What do a flip-top lid and a slimy worm have to do with how much you eat? 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 28 of The Done Bingeing Podcast.

If you have trouble stopping at a level of fullness that you know feels comfortable for you, it’s because of a feeling, driven by a thought. One of the most deeply held thoughts preventing people from stopping at the level of fullness that feels best for them is that it’s wrong to throw away food. And so that leaves them with a feeling of guilt.

Sometimes I like to go to the situation that freaks you out the most. Not because I’m particularly sadistic, but because if you can make peace with that, it’s so much easier to handle something that feels less threatening.

Here’s a scenario that I run past clients that usually makes them want to yell at me: Imagine that you’re at an expensive restaurant, your meal arrives and you’re not hungry. You decide not to eat your meal because you’re already feeling past the point of fullness that feels right for you. You can’t bring the food with you. Maybe you’re staying at a hotel with no refrigerator or maybe you won’t be home in time to get it into the fridge before it starts to lose its freshness. You must have the waiter take it away after only tasting it. How does this choice make you feel?

Now, imagine the same scenario, but this time you decide to eat the food instead. How does this choice make you feel? How does this feeling compare to the feeling you’d have if you’d made the first choice to send the food away?

You may discover that both choices leave you feeling bad. Perhaps you’d feel bad about the second choice to eat food that you weren’t hungry for because you weren’t true to your needs or to your goal. Perhaps you’d feel bad about the first choice to send the food back because you believe that wasting food is wrong. If so, that’s a thought worth exploring, and it’s the focus of this episode.

One of the reasons I find this scenario so powerful, is that in our large-portion society, in order to get to, or stay at, your ideal weight, you will have to waste some food. It’s important to know what you want to think and feel and how you want to act, given this reality.

In Episode 3, I talked about throwing my food in the kitty litter in an attempt not to eat it. I left it to your imagination to figure out how that story ended. What I was trying to do was throw out the food or waste it in a way that would make it completely undesirable to me. That attempt to waste food came from sheer panic, which came from the thought, “I don’t know how to control myself around food.”

But what I’m talking about in this episode is a different kind of wasting. This is a wasting that comes from a place of peace or competence around food. Let’s take some time to explore how to get there, to explore the various ways in which we waste food.

You can waste food if you eat anything, even wholesome and nutritious food, when you’re not hungry for it. Why? Because you don’t need that food to fuel your body, and therefore it’s a waste in your body. Your body will try to salvage the unneeded food by storing it as fat.

You can waste food in the trash can if you throw it away because you’re not hungry for it. Why? Because in effect, you’re throwing away the money you or someone else spent on it.

Let’s stop and look at these two situations. In the first one, you’re wasting food in your body. In the second, you’re wasting it in the garbage. We have so much baggage about throwing out food, that we rarely stop to ponder that the other option is no better. We think of people who don’t have the money to buy food, and so we eat for them, though it never gets to their bodies. We think of all the times we’ve been told not to waste food as we grew up, and so we eat for our parents, though the fat gets stored on our bodies and not on theirs.

Starting with self-regard lets you reorient. When you feel fierce love and respect for yourself, you take actions that reflect that.

You might take an action like not eating food—even a leaf of organic lettuce—if you’re not hungry for it.

You might take an action like putting the food in the compost instead of in the trash can or, if you’re region doesn’t offer composting, exploring how you could compost on your own.

You might take an action like putting leftovers in the fridge for another time—yes, even that one leaf of organic lettuce.

You might take an action like evaluating whether there is a different way to serve food. For example, one of my clients decided not to dress her salad in the big bowl that she used to serve the family at the dinner table. Once the salad was dressed in that bowl, any leftovers were soggy and so she threw them away. But when she started to serve the dressing on the side, for each family member to add the amount that they wanted, she was able to refrigerate the leftovers instead of throwing them out.

You might take an action like exploring how much food you buy in the first place. Maybe Costco-sized portions are too much for you. Maybe you need to divide larger quantities into smaller serving containers and freeze them. Maybe you need to begin buying smaller quantities of food.

Now, the question is, what would you need to believe to feel the self-regard toward yourself that would allow you to take these and other productive actions?

Maybe you’d need to believe that you don’t help anyone—whether hungry people or those who scold you for throwing away food—by wasting it in your own body.

Hungry people need food to eat themselves. If you can manage it, maybe you could donate to a food bank. Or maybe you’d be interested in advocating for restaurants in your area to allow food banks and shelters to pick up food they won’t be able to serve customers.

People who frown when you throw food away aren’t frowning because of what you did with the food, but because they’re experiencing an emotion—perhaps that emotion is disapproval. Their emotion, whatever it is, is caused by a thought. Maybe that thought is “People shouldn’t waste food in the garbage.” They are allowed to have their thoughts and emotions and to take action from there. Likewise, you are allowed to have your own thought, like “I’m not willing to waste food in my body,” which may create emotions for you like self-regard or competence, which may then allow you to peacefully put leftovers away, or compost them, or put them in the garbage if another alternative isn’t available.

Maybe you’d need to believe that your body is not a trash can, and that you’re worth more than garbage. That it is totally appropriate for you to make your own choices as a grown adult about what you put in your mouth.

Once again, so much of this work comes down to consciousness. Consciousness about where you are on the hunger–fullness scale, about how certain foods feel in your body, and about the thoughts and emotions that drive your actions.

It’s helpful to unearth your thoughts about wasting food. This will help you to see what thoughts you’re thinking and what feelings you’re creating and how they’re driving your overeating.

What I want you to see is that overeating always a choice, no matter how old the belief that wasting food is bad is and no matter where it came from. I want you to see that old beliefs that lead you to waste food in your body aren’t working for you.

Do you believe wasting food is bad? If this discussion hasn’t touched on the reasons why you feel that wasting food is bad, try to figure out what your belief about wasting food is.

If you eat food that your body doesn’t need for fuel, you carry the waste with you on your body as fat.

Would you rather waste food in the garbage or waste it on your body?

Why?

You can drop unneeded food in your trash can with a flip-top lid, feed it to hungry worms in the earth, or place it neatly into storage to eat another time.

As always, you get to choose.

Wherever you decide to place food your body doesn’t need, here’s the check I want to you make:

Do you like your reason?

That’s it for Episode 28. Thank you for listening. The Done Bingeing Podcast is helping 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’d 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.