What do a wire and a couch have to do with you and 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 an evidence-based, 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. To find out more, go to www.holdingthespace.co and click Programs.

And now, your host, Internal-Family-Systems-Level-3-Trained and Master-Coach-Certified Martha Ayim.

Hey friends!

If you’re listening to me right now, you’ve likely dreamed of:

• actually waiting until you’re hungry to eat
• being able to stop eating when you’re no longer hungry
• being able to stay with your urges to binge, without resorting to bingeing
• following through on eating nourishing food without being hijacked by junk-food cravings
• being able to thrive in your body again
• feeling confident about your body again
• having a wardrobe that actually fits you all the time, without the extra bins of just-in-case sizes
• putting your time, money, and energy into something other than shopping for food to binge on, finding a secret place to eat, hiding the evidence, feeling crappy after, then restricting to make up for the bingeing
• feeling like an adult again and in charge of what and how much you eat
• losing all the weight that comes with bingeing—physical, emotional, mental
• joining family or friends for a meal and feeling totally calm about it

I’m guessing that you’ve dreamed of healing your binge eating pattern and living a full, unapologetic life.

I’m also guessing that you’re tired of approaches to ending binge eating:

• that don’t work for long, or don’t work at all, or make your bingeing worse
• that seem eerily just like an old diet you were on, except dressed up in new words
• that trigger your bingeing or have you bingeing for the first time in your life
• that have an air of judgment or presumption
• that feel limited and narrow, somehow missing the mark on what’s beyond the obvious

Maybe you’ve longed for an approach that had a body-positive perspective and that went further than helping you stop bingeing to helping reach your ideal weight without activating more binges

Binge eaters often wonder:

• Is there any hope for me to stop bingeing after doing it for months, years, or decades?
• Is it safe to hope that I’ll one day be able to stop bingeing?
• Will I ever get out of this despair?

I remember having all of these hopes, disappointments, and questions.

I was a binge eater for nearly 35 years.

Sometimes, my binges happened daily, other times happened multiple times a day.

I was exhausted from lugging around almost 100 extra pounds of weight.

My life felt stifled and small.

I used every dollar I had and borrowed every penny I could to get better. I tried every conceivable treatment I could find. Financially, it was killing me to try to solve this problem. One program after another drained my bank account.

I remember wondering what it might be like to live a life that didn’t cost $20,000 on a behaviour you couldn’t stop and on treatment to help.

I remember believing that freedom was absolutely impossible.

I was confounded by not being able to stop bingeing even when I tried so hard and wanted it so bad.

I was desperate to stop. I felt sick with all the food I was eating. Sometimes I ate so much that my throat was raw. Sometimes I ate so much that my mouth bled. I got ten cavities in a year- and-a-half and lived for decades with a mouth full of mercury. I even begged my dentist to wire my mouth shut. (And, in case you’re wondering, she wouldn’t do it.)

My lowest moment was trying to stop a binge by throwing a cake in the kitty litter (didn’t work by the way).

I tried everything to stop bingeing and have the scars to prove it. (No, lap band surgery didn’t work for me either.)

I went from on the couch to under the knife.

I went from fad diets to clinical treatment.

And yet, I still binged.I felt hopeless and hope seemed a world away. And when I gave everything to reach out for a little bit of hope, I inevitably dropped back into despair when my efforts failed.

I didn’t know then what I know now—that there is another way, that hope might not be the best friend of change.

I learned from Toni Herbine-Blank, in her book Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and Compassion in Couple Therapy, cowritten with Donna M Kerpelman and Martha Sweezy, about the power of holding on to the possibility of healing, rather that clinging to the hope of healing. As Toni writes, “Hope orients you to the future while hopelessness keeps you focused on the past. . . . [S]taying with what is possible right here and now, one step at a time, just focusing on your intention . . . gives you some distance from the highs and lows of hopeful and hopeless parts.”

Maybe you met some of your hopeful and hopeless parts in the last episode. Remember that after going through the process of setting an intention to aim for something meaningful for you, we talking about checking inside to see what came up. Sometimes hopeful parts cheer us along as we go for our goals and sometimes hopeless parts hold us back with their views. “There’s no point. It isn’t going to work anyway. Nothing else has ever worked. You’re stupid to try.”

We can help both of these parts so the ride feels less like a rollercoaster.

On the more level plains of possibility, so much more calm and clarity prevail, making space for curiosity and creativity.

If you were to focus on possibility, on what’s right here, on what’s present right now, and on one loving next step, what would your next step be?

Message me at support@holdingthespace.co and let me know!

That’s it for Episode 76. Thank you for listening! If you’re interested in private coaching to help you reach your goals and realize your dreams, book me for a free consultation at https://holdingthespace.as.me/free30. Let’s get you on my calendar today!

Thanks for listening to The Done Bingeing Podcast.

Martha has the highest-level training in both the evidence-based Internal Family Systems approach and in life coaching, and she’s available to help you stop bingeing. You can learn more about her programs by going to www.holdingthespace.co and clicking Programs.

Stay tuned for the next episode on freeing yourself from binge eating and creating the life you want.