Tell me if this sounds like you…

You wake up, you know you’re plan, you start off the day with your clean and healthy breakfast…

Lunch comes, you want the sandwich, but you’ve heard that you shouldn’t eat gluten and carbs if you’re trying to lose weight or trying not to gain it, so you pass it up. You decide to be “good” and have the salad.

day gets busy, you notice a little hunger, but you push through until it’s time to have your snack. You have it, and you have it fast. So fast that you don’t even feel like you ate, but it’s what your plan says to do, so you keep
going.

You get home, you make your healthy dinner, but then it starts…

Picking as you’re prepping, eating while standing…

you may be able to make yourself sit and attempt to enjoy your meal, but when you’re done you don’t feel satisfied.

So you go back to the cabinets, you let yourself have a little of whatever you’ve told yourself is “off limits”, and then once it starts, it doesn’t stop.

You say f*ck it, I already screwed up the day, I might as well finish and keep going, with goals of “starting back over tomorrow”.

The rush feels good for a second, and then it hits you…

What did I do?

Why can’t I have enough will power to control myself?

Why can other people do it and I can’t?

How am I going to make up for the damage?

What am I going to do tomorrow to get back on track?

Then tomorrow comes…

the brain fog, the sluggishness, the bloating…

the guilt, the shame, the looking for answers.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

I get it, I did it for YEARS. I thought it was about controlling the food or finding the perfect way of eating that kept me in control, but then I realized that all-or-nothing mindset when it came to my body and food was setting me up to fail… yours is too.

Why An “All-or Nothing” Approach to Eating Doesn’t Work (And What You Can Do Instead)

1) It triggers survival mechanisms in the brain that drive you to think about food all the time and makes you eat more.

Yep, you read that right. What you’re doing to control your eating is actually making you eat more.

When you diet, control, or restrict your food, or even think about it, your brain goes into protection mode. Your brain is here to keep you safe and alive… not to keep you fitting into those skinny jeans in the back of your closet. Your brain recognizes food restrictions as a possible deficit in what it needs to thrive and a threat to survival, so when it sees this coming or experiences it, it send signals to you and changes your body’s physiology to drive you to eat more.

Once a binge starts we know how hard it is to stop, right? Kind of like a wild fire. Think of dieting, controlling your food, or even thinking about your next plan of attack like fuel to the fire of binge eating.

Instead: This doesn’t mean start eating pizza all day to stop binge eating. This just means -> fuel yourself in a way that’s not depriving, restrictive, and counteracts the main physiological reasons your body and brain are driving you to binge eat.

Keep in mind this isn’t the cure to binge eating, but you can’t beat binge eating without this as the foundation. Without it, the brain is always in survival mode, and no tool that ANYONE gives you will work more than a few days at best. With the tools in our Beating Binge Eating Blueprint program the women are taught to navigate this space in a way that puts them back in their power in as little as 2 weeks! This stuff works, I see it time and time again.

2) It takes you out of the present, and forces you to rely on what’s swirling around in your head instead of the best nutritionist in the world for you: Your body.

All or nothing means you’re making choices on what you did before, what you might do later, and looking at things in a 1 day at a time mentality. Our body’s, especially as women, aren’t this linear machine. You made need more calories today because your body is repairing an injury from a week ago and you may need less calories tomorrow because your body has all the fuel it needs.

When our survival mechanisms are activated, it’s hard to listen to our body’s because our body’s signals are all out of whack. Once they’re quiet, and once you quiet the noise in your mind, you can begin to listen.

Instead: Drop from your head and the 823947827 conflicting nutritional theories blasted in your face by the diet industry daily, and bring your body back to the discussion.

Start with present moment choices. Not based on what you ate last night or the meal prior, and not based on what you might do tomorrow or might eat later. What you and your body need – now – in this moment.

Ask yourself: What do I need? What would honor my body in this moment?

Click here for your own personalized blueprint to break free of the diet-binge cycle so you can have food freedom forever

3) Things like “staying on track” only to make it to a cheat day or an “off track” overeating sesh literally programs our brain and train us to binge eat.

Cheat days or “off track” overeating sessions are rewarded in the brain with a hit of chemicals that leaves us coming back for more. Remember, with the survival mechanism activated, your brain is invested in making you eat. Once you do, it sends a hit of rewarding chemicals that reaffirm the binge pattern in your brain aka programs you to binge eat.

The brain is always trying to make behavior automatic, so as you keep participating in this behavior, the brain pattern gets more engrained, and this behavior can become habitual and happen on autopilot.

I’m sure you’ve felt it before, this is the “oh shit what just happened” / “once I start I can’t stop” binge.

Instead: Fuel yourself adequately and enjoy a variety of foods, even the ones that you’ve labeled as “forbidden” because…

4) When we think that the food won’t be available to us or off limits in the future, we eat as much of it as we can in the present.

Think about it, if you told someone: You’re never eating bread again, wouldn’t you understand if that person at a ton of bread?

When you truly practice the art of allowance, your survival mechanisms in your brain that drive you to overeat on those forbidden foods like bread, will quiet. This is when a phenomenon starts to happen: you stop the intense cravings for the things like bread or foods you’ve denied yourself. You may still want the bread on the occasion, but it won’t be a compulsive binge urge, and more just like a “eh that bread sounds good” and then you can make a decision around it that’s not rooted in conflict, fear, or intense emotional angst.

You’ll be able to have on piece out of the basket at dinner, instead of feeling like you need to finish it all because it won’t be allowed at some point in the future. You’ll also start getting signals from your body to nourish yourself in ways that make you feel good and supportive for your well being. This sets you up for things like optimal health, energy, and weight loss that’s sustainable if that’s what you’re after.

The second layer of this boils down to breaking the patterns in your brain that drive you to binge eat, but before we do that, quieting the survival mechanisms and taking a different approach to your eating that leaves you nourished and physically fueled is absolutely imperative to your success!

If you need any support or would like to talk to me or a Certified Eating Psychology Coach on my team to learn how you can break frtee from this diet-binge cycle once and for all, be sure to schedule a Binge Eating Breakthrough Session with us by Clicking Here.

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