Take Back CONTROL! - Break The Binge

Today, I share with you what it takes to regain control over any compulsion, without harsh dieting or 'all or nothing' thinking.

As we enter what is traditionally known in the UK as the most depressing week of the year, I offer you an alternative to the new year 'fresh start' mentality. Today's podcast is intended to help you with accountability, but with compassion. 

As many of you know, I run programmes for comfort eating recovery. Here are the basics of what I cover in the programmes. These are the things I see that people need to be open to, in order to take the control back.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, this is Shelly Treacher. Welcome back to the Underground Confidence podcast. I told you at Christmas that I would be taking a break from the podcast. I actually meant for a bit longer than this, but it turns out that I couldn't resist returning early. And it's because I've been inspired by what I've been hearing from my clients this year. I've been hearing for the last couple of weeks since New Year that many people had a welcome break but are now struggling to maintain that sense of ease. I don't know if it's true, but it seemed to me that people struggled for longer to get back into the swing of responsibility this year and into work. This would make sense given that COVID has been so tough on so many of us in general, our recovery period might be longer. We might need extra care right now, but still be expecting ourselves to be firing on all cylinders. Kinda seemed like everyone was on freeze for the first couple of weeks in the year. This may not be everyone's experience, but it is something I've seen. I am starting to get inquiries, many for comfort eating, but also for two other things. One is feeling lonely and the other is feeling underconfident. So you're not alone if you can relate to this. I've had the genius idea of giving you some free lessons, so I'm going to be doing that along with producing them in my app, so you can look at them online as well as listen to them here. I had the lovely fortune of bumping into somebody I've worked with just virtually in the last couple of years. It was so nice to see her in person. But she also thanked me for the podcast, so that inspired me to come back as well. Thank you for that. As many of you know, I run a six-week introductory program to recovery from comfort eating. I also have a much longer program that you can be part of. So what I'm going to cover today is the basics of what I cover in these programs. These are the things that I see people need to get a handle on in order to take control of comfort eating or any binge behaviour. What I say here is specific to comfort eating, but a lot of it applies to other addictions, other substances, other behaviours like overwork, watching television, watching Netflix, eating too much, drinking too much, and also loving too much, putting too much into a relationship that's not really working. This can be viewed in the same kinds of ways. So today I'm just going to take you through some basics of what it takes to pull back from that and to start behaving differently so that you can treat yourself differently. The first thing to start to get your head around is what comfort eating actually is for you. What the emotion might be behind it and what the reason is that you choose to do it. This means looking at what you get from it. Questions like, what would your life be like if you didn't do it help you to understand this. I don't really mean in terms of you'd lose weight, you'd feel better, you'd look better. I mean how is the comfort food protecting you? What kind of job is it doing for you that you feel you can't let go of? Maybe you'd be too scared to let go of. So this is the kind of thing to start thinking about. What emotions are actually behind your comfort eating? Or what reasons do you choose to do it? For a lot of people, they say that it masks feeling sad, feeling angry, feeling bored, feeling frustrated, feeling discomfort in some way in life. On some examination, of course it's difficult to see this at first. If you've got no idea what the emotion is behind it, it's really difficult to stop and think, okay, why am I trying to mask something? Because you might not be in the habit of thinking you're masking anything at all, because you might just automatically eat instead of feeling and thinking about what you're feeling. So I guess what I'm trying to get you to do is to start thinking, is there emotion behind this? Am I stressed in some way? Is there something upsetting me? Do I choose to eat when those things happen? Do I not notice that those things are happening, that I feel something, and just automatically go for food instead? This is the kind of curious inquiry that you need to start developing. And frankly, you could go a long way just on this one. The more mindful you are about what's going on for you, the more you have the choice and chance of choosing something different. I had a client recently come in and say that the reason she does it, she said food is keeping me busy. And that's such a familiar thing. I hear that so often. Can you relate to that one? So then once you've got a handle on that, you've got some idea that there might be stress or emotion behind your eating, that that might be what's prompting you to walk towards the fridge or the kitchen. Then you can start asking why you might want to stop. What would it mean to you to stop? If you didn't have this habit and this instinct, this thing on your mind all the time, what would life be like? What would you really get to enjoy? And what would mean something to you that you're not actually getting to enjoy right now or that you're missing out on right now? What I'm asking you to do here is to think about what makes stopping meaningful enough for you to stop. And again, this can't really be I need to lose weight, I want to be healthier. Sometimes those things will scare you into stopping eating too much, but more often it's something more meaningful, something that aligns with your values, something that aligns with whatever really gives you meaning in life. I know for me, I, and I've said this before, I often don't drink on a Friday evening if I'm going to be talking with my goddaughter who's having stressful issues at school. And that is so important to me that I try and help her in some way because I know she's unhappy. And so that will give me a bigger long-term reason to resist something that may be of comfort to me that I don't really need. Do you see where I'm going here? It has to be something that means something huge to you. And if you start to think about what brings you meaning in life, you'll find this. And then another thing to start to understand and to look at is what habits you have around food. Here you can start to look at your history. I'll come on to that in a minute, but just practically start thinking about how you developed your food habits. What did your family do around food? How did they treat you around food? And now what habits do you have that associate with food? You might have a lot of little habits that you just automatically keep repeating. And these can actually be challenged. This is just a brain pathway in your brain that has grown quite steadily and has been deeply grooved. These things can be changed. Our brains are flexible. I'm not saying any of this is easy, but it can be done. And I suppose another thing to get your head around is that this isn't a short-term process. This is something just like exercise, just like learning something new, takes time and practice. But I promise you, with practice, it reaps very good rewards. So this brings me on to understanding what a craving is or what a habit is. They both relate to each other because they have some biochemistry that we get duped by. So it's a really good idea to start to understand what exactly is going on, just physiologically, in your body and in your brain, that would happen to most people. Once you start understanding that, you then again get to take control and have a choice. Of course, that won't be easy at first, but like I said, with practice, you might get quite good at this, subverting a natural habit or a craving. So now let's move into the deeper side of what's going on with comfort eating, because this is something else, oh my god, a huge part of understanding how to stop. I think probably the most important thing to understand is that your self-critic is often behind the need to eat or is involved in some way. Somewhere back there, there's going to be a voice in your head that puts you down or judges you or thinks other people are judging you. And nobody responds well to that unless they've been trained or they have a very secure upbringing. The operative word is trained. You can train yourself to respond differently to this kind of feeling. You can train yourself not to be so self-critical, and you can learn compassion. I think this is a really important building block for starting to understand your whole emotional world. It's going to require compassion to understand why you get triggered in certain ways, what things frighten you, what you need, and how you feel. Typically, what I hear most often is that comfort eaters have had an upbringing where their parents did not encourage them to express their emotional needs or their feelings. So it's now going to be your job to learn how to do that in as kind and gentle way as possible. What may come from that is learning more about the deeper side of your history, learning about your relational history, and learning about your triggering. We all have triggering. We all get emotionally insecure at times, and most of us don't know how to deal with it and react in some way. For the comfort eater, that's to walk towards the kitchen and to get some food. For the person who feels alone or unloved, this might be texting an ex-lover or complaining about not feeling loved to someone who doesn't have the capacity or doesn't understand. Another part of this is catching yourself when you dissociate. This is a huge part of comfort eating. What I hear again more often than not is that comfort eating comes in a kind of a dissociative state where we don't really know what we're doing and disclaim responsibility. So the final piece and the thing that's going to make this all come together is taking responsibility for what you're doing and understanding with compassion why this happens. So we come to the scariest part of releasing comfort eating, and that is to learn to bear discomfort. I know that's scary. I know that's terrifying for a lot of you because you may have some difficult history that you're afraid might come up. So I bring you back to the compassion and the gentleness and the viewing yourself more kindly and taking your time. This cannot be rushed. The kindest, gentlest thing to do is to do this slowly and surely. But life involves discomfort, it's just a fact. Things happen, as we know, from the last couple of years. But the answers are out there somewhere. Recovery from comfort eating is something that happens naturally when you uncover what's going on in your psyche and take steps to learn to treat yourself better. But even though I've said this in only a few minutes, that's a lot. So where can you start right now? What's the first thing to do? Identify the emotion causing your eating and your self-critic. And start learning about how to treat yourself well. Often the people I see are so good at helping other people. And that takes up all their time and energy. But now it has to be your turn. Taking control of comfort eating doesn't come through willpower just by trying to make yourself do something that you don't want to do. It comes from learning who you are on a deeper level and doing something different to what you normally do. What's your first step going to be towards that goal? As we come to what's traditionally felt as the most depressing week of the year in England anyway, I would love to help you with your confidence, feeling lonely, and your comfort eating. The next six-week program starts on the 17th of February. We are almost half full right now, but the early bird offer is still on, so please get in touch with me. I never know when I'm going to take that off, so please catch it while it is there. Unusually, I do also have a couple of one-to-one sessions available weekly. So if that's what you've been hanging out for, now's the time. Thank you so much for listening today. It's so lovely to be back. I will be back next Wednesday, if not before. Next week, I'll be talking about how to manage overwhelm and how that relates to comfort eating. The best way to be in touch with everything that I offer, including when those free lessons come out on the app, is to sign up for my mailing list. Or you can sign up for my Have You Ever Felt This list on undergroundconfidence. That way I'll have your email address and I will be in touch. Thank you. This is Underground Confidence with Shelly Treachery.