Episode 90: How To Stop Binge Eating SOLO EPISODE
Episode 90: How To Stop Binge Eating SOLO EPISODE
In this episode we sit down with....your host, Katelyn Parsons.
Katelyn Parsons is a Certified Intuitive Eating + Body Image Coach, Speaker, and host of the weekly podcast, Body Truth.
After years of struggling with bulimia and disordered eating, she not only found recovery but recognized a crucial missing link in the wellness industry- empowerment + individual sustainability around health. This inspired her entrepreneurial journey and life mission to shift the conversation toward healing our relationship with food and body.
For the past 4 years, Katelyn has helped countless creative leaders transform their relationship with food and body image through an integrative, evidence-based process so that they can move through each day feeling more present, empowered, and comfortable in their skin, without worrying about what to eat.
You’ll also find Katelyn snuggled up with her cat or strolling the beach in sunny San Diego with her husband and their pup Winnie.
In this conversation we talk about:
My relationship with binge eating
The root cause of binge eating and ways that it may be showing up in your life
The way that diet culture affects all of us
Next steps for you to take in your journey
Connect with me...
IG: @katelyn.parsons
Website: katelynparsons.com
Ready to heal your relationship with food + body?
Book your FREE Body Trust Breakthrough Consult
Grab your FREE Intuitive Eating Workshop
Get weekly email support from me to help you heal your relationship with food + body image
TRANSCRIPTION
Episode 90: How To Stop Binge Eating SOLO EPISODE
Katelyn:
Hi, welcome back to the show, or if this is your first time, welcome to the show, I am your host, Katelyn Parsons, and I have a special solo episode for you today.
You might have heard me mention this a couple of episodes ago, but I am going to start releasing these solo conversations, just you and me every other episode. So it will be a guest sharing their personal body image, story, and expertise. And then a little mini-episode where you and I get to talk about some real stuff around food and body image and mental health that I personally coach on in my business and have definitely gone through myself some, sometimes I'm still going through it.
So it's just raw, real conversation with you and me. And today we're talking all about how to stop binge eating.
This is a topic that is really near and dear to my heart. If you have heard my story in the past, or have heard me mention it in passing in previous conversations, this might not be familiar to you, but I spent most of my life stuck in the binge eating cycle.
So kind of doing a dance between binging, feeling out of control around food, and straight-up bulimia, which went through many different phases.
And that cycle became so normal, I really didn't know any other way to eat, I didn't know that another way to eat was possible, I spent a lot of time caught in comparison of everyone else, and their quote-unquote, normal relationship with food, which triggered all kinds of shame and self-judgment. And really just this feeling of being broken. It was tough.
And if you're there, I want you to know that I really see you and you are not broken.
Getting out of the binge eating cycle and healing my relationship with food. It's really been one of the most freeing and liberating, life-giving processes so far in my life. And it's without a doubt one of my favorite parts of supporting my clients, it's definitely my zone of genius.
I have said on this show before and say often with my clients, that there's not a lot that you can share with me that I have not experienced on my own just because of the tumultuous nature of my relationship with food.
Which, you know, just to be real with you for a moment when I was really in it and struggling I was just swimming in shame and thinking that this was just the worst place to be. And it felt pretty, pretty terrible, really terrible.
And going through it and now being in a place where I can so clearly see why I went through that to be able to support clients more powerfully and this community more powerfully. It gives me a completely different perspective on that part of my life. And so also I want to share that with you.
Because if you are going through it and you are at a place where you are really wanting to step out of the binge eating cycle, and you're just feeling like it's never, it's never gonna happen, or that this is just going to be a wound that is going to be carried with you for the rest of your life that's going to disrupt everything else there is probably a reason why it's happening.
And you don't have to know why right now, but sometimes that's comforting to me when I'm in really painful moments. And I'm saying that as in like life right now, not to have a bypass of the emotion but to really just take a step back when things feel so tough and acknowledge.
I have gone through hard things before I can go through this hard thing right now. I can give myself permission to feel how difficult it is and also know that I am resilient as fuck, and I can get through it.
So just to offer you some strength in this time, if you need it, those are some words of wisdom, they get me through really tough times. If it resonates, take it, if it doesn't leave it.
Before we go into how to stop binge eating, let's just set some boundaries, boundaries are beautiful, and always super important.
First of all, ending binge eating is not a one size fits all process, there's no right way to do this work. And everyone's personal experience and timeline with healing are different. So if you are thinking that there is a step-by-step that you need to follow, or a plan that you need to get your hands on, or are looking for just that magical google keyword that's going to unlock the healing potential for you. I'm sorry, it's just, it's just not that simple. This is super complex.
I also want to emphasize that it's not impossible. When we can emphasize these things, and really create space for our own individuality in the healing process. That is where we are met with sustainability, which is my mission for everything that I do in my work, really just creating unique sustainability for my own life and spaces for clients to be able to do that work as well, too.
Because if it's not sustainable, then that is just exercising a lot of energy and feeling defeated, often in the long run, so self-compassion is key.
Curiosity is an essential part of this process. Just observing without judgment, I want to offer those tools just as we're going through some of these pieces today. But especially wherever you're at in your own journey, you might know that this might be the first time hearing that but I offer them as tools for you to lean into today.
So next, for purposes of this podcast, we're going to use the term binge eating or binging more liberally. However, there are actually diagnostic criteria for binge eating disorder. So I just want to make that super clear in terms of this conversation. However, the word binge or binge eating resonates with you, whether it's that feeling out of control around food, going through on-off periods with how you're eating, or that lack of consistency and ability to really trust yourself around food. That's what we're referring to here.
So try to let go of deciding if you're struggling enough to be able to learn from this and just sit with us in this conversation and see what comes up for you when you're hearing all of this because there's probably a reason why you are listening to this if you are here today.
Lastly, I want to encourage you to keep an open mind. Notice if you're becoming activated or triggered when you're listening to this information and just take really deep breaths. Get curious about what you're thinking, and how you're feeling without judging yourself, you're exactly where you need to be.
Okay, so let's dive in and just straight up there is one really clear reason why binge eating occurs. And that is restriction.
However, this can feel really confusing because there is more than one way that we restrict. And it's also not talked about a lot in our culture. So I'm going to be unpacking some of the fundamental areas of restriction to give you a better understanding and more context for this so that you can begin exploring in your own life.
So first area of restriction, physical restriction. So I'm talking about physical restriction, we're talking about the amount of food the times that you're eating food throughout the day, skipping meals and snacks, avoiding certain food or food groups. So physically think about it as a tangible restriction, avoiding certain ingredients in foods out of fear of what it will do to your body or your relationship with food. Lack of willpower is what's coming to my mind when I'm when I'm talking about this, but physical, something a little bit more tangible around food, amount of food, we want to make sure that we're eating consistently throughout the day eating enough variety of foods throughout the day, really giving ourselves the ability to nourish and build that consistent, sustainable trust with our bodies and ourselves. The opposite of that is the physical restriction.
So, next phase of restriction or part of restriction, rather, is mental. So this would be more of the preoccupation with food, convincing ourselves that certain foods need to be eaten, or not eaten, mentally manipulating body cues, just kind of like that willpower trap of I'm not hungry, or I shouldn't be hungry. Just all of the mental energy that we put into the food that we're eating, and, and really just the dialogue that we have in our head around what is good, what is bad, and restricting in that matter.
The next phase is emotional. So assigning a higher moral hierarchy to foods, thinking about this as healthy and unhealthy, good, bad. So when we actually have that mental restriction, the emotional restriction that comes from that, so what's the emotional reaction that we have from those mental thoughts. So often, this is the judgment, the shame, the guilt, or the praise, attached to food, and not giving ourselves the space to just feel all of those feelings and really restricting out of like this really narrow willpower trap that just keeps coming up as I'm, as I'm sharing with you.
And then the next would be self-care. So this really goes into needs that are not being met. So again, neglected emotions, disorder, boundaries, unhealthy communication styles, people-pleasing, perfectionism, codependency, just all of these all of these tools that are not necessarily the healthiest tools but are serving a purpose in our life for some way there, they're learned patterns to cope with the reality of our worlds and very often start at infancy, infancy and childhood, and we learned these behaviors and patterns out of need to meet our own needs. I guess that's the best way that I can, I can put it for you.
But really, they don't come up overnight, right? You don't just become a perfectionist overnight, or you don't just fall into the people-pleasing category. You know, when you wake up one morning, it really is that consistent pattern that you build on throughout your life that creates this trap. And I am raising my hand here.
I certainly, oh my god, you guys, these patterns are so deep with me, I am constantly finding them popping up in different areas of my life, but especially around my relationship with food as it related to to binge eating. And they were super present without me even realizing it. Right. So from that professional perfectionistic standpoint, it was just wanting to eat all of the right foods, quote-unquote, like the healthy foods, how I wanted to be perceived or how I wanted to just follow the rules that I had set for myself or that diet culture had set for me and give myself my own little checkmark or a plus not even meeting anybody else's approval, but just my own inner critic that I was so scared of for so long, and how that really just put a big roadblock in my self trust.
So when one or more of these areas is consistently neglected, it almost always results in a binge. Very often it is more than one of these areas, but it could be one absolutely just wanted to tie it back to the individuality of all of this and let you know that it is possible. Like I said, in my case, I was neglecting pretty much all of these four areas for most of my life without even realizing it. This is the case for a lot of my clients, too.
So if that's you, please know that you're absolutely not alone. And it's not your fault. It's not any of our faults actually, this sneaky restriction cycle is really a result of the environment that we are raised in, meaning diet culture.
So I'm not talking about your family of origin here, that's a separate conversation, I'm talking about the culture that we are born into, at least when I'm talking about America. And unfortunately, diet culture has infiltrated into so many other countries at this point. But diet culture is the culture that you were raised in, regardless of how you were brought up in your family. And we'll go into this in another podcast episode because I do want to keep this concise in terms of binge eating for this conversation. But it's important to name it here. And it's also important to emphasize what I mentioned earlier that you are not broken. This is really complicated.
And the complexity of this unhealthy relationship with food, it's not your fault, there is a solution for getting out of this cycle, there is a solution for rebuilding that deep self-trust. And the repair process is really an unraveling and unpacking each of these areas, and all the layers that have been built up over time, so that you're able to really examine what's consciously and subconsciously blocking you from having that relaxed, joyful, empowered relationship with food that most of us want, it's your right to want that it's your right to want to eat food unapologetically. And also not feel like it's on your mind 24/7.
Whether it's the mental preoccupation or just that low-grade emotional preoccupation that you're feeling and are, you know, our thoughts directly impact our feeling. So it makes sense, you can't really have one without the other.
And this is why I always recommend working with a professional, someone who's good, who can go through this examination with you objectively, and shine a light on some of these areas that might not be so obvious to us so that you can build in new tools for creating a trusting relationship with food and yourself. This is exactly how I support clients.
So if that's something that you're interested in exploring, I want to invite you to book a call so that we can discuss what healing looks like for you. And if coaching is the right fit at this time, this console is a zero-pressure conversation. My full intention is to listen to where you're at. But you know how I can help if that's the case, and if it's not guiding you to another path for the support that you might be needing at this time.
All right, I'm going to leave it there and just let all of this sink in. So I love you so much. I want to encourage you to take care of yourself and really just give yourself some space to let all of this digest and I'll talk to you next week. Bye.