What To Do When Binge Urges Won't Go Away

welcome to my channel the binge eating therapist i'm sarah former binge eater turned psychotherapist and my mission is to use this space to bring content to you to help you understand your struggle with food and break free from binge eating and today i want to talk about binge urges ultimately these are right at the crux of binge eating and binge eating disorder because let's face it if you didn't have the urge to binge then you wouldn't binge so by an urge what i'm talking about is like a visceral feeling that's accompanied by some thoughts and

some beliefs around what this feeling means and the thoughts will often just be experienced as a really strong intense desire to eat a load of food so first of all i just want to kind of divide them up into two types of urges you've got one that's going to be hunger driven so if you are restricting um your urges may be driven by biological hunger if that's the case you know you can get in a fight with them but at no point are they going to diminish or change because they're being driven by your biology

and your biology is not going to give up on you and then there's the other kind of urges that are not driven by hunger they're driven by emotional thoughts triggers of situations habits all kinds of other things as well i might think of it almost like a mental hunger and this video is about those urges so first of all you need to be feeding yourself for you to be able to tell the difference between the two urges and figure this stuff out so when i was really in the depths of very chaotic binging and i

was looking for a solution i found an nlp and hypnosis guy who worked in harley street in london and he was guaranteeing results in one session to cure bulimia and binge eating and if it didn't work in one session he would offer a couple more sessions free of charge and then if he couldn't cure you you got your money back now it was a lot of money especially for me at the time but i thought you know what it's definitely worth this money to get rid of this eating disorder and if it doesn't work i

get my money back so why not so i went for this session and i remember during the consultation he was asking me some questions about my experience and i remember telling him that when these urges came that i was i was powerless i couldn't stop myself from acting on this urge to binge like all sense of any self-control was out of the window i just couldn't stop and he was like well that's not really true is it you could stop and i was like no my experience is i really can't when i'm in that situation

and he said yeah but if you were about to binge and then someone was breaking into your house do you think you'd be able to stop in that situation was like well okay sure but it's just gonna come back you know and i think this is one of the distressing things i think a lot of people experience about binge urges is maybe they have a bit of success in managing their urges or even riding them out but it feels like they just keep coming back and and particularly with distraction techniques that are often taught you

know go and have a bath go for a walk all that kind of stuff which i just used to find extremely patronizing and just not what i wanted to do when i've got an urge to binge i want to binge i don't want to sit in a bath and my experience was that okay even if i had an urge and i didn't act on it for whatever reason yes it would diminish but then it would come back so this story that i had around my urges was they're gonna get me eventually like they're gonna get

me so like what is the point of like suffering through these urges when they've got me in their grasp and it just felt like i i didn't have the power or the self-control to do anything about it and you know the nlp stuff it it didn't work and um he was so confident that it would work and i kind of believed him at the time as well so i maybe had about a week binge-free before it came back um and i never went back i never went back for another session and i never went back

to get my money back because i think because of his confidence i blamed myself i blame myself that my my binge eating wasn't cured in one session you know that feels really sad to think about now but yeah i just i internalized it and it just built on that pile of shame that i was feeling that i couldn't couldn't figure this stuff out and there seems to be this pervasive belief out there that recovery from binge eating means getting rid of all urges to binge that's what recovery looks like and for me the longest time

i held on to that so i would sometimes have a week or two where i didn't binge and i didn't have particularly strong urges to binge and every time this happened i'd kind of forget how powerful the binge urge was and i would think yes i'm recovered i've got it this time there's no way i'm going to go back to binging i'm just going to remember how good it feels not to binge and then at some point sometimes seemingly without a recognizable trigger i'd be hit with an urge to binge and just experiencing that urge

made me feel like i'd already failed you know so there was this catastrophization that came along with the urge now that belief that recovery means getting rid of urges makes a huge amount of sense because the alternative is pretty scary because what's the alternative the alternative is what you're supposed to live and fight with your binge urges for the rest of your life so i suppose what i would want to share is that i still get urges to binge i'm not going to get in a fight with them and so i want to share with

you like a couple of things that you can do in order to change your relationship with the urge itself we talk about changing our relationship to food all the time but there's a sensation that comes before the binge and we need to understand and almost we can't make friends at least accept that sensation because if we can't manage it and if we can't tolerate it it will always control us and then and then freedom's just gonna continue to elude us so the first thing when it comes to understanding and managing your urges to binge is

to look at the belief system around them so a lot of practitioners when they work with binge eating they'll use food diaries and they'll ask you to like write down what you were thinking before you binged and this i always found extremely unhelpful um because me and i hear it from a lot of people as well they're like i'm not thinking anything all it is is an overwhelming desire to eat an overwhelming desire to binge and i'm not thinking anything it's like my thinking has switched off so then this idea they're being told that thoughts

are supposed to drive the binge eating but they're saying i'm not having any thoughts i think we need to take it down a notch it's the beliefs that are driving the binge eating so beliefs are not necessarily experienced in the moment as like a a constructed sentence i believe i am going to binge because it's more like just a belief structure that's that's holding something up so i'll tell you some of my beliefs and and hopefully some of them will resonate with you so one belief that um i think really kept me stuck for a

long time is that belief that this feeling is never going to go anywhere until i binge that binging is the only way to get rid of this feeling that belief system meant that when that feeling came oh my goodness this feeling means that i'm going to binge and it felt inevitable which kind of like is the next belief that belief that this feeling means it's inevitable you're going to binge because if you're feeling it and you're believing it's inevitable and then at that point it is inevitable so the story just keeps the belief and the

story just keeps playing out and just keeps getting reinforced and cemented another belief which i touched on briefly was this idea that that binge ed is going to get me eventually like the fact that i keep having these urges if i resist today it's just gonna come back tomorrow it's just gonna keep coming back and so when we start identifying the story that we're telling ourselves around this feeling around this urge really helps to see what's the cognitive part that's driving it and we need to try and cast doubt on that story because for as

long as you believe all those things you will keep playing them out right so the belief that this feeling isn't going to go anywhere is also accompanied by a judgment value that and that is a terrible thing but what if it's like this is just a feeling and it feels a bit uncomfortable but it's okay that i'm feeling this it doesn't mean i have to act on this it doesn't mean it's not going to go away so there's something about being able to identify these thoughts or these beliefs and being able to question them because

it's the fact that you believe them that makes them true because the fact you believe them means your behavior will reflect the belief so first of all really understanding like what are the ones for you what might they be and then the next thing is about finding the urge in your body now binge eating is all about disconnection people who struggle with binge eating tend to have a really poor relationship with their body but we need to find the sensation in your body where is it for some people it's low down in their stomach for

others it's higher up in the solar plexus others like me it was kind of like in my chest it felt like a weight here some people it's up in their throat and other people even in their head and maybe somewhere else you know please share if you've got you experience it differently because i think people do experience it differently but when we can identify the sensation in our body like what does this actually feel like this urge and and where is it we start to realize or hopefully we realize that yes it feels uncomfortable but

it doesn't feel terrible until we wrap our beliefs and our story around it which makes it feel terrible normally it's like an agitation or a tightness tension or heaviness or something like that like being able to find it and then just breathe into it like make friends with the physical sensation or at least accept the physical sensation because the point is as we get into a conflict with it and this feeling arises and we're like our story is activated and then and then we have this urgency that's where the urge part comes we've experienced this

urgency to change whatever it is that's going on in the moment change our emotional state feel better in some way even though part of us knows that long term we're going to feel worse but if we can identify how our body experiences it and just pay attention and connect with it we start to have a different experience and when we're not really aware of it we are experiencing in our body but we're not aware of it because we're we're caught up in our head with our story and then the third part is kind of bringing

those first two together and being able to wake up the observer so if we think it's like we're we're a bundle of of conditioning and of taught beliefs and experiences and there's so much around what we've experienced that makes up our world right and so if we take this but we're these conditioned animals with no free will we're always going to be run by our thoughts and our feelings and so i think of the observer part this idea that we have the capacity to step back and watch the mind think and watch and experience what's

going on in the body from an observer point of view because when you're in that urge to binge you are in it you're in your thoughts believing them you're believing this feeling is terrible you are right in it and identified with the experience and this idea of kind of creating a bit of distance so that we can observe and we can watch the mind doing what it does so often we judge our thoughts and then we make our thoughts mean things as well and for me that observer part that is the root of free will

this the fact that we have this capacity to kind of go oh i recognize that i'm believing this or i recognize i'm feeling this in that sentence there are two eyes there's the i who's recognizing and the i who's having the experience so that capacity to no longer be identified with your thoughts they're not you and particularly with a binge edge where it's so familiar it's just an old pattern being activated when we can step back and watch it it feels a bit uncomfortable but it does not feel terrible and when we can get to

that point then we don't need the binge urges to go away if we think recovery means that binge urges have to go away then we're always at the mercy of should they decide to return one day but if we know that a binge urge we can experience it and it's just an uncomfortable experience and we know our mind is going to catastrophize and we just let it there's a part of us that's not just our mind and that i think is the key to getting out of any compulsivity when we're in it and in our

experience we're run by our feelings we're run by these automatic thoughts so i'll leave you with that for today and i will see you on the next video