What do the Hollywood hills and the lights on Broadway have to do with ending binge eating? Keep listening!

Welcome to The Done Bingeing Podcast. This is the place to hear about how you can pair the emerging brain science about why you binge with powerful life coaching to help you stop. If you want to explore a non-clinical approach to end binge eating, you’re in the right place. It’s time to free yourself. You have more power than you know. And now, your host, Life and Weight-Loss Coach Martha Ayim.

Welcome to Episode 22 of The Done Bingeing Podcast.

We talked about writing your script in Episode 20. Your script is the list of thoughts you need to think to create the feelings that will inspire you to show up in your life the way you truly want to. We talked about practicing your script in Episode 21. Now, in Episode 22, it’s showtime.

My mother wanted to be an actor, but she didn’t become one. Instead, she became a professor. The lecture hall was her stage. The podium and projector, her props. The students lined up outside her office, her audience.

Whenever I’m with my mother, even now, 20 years after her retirement, I feel a presence bigger than she, herself. Maybe it’s the prof who never quit or the actor who never stopped believing. There’s a dynamism, a dramatism that I can possibly best capture, or at least attempt to try, with a story.

When my brother and I were young, Mom would read to us every night while we washed the dishes. She’d pull up a chair by the sink, adjust her glasses on her nose, and open to the tattered bookmark. This was where, in the corner of the kitchen by the front window onto our crescent, I learned to love the sound of fingers moving down paper, the sound of a page turning.

My brother washed and I dried. I loved to try to irritate him by continually bringing dirty dishes, just when he thought he was done. He liked to try to irritate me by filling up the dish rack with clean dishes as soon as I’d dried all that were there.

It was there, over the sinks of steaming water—one with a mound of soft bubbles, one without—where we lived the adventures in the Chronicles of Narnia. It was from there that we were transported to Middle-earth, to witness the war for the One Ring that was waged across the land and won in the fires of Mount Doom, within the reach of the Dark Lord, at the heart of Mordor. And it was there that we heard the shrill shrieks of Bertha in the attic.

Mom read the scenes with the White Witch with a hushed and halting voice. When the servants of Sauron were close, her voice deepened into a growl. And when Bertha escaped from the attic, Mom’s pitch rose to a piercing cackle that left my nerves jangling and the dish I’d been holding shattered on the floor.

Mom never made it on Broadway, but she lives as if she had.

I want you to live from the place you want to be. I want you to live as the person you want to become. Imagine a life where you no longer binge, where you can totally handle an urge, where you feel calm around food, where you don’t feel like food controls you, where you have clothes that you know will fit you, where you feel confident in your body, where you can dedicate your life to something besides trying desperately to stop the bingeing. No more confusion. This is your future. This is your part.

Many actors say that when they study for a part, before the film rolls or the curtain lifts, they try to live and make decisions based on what their character would do—within reason of course; if you’re playing Superman, you might not want to leap from the top of a flaming building.

Actors ask themselves, “How would my character feel, move, talk and react? What would he think? How would she carry herself? What would he say?”

I want you to learn to think, feel, act, create, and decide your life based on what your future self would do. Your future self doesn’t binge or overeat. She has a full life with better things to do. He feels better, thinks better, feels trimmer. She has more energy, the acid reflux is gone, the digestive distress has eased. He is unafraid of emotion. She is free.

We live like everything depends on our past. Here is a thought I hear again and again in my free sessions: “Because I’ve binged for so long, I’ll probably binge forever.” That is just a thought, and it’s poison. It predictably calls up feelings of despair and hopelessness, which lead down a well-worn path to another binge.

If you’re anything like I was and you’ve been bingeing for a long time, you may not be going after your dream of ending your bingeing because your brain is telling you that you’re going to fail. Why? Because, like me, you’ve failed many times and been unable to stop bingeing despite your best efforts.

But, what if, instead of living like everything depends on your past, you lived like everything depends on your future? What if you lived your script? What if you lived your new thoughts, like “Others have stopped bingeing and I can too.” Or, “I am becoming a woman who is willing to feel emotions.”

A woman who is willing to feel her emotions will pull the car over by the side of the road, on a somber evening, when sky is greying earlier than it did the night before, and cry. Why? Because she’s sad. Sadness to her feels like a lump in her throat, a rock in her belly, a throbbing in her head, and not much more. And she is willing to feel these things. She’s living her future today. Ten minutes later, she restarts the car and eases back onto the road, a few tears shed, no food eaten, and a willingness to pull over again, as often as needed, and feel.

It takes less time to pull over onto the shoulder, park, and cry than it does pull through a drive-thru, park, and eat. The first is healing. The second is debilitating. Both hurt. The first hurt has its own natural ending. The second hurt has a pain that ricochets for days.

Pulling away from the drive-thru, leaving your order behind, your money spent on something you no longer want, is possible when you begin to live your new, powerful reality right now.

Begin to live from the place where you are already the person who has created the reality that you want so badly. Imagine your life without any desire to binge or overeat. Imagine that you’ve emerged in your future more powerful in your life than ever before. What would your life be like without bingeing and overeating? What’s different about you? How do you think differently? How do you feel differently? How do you show up differently in your life? How do you act around food? What do you create? How do you handle problems? How do you move? How do you talk? What does your body language say about you? What do you wear—a muumuu or the cutest damn clothes you can find?

What do you desire? We know that your future self doesn’t desire food. Food is a source of fuel your body—nothing less, and not much more. So, what does your future self desire? If you could choose anything at all to want, what would that thing be? And why would you want to want it?

One of the ways we stop ourselves from believing we can get to this space is by insisting that we must know exactly how we’ll get there before we head out on our way.

In The Two Towers, the second book in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, my mother read the lines of the King of the Dead Men of the Mountains in a hollow, haunting voice: “The way is shut. It was made by those who are Dead, and the Dead keep it, until the time comes. The way is shut.”

Those lines came from the mind of brilliant man, and they live on. But the dead are gone, or perhaps only ghosts. If the way is shut, kick it the fuck down or go ’round. There is no one way. There is only your way. And you will find it. Perhaps with a guide, perhaps not. Just keep going.

The time has come.

The red carpet has unfurled before you.

The path is soft.

The lights are hot.

And so are you.

Live it.

Breathe it.

It’s you.

In your future, today.

That’s it for Episode 22. Thank you for listening. The Done Bingeing Podcast is helping so many people to reduce their bingeing and overeating, and to find out who they’re truly meant to be when they live their lives fully. Ratings and reviews will help more people find this podcast and get the help they need. So, if you’re getting something out of this podcast, I would be honored if you would be willing to take the time to leave me a rating and review. Just go to www.holdingthespace.co/itunes-review for easy-peasy instructions on how to get it done. Thank you so much!

Thanks for listening to The Done Bingeing Podcast. Martha is a certified life and weight loss coach who’s available to help you stop bingeing. Book a free session with her at www.holdingthespace.co/book. And stay tuned for next week’s episode on freeing yourself from binge eating and creating the life you want.