Aware & Aggravated - 126. Binge Eating

Episode Date: April 28, 2024

In this episode Leo shares how to overcome binge eating from his experience. He gives extensive explanations to help you understand binge eating for the coping/comfort mechanism that it is from angles. Get ready for the most empowering approach ever shared on this topic from a basis of science, biology, psychology, and spirituality.   🎟️ TOUR TICKETS:  https://events.seated.com/leo-skepi   ✅ FOLLOW ME HERE: https://www.instagram.com/leoskepi https://www.tiktok.com/@leoskepi https://www.snapchat.com/add/leoskepi   👕 Clothing/Merch:  https://leoskepicollection.com   📱 MY APP POSITIVE FOCUS Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/positive-focus/id1559260311 Google: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.positivefocusapp&hl=en_US&gl=US&pli=1    🔒 MY PRIVATE FACEBOOK SUPPORT COMMUNITY  https://m.facebook.com/groups/851294735925522/?ref=sharehttps://m.facebook.com/groups/851294735925522/?ref%3Dshare&exp=7ffb&mibextid=I6gGtw    Business Inquiries: [e-mail]

Hi friends, I'm going to tell you everything I know about binge eating. I'm going to hit this from the mental aspect and then also the physical aspect behind the behavior of eating. This is everything that has helped me. And before somebody gets their panties in a twist, no, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a psychologist. I am a nurse and my license currently is active, but I do not work as a nurse currently. And the reason I'm saying that is because I want everyone to know I have a deeper understanding of the human body and psychology than most people think and if you don't throw a

title out people love to get fussy about it so there you go. I do have a little bit of science I'm gonna throw in this but I'm also gonna hit this from a spiritual angle and talk about the shadow work and the things that I've done around this whole subject and the whole behavior of binge eating because it has plagued me for most of my life. Not anymore. I beat the vixx. Okay, let's jump into this.

So first thing about binge eating is it is not self-sabotage. That's the first thing to wrap your head around. Binge eating is a coping mechanism. It is a mode of gaining comfort and self-soothing. And this happens two ways. Emotionally, it gives you relief. And the second thing it does to your physical body is kick on and trigger your parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is fight or flight mode. It's very up. It gets you ready to handle a threat

and when you're having anxiety or you're stressed out, your body's up. It's an up state. Your parasympathetic nervous system is what down regulates you. So when you consume food and your parasympathetic nervous system turns on, your blood pressure is gonna decrease, your heart rate is gonna decrease and your body will begin to enter a more relaxed state. There's also a big amount of endorphin release that happens when you eat but also the stretching of the fibers in your stomach because your stomach is a muscle. It triggers a lot of hormones to be released. And this is why food is worse than drugs sometimes.

Because you can get addicted to the chemicals your own body will produce when you give it food. And like I said, it's a comfort. It's a comfort emotionally, mentally, and also physiologically. Like I just explained, that was a little bit of science real quick to help you get an idea of what's going on in your body. And with your body, it down regulates you when you consume food, especially when you overeat, your breathing is really going to slow and your heart rate's really going to go

down. But now I want to get into the emotional side of it and how I said it's not self-sabotage. There are a lot of emotional needs being met when you binge eat and I'm going to give you a few of them and then I'm going to get into my own personal situation that I did shadow work on about it. So I want to reveal to you how binge eating is secretly helping you because once you see how it's helping you, you can go about getting this help or helping yourself or meeting certain emotional and physical needs in other ways. The first sneaky little thing,

this is just going to get more and more deep as we go, but the first way binge eating is secretly helping you is it physically slows you down and it makes you tired and it makes you feel sluggish. And if you're watching this, you know what it's like to binge eat, how you feel after you're just like stuffed and you feel tired and groggy and you don't have energy for nothing. And that is secretly you giving yourself an excuse to avoid responsibility. It feels real good. When you actually have a physical symptom that is decreasing your energy and making you feel worse, I don't want to say giving yourself a pain or a level of discomfort that

takes priority, but when you feel like you have a lot of pressure to get a lot of things done and you're overwhelmed and you're stressed out, overeating gives you a physical discomfort that overrides everything else you need to do because now you have pain that needs to be attended to and usually you're a mental mess after you binge eat when you don't understand everything going on. You start the whole shame game and all that but overeating and feeling very full like I said serves as an excuse when you have a brain that beats you up so you get to get off the hook mentally because now you're full and you can't move and it hurts.

And now you have less pressure on you to do the things that you feel responsible to do. So in a situation like this, you want relief from the overwhelm and you don't want to feel pressure to have to do things you don't want to do. And this behavior gives you that excuse subconsciously. So like I said it's not self-sabotage, it serves you in a lot of ways. But something I want to point out is the betrayal you feel when you overeat or you binge eat and then it's the whole betrayal and punishment back and forth with yourself. So a lot of the times you feel out of control of

your emotions and you feel so overrun by certain emotions. You have to get away from them and you can't sit with them and deal with them. And you just reach for food and you feel like you cannot stop eating. When you just give into that and you do that, which is totally fair, you do feel a sense of betrayal once you're done and once it's over. And when you feel that sense of betrayal, a lot of people, something I dealt with was the whole punishment aspect that came with it of punishment for the betrayal. You just feel like you did to yourself.

And that leads you to a whole sense of doom of like, what the fuck have I just done? I can't undo it. You have a sense of regret. And then you unfortunately realize what you just did to try and comfort yourself, cause more discomfort and made you feel even worse. And then the spiral keeps going of the shame and the blame game and attacking yourself and all that. And I have tips coming in a little bit. After I explained more of the emotional and psychological aspects of everything, so you have a better understanding,

I'm going to give you actual tips you can implement about how to deal with the mental hell and the torment that goes on. But now we have to talk about the whole purging aspect and feeling regret to such an extent that you want to undo damage that you feel like you've just done. And some examples of purging are throwing up after you binge eat, taking laxatives and excessive exercise. It's kind of like the whole punishment thing I talked about, but also to reverse the damage. And those are typical things people will go for. But how I said before, whatever you're going through that triggers you to binge eat, what you do when you binge eat is look for comfort. You are trying to comfort yourself

and then you hit the shame and the blame game. For you to shame and blame yourself for wanting comfort isn't fair because that's what it is at the end of the day. To want comfort is normal. Every single human being does. Other people have other ways of getting it. And binge eating is going to be especially triggering and like flaring up for you when you spend a lot of time alone. But what I want you to see is through this whole cycle, you feel powerless to what's going on. You get the comfort, you lose control, you feel powerless, you eat too much, you do too much.

Then you have the regret of everything and you now feel powerless again because you're sitting here feeling worse and the powerlessness comes back. And then that's when purging feels good and you want to get it out or repair the damage immediately because undoing that will bring you more comfort and get you out of the powerlessness. And then you're right back where you started and this whole spiral of shit just unfolded and if you're going through it you have to see what you're getting out of doing this to yourself because sometimes it's a little bit more covert and will seem like you are enjoying and intentionally hurting yourself but when you feel a lack of

control of what's going on and you binge eat and you do not feel in control of it, you feel powerless. A common reason people will binge eat when they don't feel in control is they will just be reckless and do what they want to do, eat what they want to eat and comfort themselves as much as they want. They will give in to the powerlessness to set themselves up, to feel a sense of self esteem and a sense of control by what they do after.

So a lot of people will purge and they do things so that they can purge because that's where they feel like their power lies. They have to fully give into the powerlessness of the urge to binge eat and the process of binge eating. You fully give into it because you know when you go all the way through that powerlessness, you got your little fix at the end of feeling in control because now you can get

it out of you or you can make up for it. And that's when you feel empowered. And another darker angle this goes is when you feel like you cannot control the things that hurt you in life, you might do something subconsciously to hurt yourself and binge eat and cause yourself to be uncomfortable, to feel in control of things that harm you because your life is just a reflection of things you feel like you can't control that cause you harm. This is something you can control and you might do it to yourself to feel in

control of discomfort you experience. But like I said before, it's in your hands because you're causing yourself the discomfort. You can control it now. You're not just a victim to it by everything else in life. And then you get to exert a sense of control over the discomfort that you feel. So you caused it and now you can fully undo it. You can throw it up or you can take a laxative or you can work out. You have a sense of control and you're showing yourself you can do something about times you feel discomfort. That's also a typical tactic with people who self harm and this can become a self harming behavior. But with this specific situation, what you are showing to yourself is that you can create resolve and make things not hurt you. You get a sense

of control over things that do hurt you because you're causing it hurt you. You get a sense of control over things that do hurt you because you're causing it to yourself. You get that sense of control and then you're fully in control to create the resolve with it. This is not bad. You are not fucked up. You are not wrong. If this is something you recognize in yourself now that I'm saying it, this is a learned behavior. This is a strategy for you to remain sane and remain going forward through life. I fully understand. Don't think this is a shameful thing.

This is not self-sabotage, like I said. And when you're in cycles like this and you struggle with binge eating, you're not consciously choosing it most of the time. This is all things I was unaware of. But this is why I really wanted to share the emotional aspects of what's happening for you with binge eating because it becomes easier to stop once you're aware of all the moving pieces. It's like you get into a new perspective that's a little bit above what you're doing and you can observe yourself, your feelings,

your urges and the emotional needs being met from a different view. You're observing it happen and why it happens and you can see where you do have control and can step in. But one more emotional need that binge eating satiates for a lot of people and kind of helps is filling that sense of a void. When you feel like you have an emotional void or you just have a void in you or you get to a place of numbness and you can't feel anything, to binge eat makes you feel like you are filling a void. When you feel your stomach stretch, it does a weird thing to you emotionally where you

feel like something is filling up or it's whole again. You don't feel like you have a void or a piece missing. It's a physical comfort. Like I said physiologically in the beginning, all the things that happen with the parasympathetic nervous system, but also it gives you a weird mental and emotional sensation of a void being filled. You're doing something to fill it and you feel good and north from release while you do it. So that's one more thing to look for is if you get triggered to binge eat when you feel a sense of nothingness, feeling like you have no purpose or feeling like you just have a hole in your heart

or a hole in your being and you feel numb or whatever void you feel. Just pay attention to if that's what's coming up and that's what you're trying to fill it with because food will never do it. Unless you're starving and you're actually hungry and you're like very malnourished and that's the actual void that's going on, it's not going to fill an emotional one. Trust me, I've eaten enough shit in my life. Okay. All right, now let's talk about my own personal shadow work I did around binge eating and

the thing that really helped me crack it in my life and it came from how I was living and what I had to change that actually had nothing to do with food and it flipped this. One other thing to pay attention to is flipping your relationship with food improves your relationship with money. Don't ask, just watch it unfold. But the thing in my life that was driving me to binge eat and have these urges was living with so much restriction and in specific going for things that I wanted. So holding myself back from doing things or going after things that I wanted or trying

to achieve certain things or hit certain goals, overthinking, overanalyzing, nitpicking every action I took, thinking of every potential consequence, and literally just overthinking the shit out of everything hindered me from taking steps and going for anything. Everything I did in my life at the time was so calculated and thought through that it hindered me from taking action. And it felt like a chore to do anything 10 times worse mentally of a chore, because I was overanalyzing every move I was making.

I didn't ever just think, oh, I want to do something and go do it. I had to think about all the potential consequences that could happen and what could go wrong and what I could fuck up or like how this could be bad or how can I make it perfect? It kind of came from a perfectionist mindset but also a fear of consequence mindset and overthinking everything and trying to do everything right and just not running into more pain with consequences I wasn't seeing. But what you got to see when you get trapped in overthinking is you paralyze yourself and you can only hold yourself back for so long before some part of you snaps. Then you can only block yourself from the things that you want and make yourself jump

through hoops that are unnecessary for every little thing before you just get decision fatigue or you emotionally or mentally snap and you're just like, fuck it. And that is exactly what binge eating was for me When I was living my life like this over analyzing every move I made and holding myself back Binge-eating was the only time I got to say fuck it and just see something I wanted go grab it and eat it not think about a consequence not think about nothing and it typically started with a Mood of like something happening or my day went bad or I was stressed out and I was just like, fuck it. Like if anything I was doing,

I felt like my effort wasn't for anything or it didn't matter or I did something and it was wrong and I had to redo it and I felt like I just wasted my time on the whole thing. Like it was for nothing. That would really trigger me into binge eating and I would just say, fuck it. My efforts don't matter. The consequences don't matter right now. I'm pissed off. I don't care about nothing. Anger comes up to help you bypass and avoid and turn a blind eye to any consequences coming and you convince yourself everything you're about to eat.

Doesn't matter. It's not that bad. It's not that many calories. It's not going to damage me. Then you turn into that spiral of, Oh, if I have this fitness goal or I want to lose weight or I want to hit certain goals in the gym, it's never going to work anyway. I haven't even seen that much progress. My body doesn't even look that good. I'm not even losing weight that fast. This ain't going to matter. You just get very focused on right now. And the more stress you feel, the more you will convince yourself to discard consequences. They don't matter.

You will doom and gloom and you will spiral down mentally into a place where you convince yourself getting comfort however you want right now is not gonna hurt anything and what you get with this is finally getting to take the leash off of yourself. You finally get to prioritize whatever it is you want and go directly for it. You see something, you grab it, you want it, you have it, you eat it, you do whatever you want. You don't overanalyze yourself. You just let yourself fully fucking go nuts. Anything you desire, go get it. That's how it goes with binge eating. And that's how it was for me. I fully got to be off the hook.

I didn't have to think of nothing. I didn't give a fuck about a consequence. I didn't care about anything. The emotional need being met was to feel free and to feel like I could just go for what I want and not feel so restricted and held back all the time. People who binge eat do not typically have a problem with restriction. It's just all mental. You are constantly restricting yourself all the time and over analyzing like I said and what I want you to get if you are someone who deals with binge eating you are not careless and you are not thoughtless and you aren't reckless you

overthink a lot I get it and I see it you have all of these skills you have everything in you it's just aimed in a way that doesn't work for you anymore And now you're seeing the negative causes of binge eating Versus how they comforted you you're seeing this no longer a comfort, but I want to reassure you You are very thoughtful. You are very very smart You know how to think of consequences and you are a very very convincing person You can convince yourself of fucking anything and you're very strong about it. Because if you relate to this and what I'm saying, you can convince yourself

to diminish any potential consequence and make it seem like it's not a big deal. You can fully gaslight the shit out of yourself and convince yourself of anything. That skill you have of convincing can be flipped to convince you of other things and work it in your benefit. I just want to point out the skills that you have and what you have that can be used for you because right now you just feel like it's against you. But this is the biggest biggest biggest thing I had to get with how I was living and I had to make a lot of changes to allow myself to have other times in my life where I was unrestricted and I can't just act on what I wanted and it

wasn't even around food. It was fully just the way that I lived my life with being myself, with going for my desires, business shit, acting on ideas and potentials to stupid shit like playing like a little kid. To just have moments of joy and whatever you want to do, go fucking do it. Make sure there's no like harm involved. Give yourself kind of like a safety container of things you can do and just go do it. Start being more spontaneous. Start not thinking of so many consequences and just wing it. You have to have times where you can just go be spontaneous, but I want you to see you're safe to do it because you over fucking think so much. You're very smart. You're very much

a problem solver and for you to go throw yourself into a situation that's kind of like out of the blue or spontaneous or fun or whatever, and you didn't fully plan for it, you're so goddamn resourceful. You will get to exercise all of those things and show yourself how valuable you can be with handling things that might come up because you didn't plan so much. And you get to have the joy of feeling a sense of control of bettering your circumstances and whatever situation you're in that you chose to be spontaneous about. You can make the experience good and you can see that you

do have control and you are smart and you can depend on yourself. You just threw yourself into an experience, you went to go have fun, you didn't pack everything you needed, you're gonna find a way to figure it all out. You're going to find a way to make sure you're comfortable and have a good time regardless. And that is where a real sense of control is going to come in and it's exercised in a more positive way. And that is going to diminish your need to be let off the hook and let off the leash through binge eating. But with this, I want to say binge eating is a process to overcome and to work through. It's not an overnight thing.

It's not a quick fix. I'm so sorry that I have to say that because it's very disheartening and it's discouraging. And if you deal with the perfectionist mindset, you're very much all or nothing like I was. I was very much, we're done. We're going to do this. We're going to handle this. We're going to handle or nothing like I was. I was very much, we're done. We're gonna do this. We're gonna handle this. We're gonna handle this perfectly from now on. That just adds even more pressure to yourself and sets up unrealistic expectations of, I'm

never gonna binge eat again. That's another restriction. That's tightening the leash even tighter. You're never going to be able to meet that. Nobody can. Nobody can act perfectly all the time. And this is your mode of comfort that you found for a long, long time. And this is what has worked for you for a long time.

So don't get in the whole mindset of this is fixed right now. This is done after Leo's video today. After he shares his tips, we're done with it. I want you to give yourself the grace to understand this as a process. You will fuck up. You will go back to it. That is a known comfort and sometimes you will do it. Don't look at it like it's such a big catastrophe when you do jump back to it or you do relapse, some people would say, or you engage in this comfort again.

Because every time you do it after the tips I'm about to give you, you're going to learn something new from it every single time. You're never going to be back and taking steps backward. Everything's going to be happening from a different level. It's going to be like a staircase. It's like every single step you're on. It's like every time you binge eat again, you're at a new level of overcoming it and a new level and new strategies and new tools and mindsets and new control over yourself to handle the situation better. And it's just going to get better and better and better. So don't get mad and don't beat yourself up if you do go back to binge eating.

So just keep in the back of your head and play this video anytime you need it. This is a process. You're going to be fine. And every single time this happens, you're getting better and better. It's not going backwards. It's going up the stairs. Okay? These are tips from my own personal experience and I'm not about to bullshit you with tips that don't work. Eat ice. Drink a glass of water before you start eating so you eat less. I'm not fucking around with no petty shit like that. I'm about to give you the real tips that works for me and things that I still kind of deploy here and there when I get the urge to binge eat. I was trapped in such a long period of feeling out of control.

I did not feel like I had any control over my urges to binge eat. When they hit, I couldn't stop it. The literal house could be burning down and I would still be looking for food. I would not stop. Once I got into a bingeing cycle, I wouldn't quit. Like sometimes it is too overwhelming and you want that comfort at all costs. It's like a drug. People will fiend for that shit like their life is going to end because of what you're going to have to face if you don't get your comfort.

And this is the only comfort that you know, but I need you to see and I need you to hear me when I say you are in control. You have control when you are binge eating. And I don't mean to sound insensitive when I say you got a fucking Put food in your hand and put it in your mouth. You're fully in control of that I am gonna acknowledge that it does not feel like you are in control But I logically want you to remember you do have control You can stop at any moment and this logic is very easy to lose sight of when you are trapped in a very heavy emotional

state or an emotional kind of like episode that's causing you to want to binge eat. And the thing I want to point out before I say what I'm about to say is you're not cursed and you're not helpless and God is not against you. No one's punishing you. You're not cursed. You're not helpless. I promise. But the thing that I did and the supplement that I took when I did not feel

like I could control it was something to do damage control. The only reason I'm talking about this is because I want you to feel like you have something you can do to help yourself. If you fully feel powerless to the damage you are causing to yourself, if you don't feel like you can control it, what I used to do is take a fiber supplement before I would binge eat. I wouldn't try to go around the whole process when I felt out of control of trying to force myself not to.

I would take a fiber supplement and then just let myself go binge eat. And that's because fiber swells in your stomach and it helps to decrease absorption of fats, sugars and starches and calories from other food. It helps your body not digest and absorb as much as it would without it. Before you take any fiber supplement around anything to do with this, consult a doctor and talk to a medical professional about your specific case. I'm saying this because you need to have someone who can work with you. I'm not gonna recommend a dosage, I'm not gonna tell you what I would take. I'm just gonna say do not do this until you talk

to a doctor about your specific situation. Everything is gonna come into play to determine if this is good for you, bad for you, or how much of this you could take to see a benefit because taking too much fiber can also have adverse effects and make you feel worse. And the worst thing for me personally is feeling like I am stuck with damage being done to me and I cannot do anything to help it or reverse it. Finding out about this in nursing school made me feel a little bit of peace because I was so blind to control that I did have.

I felt like I was just damaging my body for health reasons, not even just the weight gain. That was the least of my concerns. It's not healthy to shove the amount of fucking food and fat and sugar and salt into your body that I used to shove into it. Oh my God. But this is not a cure by any means. And that was just something that I did to make myself feel a little bit better. It doesn't have that much of an impact.

It just made me feel a little bit mentally better. Like I wasn't just damaging myself. I was trying to do something like a little damage control. Like if I'm going to hurt my body, I'm going to help it a little. But this is not something I did daily. And this is not something I recommend daily. Like I said, before anybody wants to try and crawl up my fucking ass, go talk to a doctor and get information from them.

I'm just some asshole on the internet to some people. You should never just blindly take advice from people on the internet. So if you're new here and you don't know me me don't trust anybody you see on the internet, okay Now let's get into more tips quick pause to talk about the sponsors of today's podcast the first one is Claritin and luckily for those who live with symptoms of allergies you can now live Claritin clear with Claritin D Because it's designed for serious allergy sufferers Claritin D has two powerful ingredients and just one pill that relieve your allergy symptoms and decongest your nose so you can breathe better. This double action combination of prescription strength allergy medicine and the best decongestant available relieves sneezing, a runny nose, itchy

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That's P R O L O N life.com slash aware for this special offer. That's prolonlife.com slash aware. Now back to the podcast. And these are going to kind of be all over the place, but they're all going to be very, very helpful and make a lot of sense. So my first tip with binge eating is I want you one night to commit to walking out of the kitchen and not binge eating. Whenever you have an urge, you only have to do it one time. You only have to not act on that urge one time. And the whole purpose behind this is to show yourself you can do it. And it's so powerful for

you to see that you can control something and you can have control. You can walk off. I want you to pretend like food is not an option. The comfort that you know and the comfort that you have pretend it's not even there. Go to sleep and wake up the next day. You only have to do it one time, but I want to prepare you. If you do this and you are going through something very emotional, you're going to panic. You're going to freak the fuck out like a crack head

that can't get their next fix. And I'm not saying that to be disrespectful or rude. You might fully panic and freak out and you might even cry and get emotional. But what I want you to see is it is not weak. You're not a pussy. It's not about, oh, you're so weak, you're crying over food. You're not crying over that. You're in pain of some sort.

You are experiencing some kind of discomfort. And what you are doing when you do not let yourself binge eat is you are not taking the comfort and using the comfort that you know, you are having to sit there in whatever you've been running from or trying not to face. And you're going to feel trapped in it because your only mode of knowing how to comfort yourself or feel better is what you've continued to do and what's comforted you before. When you withhold that from yourself,

you're withholding comfort and now you're sitting there trapped in the emotions you don't want to face. I just want you to let that purge happen of the emotions, not the binge eating shit. Like I fully want you to sit there. This is what helped me a lot one night was fully just not letting myself do it. I knew I had the urge, but telling myself I only have to walk off one time to show myself I can do it. I was like, Leo, you're not going to die. You emotionally might feel like you're going to die depending on whatever it is you're going through. But I chose not to act on it one night and I freaked the fuck out. But I was like, all right. And I finally fell asleep and I woke up in the morning and I

was like, holy fuck. I did it. And just that established so much proof that I do have a level of control in it. And it made what I was running from very obvious and it made a lot of emotions come up and it was hell to sit there with them. Because like I said, it's not the food you're missing. It's the comfort for the shitty feeling. It's not fun to sit in it. But I can't tell you how impactful that was to my self-esteem and my confidence and my sense of control over the situation.

Once I showed myself, I do have my sense of control over the situation. Once I showed myself, I do have a bit of control over all this. Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa. Shit got different. Now the other thing, and this is going to sound a little wacky to some people, but the whole thing is establishing your sense of control over the situation. If you're going to binge eat, choose it. Just verbally saying to yourself, I'm going to choose to binge eat, changes the whole narrative. If you keep telling yourself, I can't stop just saying to yourself, I'm going to go choose to binge eat, flips the whole narrative. And you become way more aware of that logic that gets lost a lot just by switching the way that you talk about the experience and the way you talk to yourself. A basic tip like a duh general

one is to replace your food in your house with healthier food and healthier food options so if you do binge there's less damage done. That's like a given but the thing that helped me with the whole choosing it is I literally would go in the kitchen when I felt the urge to binge and I would get out every single thing I wanted to eat. And the night that changed this for me was the night that I grabbed a box of ice cream bars. There was like eight of them in the box and I was like, I want to eat all of them.

I took them out of the freezer, set them on the table and I said, choose it, open this box, eat the whole fucking thing, but choose to do it. And when I stood there with myself and I like looked at the box, I was like, fuck it. Open this box, eat the whole fucking thing but choose to do it. And when I stood there with myself and I like looked at the box I was like fuck it let's choose it. I was in such an uncomfortable emotional state I was like I will choose it fuck it. And I reached for it and I ripped that box open I started eating them. I got through two. Usually I clean out the whole box. I ate two and I was like, I'm over it. And it shifted the whole way that I kind of approach binge eating and it wasn't a clean break. It wasn't like, Oh, this just flip things once.

I continued to binge eat for a while. Even after I was saying I'm choosing this, but what it did was established in my mind every time I went to binge eat and I said, I'm choosing to binge eat. It reminded me of my control every single time. And that's where it's important to face the consequences when you do binge, not to punish yourself, not to get mad at yourself, but seeing the consequences of the actions that you take. But with the whole positioning of reminding yourself before you do it,

I'm choosing this. When you see the consequences, you have to see you're choosing those at the same time. And it becomes a little bit more of like, fuck, like I kind of beat myself at my own game. Like I'm not operating subconsciously anymore. I'm aware of what I'm doing. And it's like, damn, I can't even lie to myself no more. I can't gaslight myself no more like fuck. But the consequences that I'm talking about facing with binge eating is how you

feel after it, like right after, and also the day after. So like right after when you binge eat and you feel so fucking full and you feel nasty and you feel the guilt and all that shit, if you just pay attention to the physical sensations, tell your mind, shut the fuck up for a minute, girl. Just let me be, let me be over here in pain, fuck. Just shut your mind up for a second and pay attention to the physical sensations that you're feeling. You feel full as fuck, you feel tired, you feel like you don't want to do nothing, your mood is shot, you're typically done for the day or done for the night after you binge eat like that. If you don't even look at the mental part,

you don't feel good physically. And that's why I'm saying focus on the physical sensations, because the next day, typically after you binge eat, you're going to wake up feeling bloated as the motherfucker. You're going to feel mood shot. You're going to feel like you do not want to get up. You do not want to face the day. It's not good morning. It's just morning. You don't feel happy. You feel sluggish. It's just a shit show the day of and the day after. And when you pay attention to those consequences, do not mislabel the cause of them. And especially the way you start thinking the next day, like, Oh,

my life is shit. I'm always just so tired. I don't feel good. Nothing makes me happy. There's no point. Nothing ever is going to work. I can't stop binge eating. Like it's going to send you in a spiral of just how things aren't good, how you don't like your life, how nothing's fucking worth it. But I do not want you to even think those thoughts and I don't want you to mislabel what's going on. You don't hate your life. It's not that nothing makes you happy and you're actually just so fucking miserable. This is just an inflammation of thoughts coming from the actions you took the day before and when you just let your brain spiral like that and you freak out and you make it beyond binge eating, you make

it a deeper meaning about you as a person and your life as it is and it's hopeless and it's pointless and whatever Nothing makes me fucking happy when you take the whole focus off it being about binge eating and you assign these meanings to your life It's gonna push you into a spiral again, which is gonna lead you back into this cycle You're stressed out. You feel no point in nothing. You're unhappy. You want comfort you go binge eat You're back in the same cycle over and over and over again And I want you to practice seeing and observing the consequences that come from binge eating. Most of the things that come the immediate time

after you binge eat and the next day after binge eating come from the behavior of binge eating. It does fuck your mood when you eat unhealthy food or you overeat. When you just run for it and don't think anything through, it does come with consequences. And that's the whole point of facing them is to understand these are just consequences that come from this action. And if you do not want these consequences, really make an effort to stop doing this action. But it's so important to start saying to yourself before this,

before you go to binge eat, I'm choosing to because whenever you realize these consequences are unwanted, you're now gonna feel more empowered to escape the consequences because you've been reminding yourself, I am choosing this, I am in control for a little bit. And now you're gonna see that you fully are in control and that's why it's very important to do the night where you don't binge eat. You just do one night where you don't and you just grit through it and just survive without the comfort for once and show yourself you can do it.

But it does get better. I want you to know that. And I want you to see that you already have the strength and everything in you to do it. It's so much more mental than a physical behavior. That's the prison that locks on the inside is everything mental. So these couple of tips I've shared so far have been to help you with the mental aspect and a lot of people will take this into a negative thing and make it about weight and if you say I don't want to binge eat because I don't want to gain weight, if you don't want to

look at it like that, look at it like I do not want to binge eat because I do not want to feel bad. That's the truth of it. The whole weight gain situation is just something that is distracting you from it. And reframing it like this, the way you speak about it, is going to take the attention off of the weight gain and put it onto just not wanting to feel bad because of the action of binge eating. But with saying and speaking over yourself, I do not want to feel bad. It's going to make you see this comfort actually isn't a comfort.

It makes you feel worse when you act on it. Sometimes it's what you need to get through certain situations in life and I fully get it and I'm not taking it from you. Binge eating is always going to be there. It's's always gonna be a comfort that you can act on. But the biggest thing here is do not shame yourself mentally for wanting to binge eat. What you want is comfort. And if you want to binge eat, don't turn against yourself for wanting to do that

and getting mad at yourself. The urge isn't the problem. And if you look at the urge and say, I really wanna do this, and that's okay, but I'm gonna choose not to because I do not want to feel bad. I see that this comfort is not a real comfort. It's going to make me feel worse if I do it. So I'm going to choose not to. That feels a lot better than when you have an urge,

start freaking out because you want to binge eat and catastrophizing. Oh my God, I shouldn't fucking want it. It's fine to want it. It's what you do about the urge and the actions that you take. That's what it's about. So if you have the urge, hi hey urge to binge eat, how you doing bitch? Not hanging out with you. Don't act on it in situations when you can. You're fully allowed to have the urges. Nothing's gone wrong, nothing's bad. What you want is comfort. Remember that in the moment, but just remember you can choose not to do it because you do

not want to feel bad. Okay, my next tip. I know, I see you. We both do this. Stop watching YouTube videos and stop watching TV and watching things while you eat. No longer distract yourself while you're eating food. Because I used to get into a bad, bad routine of like, one of my favorite things used to be to put on like a YouTube video when I was

eating. I still put them on when I eat now, but I've gotten a lot more control over it and I'm a lot more aware of what's going on. So I've reintegrated this back in and you can do it too. But something that used to hinder me a lot was distracting myself and watching a video while I ate. If you're gonna watch a video, watch one under 10 minutes because when I used to put on a podcast or something for like an hour, if I started the podcast eating, you best believe I was into that bitch eating even if it was an hour. I would literally find things because the video wasn't over. I wanted to keep eating and keep like

doing my little activity. If you're gonna watch a video, watch a short as fuck one. Okay? Don't continue to eat to cater to the video. And when you do have a video on, it kind of takes you out of everything going on. You're distracted. You're visually and like mentally in a different place. You're listening to something else. You're not paying attention to how your body feels. You just know it feels good to keep going. You're not aware of how fuck-a-full you really are. I've fallen into that trap many times. Trust me. I used to fully eat for the whole hour podcast and didn't give a fuck. And my last tip for now that I recommend with binge eating is text or call somebody and declare to someone that you want to be more accountable with your binge eating and you want to work on these

behaviors and work on the patterns and decrease it or whatever you want to do. If you want to stop, you can fully do whatever you want with it. But I really encourage getting an accountability partner and someone to answer to and talk to because when you have to own up to what you're doing to somebody, your self-concept on the line, you have more inclination to follow what you said you're going to do. Even when your emotions are really, really high, it gives you a little bit more strength and courage because you have more on the line to act in accordance with what you said you were going to do when someone

else can hold you accountable. I'm not saying somebody is going to shame you and call you fucking names, but just having someone in the moment to reach out to and talk to is very, very important. It can kind of like snap you out of it. A lot of people have sponsors when they're in rehab for drugs for this reason. Having someone to reach out to will help you a lot more than you think. If you feel like you don't have anyone in your life, that's why I made my Facebook community. I'll put the link in the description,

but you can join it. It's free. It's just everybody who listens to my podcast where you can go and comment and talk to each other. If you want to go buddy up with somebody and message them and have someone to talk to do it. If you want to make a group of each other, go in there and post in there. That's what it's for. It's really for anything you need help with any friend you want to ask advice for. It's about anything, but you can use it for binge eating also.

And if you don't want to actually talk to anyone and you don't feel comfortable doing that, put this episode back on, find something that can be your go-to resort and something you can make a ritual with every time you want to binge eat and do that thing. So if you have a certain person you want to watch online, go watch them. You have a certain video you want to watch, go watch it. Something that's encouraging and comforting, especially in a time like that when you want to act on this urge and you're not giving yourself the comfort that you know. Have other things lined up. Have a comfort creator, someone to listen to. Hearing another voice besides the own thoughts in your head when you want to

binge eat is very, very helpful from my experience. So put this video on. If you don't fucking like me, but you're just here for the tips, find somebody you like, go find who brings you comfort and put them on and see if that helps you because it helps me a lot. My summer tour is almost here. I'm so excited. I'm leaving in a couple of days to go to my first show in Medford. It's close to Boston if you live there, but I have 20 shows that I'm doing this summer all over the U S.

So if you want to see where I'm coming to, the link will be in the description. You can get tickets. At my live shows, I talk about the topic of confidence and how I've gotten myself from the full circle of cripplingly insecure. I was real cocky confident for a little bit and now I'm back sitting in a place of like solid confidence quiet confidence not that loud shit so if you want to just have something to look forward to head down to the description and get a ticket while you can because that's all I've got for this episode that's all my insight around binge eating if you found

this helpful leave me a comment and let me know if you have any other tips or tactics or anything you want to share leave them in the comments and if you're watching this on YouTube when you go leave a comment hit that little thumbs up button if you're them in the comments. And if you're watching this on YouTube, when you go leave a comment, hit that little thumbs up button. If you're new, subscribe and all that. And if you're listening to the audio version on Apple podcasts and Spotify, leave his podcast to five stars rating and you can leave a comment too about other tips you have on the ratings page if you want to. But that's it. Everybody be safe, take care of yourself and I'll talk to you guys next Sunday. And some of you I will see you soon on tour.