welcome to my channel the binge eating therapist I'm Sara former binge eater turned psychotherapist and my mission is to use this space to share content with you to help you understand your struggle with food and break free from binge eating so today I want to look at the question why it is that some people seem to be able to control or restrict their food intake in order to lose weight and for the binge eater this is the eternal struggle between weight loss and binging between trying to control and feeling out of control and as the
research overwhelmingly shows most diets fail in the long term and depending on which bit of research you pull on the stats vary anything from 70% to 95% of diets fail and taking that to be true what about the people that it does seem to work for because it's not a hundred percent of diets fail so it seems to be that some people seem to be able to diet lose weight and move on with their lives without it adversely affecting how they eat how they feel about food or perceive their bodies chances are you know someone
in your life who's gone on a diet at some point lost weight the weight hasn't returned and they seem to be ok with food and I have a couple of people in my life like that so it's something that I'm eternally interested in because it just doesn't seem to work for the majority of people so growing up I can remember my mother going on one diet that was it and it was in the early 1990s and it was the Rosemarie Connelly plan or diet whatever it was called then it was calorie counting it was doing
some exercise and she lost two stones which is around 30 pounds or I want to say about 17 kilos I'm not great with kilograms and then she stayed the same size for the rest of her life and she seemed to have a pretty okay relationship with food and her body and then there's my brother and he's one of those people who will notice that his genes are getting a bit and he's just cut back a little bit he won't drink as much he won't snack as much and he goes back to how he was and
it's really tiny non noticeable fluctuations and there doesn't seem to be any stress around it for him so what is the difference between people like my mother and brother and the rest of us who whenever we die we I think sometimes people who struggle with binge eating can be really good at the diet itself but there's the really strong rebound afterwards something happens that seems to be different to what's going on for the small number of people that this doesn't seem to affect in the same way so there are three differences between those people who
can lose weight without rebound eating and the rest of us and they are number one brain chemistry and biology so most people who struggle with binge eating a lot of people who struggle with binge eating have managed to have a successful diet if successful means they managed to lose weight once upon a time and that was followed by rebound eating or binge eating and ever since then whenever they tried to die at some point normally sooner and sooner each time it dissolves it's been shooting to the point where even thinking about going on a diet
can trigger the binge response so it's like it's as if there's a switch in the brain that can take you over and I talked before about how powerful that drive is to eat it's our survival mechanism kicking it so it can take over our conscious well so when there's been a threat of starvation the brain has flipped that switch been able to take you over and you've gone into into a binge but it feels like it's not even you doing it I think your brain is making you do it now I think some people's brains
just get really good at flipping that switch once your brain knows how to override your conscious control it can do it again a hat and I think perhaps some people's brains just don't do this and probably from an evolutionary perspective we used to be an advantage but in today's land of plenty it really can work against us so I think there's something going on in the brain that we need to be very careful about how we think about restriction and how we think about trying to control our food intake because this mechanism I think just
gets triggered much more easily in some people done in others so I think that's one of the big differences between these two kinds of people number two is emotional investment the people I know that seem to be able to just go I'm just gonna be a bit lessen and lose a bit of weight and that seems to happen with no problems and not that emotionally invested in what they're doing or their body there's obviously part of them that's saying they want their body to be a bit smaller they want to release a bit of weight
but it doesn't seem to come with the same intensity as someone who struggles with binge eating when binge eating has been the struggle what can often happen is like the whole self-esteem and how you feel about yourself becomes dependent on what you did or didn't eat and about how your body feels or looks today and what this does is it means that all your food decisions become heightened by so many emotions and emotions have the ability to affect the way that we think so our judgments and if it gets clouded and we get lost in
our in how we're feeling and how we feel feels true so if we're feeling like a like a failed always feeling worthless or something like that because we're having the feeling in that moment that is absolutely true that's what we are we are we have failed we are worthless with this that and the other so there's this real emotional rollercoaster that people who are struggling with binge eating go on which these other small minority of people just don't seem to have they're not as invested their whole sense of self is not tied in with it
I imagine like for a lot of you I remember it well waking up in the morning and I'm thinking what did I eat yesterday and letting that dictate your mood for the day and how you feel about yourself this small minority of people that we're talking about they don't do that their emotions are not as tied up in this process as the rest of us and number three is that they are gray thinkers now what do I mean by gray thinkers you've probably heard of black or white thinking all-or-nothing thinking this is the mindset of
somebody who Benji's everything becomes divided into two categories it's good or it's bad and it happens with food so good foods you've got your bad fears you've got you've had a good day of eating you've had a bad day eating you're being good you're being bad all this kind of polarization means that every food decision it makes you either a saint or a sinner and people who are not struggling with binge eats and people who have quite a healthy relationship with food just aren't doing this you know if they eat too much they're just gonna
think oh a little bit should've eaten as much as that someone who struggles with binge eating is gonna go oh my goodness I'm too full that's awful I feel horrible gosh I'm never gonna be able to do this I'm this and that and the other so for someone who binge eats it's all about I'm either being healthy or in being terrible and and the I've blown it thinking really comes into this all-or-nothing black-and-white thinking so one of the biggest triggers for binging is believing that you've eaten too much or believing that you've eaten something that
you shouldn't have eaten that's how most people that switch gets flipped into like into the binge mentality basically where there's almost a panic so you've got the heightened emotions again so they rush into you've got part of your brain going I shouldn't eat I must stop eating this the other you so the brain chemistry is going well what's going on is food available is it not available let's kind of motivate you to go and get food mode about you to eat and so before you know it you're right in it and again I think this
is why binging can feel so overwhelming because you've got your biology you've got your emotions and you've got your thinking style and the three of them together I like this perfect storm so you know what can you do about it if your biology is your biology we can't consciously just decide to change our biology and sometimes the emotions they just they rise up within us we can try and talk ourselves out of them but quite often we're already in them before we we really realize what's going on so I think often the first place to
go the first place to challenge is the thinking that we need to become more grey thinkers and so many people who struggle with binge eating they resist this because they don't want to live in the gray they want things to be amazing otherwise they might as well be terrible what is the point of things just being okay what's the point in being average it's just peace is so underrated because what's happening in peace oh you're just feeling calm and fine but if you can challenge this part of you and if you can start to soften
start to see more shades of grey that will be a big part of what can release you from binge eating and I met my tendency my natural tendency is to be very olan I think very black and white but I have spent so much time sitting with myself observing with myself watching this noticing all that kind of I suppose always trying to understand myself better but I do believe that humans are far more complicated than we can ever be capable of understanding so this idea is self-awareness I think you could always become more self-aware without
becoming aware of your thinking you can't challenge your thinking and so without knowing that something like this is going on it's hard to look out for it you know most things in life exists on the scale so you've got one and some things a one and a hundred the black and white thinkers will be like at this end or this end like this middle just seemed to vanish they don't even know it's there if they try and look for it quite often you can't even see it so it really takes some practice at looking for
the ground sometimes the scale thinking can help with that so if this is where you say this is where your body image is now and this is where you want it to be so let's say you hate your body and this is some kind of body love positivity everything's amazing over here yeah what would be that you know if this is a while if this is a hundred what would be a ten and so the black and white thing looks like well what is the point in being at a ten when I want to be
at a hundred but that's why there's never the progression that's why they're bounding back and forth one day they feel great so they think I've cracked this the amount of time that is a really really helpful sign of the black and white thinking if you have said to yourself before I've cracked this I've got this and never going to binge again it's never going to happen I don't need to worry about it I've fixed it that is the very black and white thinking so then what happens is when you do have another binge you feel
like you're straight back at number one so progress for you if it's like jumping between 100 and back and forth like that but that is not how we get out of this this is what keeps you stuck is this back and forth it's a circle we call it a vicious cycle for a reason you get stuck going round in this repetitive behavior so I'm going to do another video in the near future about black and white thinking itself because I think it's such an important part and whilst I don't think that we can just think
our way out of binge eating I do believe that it's where we have to start because we have to open up a new perspective we have to shift our perspectives a little bit we can't keep looking at this problem in the same way and hope that we can find an answer when we've been struggling with it for this long and haven't managed to so far so I'm going to leave you with that today and go well namaste
