teach inside Heartlit eating. I walk you through the exact-- way to do this. Very practical. You will definitely be taking action and I'm right here with you to support you and guide you and answer your questions and celebrate your wins. It's what I do every single day with all of my girls inside HLE and I would love to see you there. You can click the link in the show notes to join us. If you have specific questions that you feel like you want answered before you join, you can always send me a message on Instagram and I will DM you back. I love to send voice messages. If you've DMed me on Instagram, you know I send voice messages. All day long, it's my favorite thing. So we'll love to connect with you there. But in the meantime, I love you so much. I hope you have a beautiful day and we will talk next week. you