How I (finally) stopped binge eating

I used to be a compulsive binge eater and the more I tried to control my weight the more my weight kept spiraling out of control by the time I was 17 I had seen four different nutritionist and I felt like I had tried absolutely everything to stop binge eating but nothing seems to work and I'm working out how to stop binge eating but it turned out that it was nothing at all like what other people suggested I do and nowadays I'm a dietician I'm a nutritionist and I've gotten to help thousands of people stop binge eating so on its create a video for you if you are struggling with binge eating you don't have to I don't want you to on my Chevy stuff the stuff that I learned there base such a big difference in my life so you don't have to binge eat anymore alright so let me start from the very beginning so I started becoming aware that I was bigger than the other kids probably around the age of six and by the time that I was 10 or 11 I had stolen my mum's calorie counts book and I became obsessively concerned with what it was that I was eating I wasn't overweight as a kid I was just some normal weighted kid but I got a complex kids used to tease me at school my brothers made comments out of my family and made me feel really self-conscious so I tried everything to try and control food and by the time that I was 11 I'd see my first nutritionist and she gave me a meal plan she told me what to eat when to eat and I thought this was brilliant she'd weigh me and each week and come in and she'd tell me whether or not I was good or bad that week and my eating became more and more obsessive at first I was pretty in control with food I knew what I should be eating and I was able to follow through with it but the more I kept dieting and probably meal plans and obsessing the more out of control I became around food some more I would end the binging so what would happen is if your else would leave the house and I would sneak into the pantry and find any forbidden food whether it was cereal or bread or peanut butter straight from the jar I find the chocolate and the lollies and I just eat as much as I can and it felt like no matter how much I ate it never felt like I was gonna fill that hole that gap that thing that needed to be fed a binge eating episode could go on for hours and sometimes the only thing they would end up stopping me from binge eating was because someone came home and I didn't want anyone else to know about this thing that I did who was so shameful and so in private and I wanted it to go away and I just kept thinking if I just try harder if I just have more willpower if I'm just stricter with myself then I will stop binge eating I thought that everyone else around me they had better willpower they could just control themselves and that's why they didn't big jeans I didn't realize that binge eating was just this natural reaction my body was having through feeling so deprived so not allowed to eat all the foods that my body really needed to eat at first the binge eating wasn't so intense you know maybe I've been cheated a little bit but the binges became more and more frequent they became more intense it ended up getting to a point where I was been cheating multiple times a day and I felt completely out of control I felt like the only thing I wanted to do was to weigh less and the more I tried to be good the more I ended up eating at the time I was 17 I went to go see another nutritionist who gave me more rules to follow and I heard that this would help me stop binging and I followed all these rules but what I didn't realize is that all these rules they were causing me to binge eat even more by the time I was 21 I was categorically morbidly obese and yet dieting and try to lose weight was always on my mind you see I kept getting stuck in the exact same cycle so I binge eat I go to sleep that night and I think okay tomorrow I have to be better at tomorrow I have to counteract everything that I've just so that I can actually lose weight and guess my goal so I wake up in the morning and I try to be good and by trying to be good what I mean is I would under it and I'd create these lists of forbidden foods and put even more restrictions on to what I could eat and by the time it that's a lunchtime I was going well but by afternoon I'd end up getting cravings and end up snacking and those snacks would turn into uncontrollable binges and then each day I'd be stuck in this exact same cycle see what I didn't realize is this deprivation that I was creating for myself with all these rules was the very thing that was causing me to binge eat and if I stop trying to control everything at aids and I stop trying to obsessively think about food and if I stop trying to lose weight so that actually my body wanted me to be at a healthy weight and what does me to be a healthy body my body didn't want me to binge eat so all I had to do is actually let go of the control stop dieting and then my body would actually find its own happy healthy weight one day at 21 I reached breaking points I realized this is not how people are meant to live I had just had this massive binge where I'd raided the entire pantry and had eaten everything and I was thinking about how am I gonna try and replace the food and the pantry so that no one would know that this had just happened and I knew this isn't something that could continue so the next day I made an appointment to go and see my doctor I shared some details and that's when I found out that I had something called binge eating disorder now binge eating disorder isn't the same as just overeating it's not the same as just eating an entire thing of chocolate so there's a whole bunch of different criteria that you need to be able to take in order to have binge eating disorder and my word I ticked all the boxes so finally I had this moment where I realized I had answer there was a things problem that I had that so many other people have in fact it's the most common eating disorder and yet no one was talking about it I didn't have to feel ashamed for having been cheating there was nothing intrinsically wrong with me but what it turns out to be was that my approach was just totally wrong so at that point I realized that I had spent my entire life obsessing about food and I hated my body and I had in my life so maybe if I stopped obsessing about food if I stop dieting if I stopped restricting and creating this list of biddin foods that my body would actually just find its own happy sweet spot over the next few years I really invested in my relationship with food I started to change how I think about eating about calories about movements and overtime I ended up losing 20 kilograms which is about 45 pounds I thought that losing that much weight wouldn't make the biggest difference in my life but to be honest it ended up just being a really nice side effect from having binge eating not control my life anymore to not feel like every thought revolved around food so this isn't a story about weight loss this is a story about learning to stop binge eating and regaining so much freedom from food so one of the first things I did and I can highly recommend you do it now is sit down with yourself and create a list of all the food rules that you have in your brain you might say to yourself oh well I'm not on a diet I know diets are bad for you but I would argue that chances are you are currently on a diet and you don't even know it's because you have all these food rules in your brain that are clouding your judgment when it comes to making food decisions and until you get rid of those you're still going to be controlled by dieting culture so here are a few food rules that you might be affected by breakfast is the most important meal of the day you kind have carbohydrates after certain time you have to eat six more meals a day to keep your metabolism going please just exam of nutrition rules that can seep into your life that can feel like normal but actually controlling how you eat now once you are clear on just how many food girls are affecting you what I want you to start to do is challenge those ideas challenge the idea that you have to eat breakfast in order to be healthy the next thing you need to learn is how to eat intuitively now eating intuitively basically means tuning in to your hunger and pity when you're hungry not eating because it's lunchtime or it's breakfast time your body has this brilliant system of helping you eat the right amount of feel for your body and it's your hunger system so you get hungry when you need more fuel you feel full when you feel satisfied now when we are dieters we are told to ignore hunger we're told that hunger is a really bad thing but that's not the case so in my program keep it real I do talk a lot about how to listen to your body how to eat intuitively but what you can find is there is a hunger scale and I'll link down below a hunger scale meat it downloads maybe you can start to measure your hunger on a scale of one to ten and simply by becoming aware oh am I am i hungry it's amazing what a difference it can make to your binge eating so your hunger system is developed over tens of thousands of years to be what it is so basically what that is is a fine-tuned system for helping you regulate your energy so they've done some research into this they found that when people eat at victim that is to eat according to their hunger that they are able to eat within 50 calories of how much energy they actually burn so it's so deeply accurate well you could understand about your body is that you don't burn the same amount of energy each and every single day if you have a really active day you're gonna be hungry and you're gonna burn more energy and so you simply tune in to your hunger you're gonna be able to service your body the way it needs and if you have a daily just on the couch and you're not so hungry you're not burning as much energy so rather than trying to follow some calculation that tells us how much food we need to be eating at the exact right time if we simply start to tune into a point if you're gonna be able to feed yourself the right amount of end so what you need to do is rather than just eating because it's breakfast time or lunch time actually start to question am I even hungry so one of the things that happen for me is I'd wake up in the morning and realize that I'm actually not so hungry when I wake up I get hungry around 10:00 or 11:00 a.m. and that's when I eat for the first time and knowing that that became so freeing to me I didn't have to follow any set rules and in fact I ended up eating less in the morning and just suited my body perfectly so think about that for you think about when is the best time for you to be eating I challenge you tomorrow wake up and instead of recording every single thing that you eat and calories and macros and any other [ __ ] like that rather start to track your hunger ask yourself before every single meal am i hungry I think we fear hunger hunger is not to be feared in fact we should be feeling hungry before each and every meal it's our body's way of saying I need a little bit more energy so let's not eat just because we are bored or because we feel like we have to just wait until you get hungry and then know that whenever you get hungry you have full permission dates so talking about giving yourself permission it's exactly what I did the third thing that I did is I gave myself permission to eat all these fad or forbidden foods see what happens is when we create a list of forbidden foods suddenly they become so much more tempting it's kind of like when you tell a toddler that they're not allowed to do something then that's all that they want to do it's the exact same thing that happens so think about all the foods in your life that you have taken off limit so whether or not it's red or cereal or peanut butter or lollies or chocolate think about all the foods that you actually binge eat on and what we want to do is we actually try to try and normalize these foods so we want to bring them back into our life normally what we do with binge eating is we avoid these foods at all costs and then we ends up binge eating on them in private what I think is a much better idea is normalize them by sharing with other people so if you find that you've been cheated on ice cream make a date with someone to go and get some ice cream I'll go and have a hot chocolate out so order some to tell her on toast when you're eating out for breakfast find ways to normalize this food because you have to get to a point where you know that you are allowed to eat this food anytime you want then it becomes a matter of but do you really want it and as long as it remains a forbidden fruit it's always gonna have control over you I think we have this idea that if I control food more I'll get more control over food but the opposite happens you actually have to let go of your control over food to regain control over food so right that list of all your binge foods and then what I want you to start to do is one by one bring them back into your diet and see whether or not you're able to regain control over them and another thing that you really need to start doing is stop beating yourself up for binge eating there is no way to stop binge eating without binge eating that sounds crazy but it's true I think what happens is we try to stop binge eating and then we ends up binging because that's inevitable and we feel so bad about it we feel like we've messed up and all this hard work trying to stop binge eating is pointless but my friend you have to Benji to stop binge eating instead what I want you to do is become curious about the beach feeling guilty about a binge doesn't help anything all that's gonna do is it's gonna make you try and restrict and counteract which is gonna make you once finish more which is gonna keep you stuck in the same binge eating cycle what you need to do after binge is simply become curious ask yourself why did that happen was I feeling tired or bored was i eating in front of the TV did someone say something that made me feel bad about this so was I feeling deprived of certain binge foods was I home alone and that's what caused it so simply becoming aware of all these things that might trigger your been just gonna help you prevent binge in the future it's really hard to actually stop a binge while you're mid binge so even if you can just become aware during the bin okay why is this happening even if you just keep eating keep asking yourselves questions and that's gonna help you learn how to stop binging in the future one of the worst things you can do when you are binge eating is to try and counteract the bad you've done by under eating I know that seems like the only way to help get your weight under control but realistically that's gonna cause you to binge eat again and it's the worst thing we can do there is no need to feel guilty instead become curious and be really kind to yourself the truth about binge eating recovery is you're not gonna suddenly just stop binge eating what you're gonna notice is that the binges maybe they become less intense or you meet less or they they last for a shorter amount of time and they start to happen less and less frequently so maybe they were happening multiple times a day and then maybe you only binge once a day and then maybe from once a day maybe you only binge a few times a week and so forth until you're early binging once every six months or once a year and then eventually you don't be in general that's how it works so don't expect perfection from yourself just be really grateful for all the progress that you're making this is a slow long journey it's taken you many many years of dieting and obsessing to get to this point so it's gonna take up a little bit of time to get you to learn to stop energy anyway if you want any more help around this my name is Libby Cohen I reside I'm a nutritionist I have recovered from binge eating disorders and this is a topic I love to talk about and I love teaching and helping people about I had a program could keep it real so if you want more support I'll leave a link down below and you can find out more otherwise I have plenty of free stuff over on my blog how to stop feeling guilty after you binge what to do I have to do revenge so if you want more support I am so here for you if you've got any comments I would love to hear from you in the comment section down below and if you want to hear a little bit more for me whether or not it's you know healthy eating advice without the [ __ ] just general healthy recipes then click Subscribe follow along and hit the bell and I'll be sharing more stuff hippie sing [Music]

Channel: Lyndi Cohen // The Nude Nutritionist

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Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020