What do a beach ball and a tiny Speedo have to do with overeating? 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 43 of The Done Bingeing Podcast and to part 9 of this special series, 12 Keys to End Binge Eating. This episode talks about the seventh key: Reduce the Desire to Overeat.

Reducing the desire the overeat is one of the biggest pieces that’s missing from almost all approaches to stop bingeing or to lose weight. Most meal plans—even reasonable ones—are essentially about eating less food. But what if you still really want to eat the food that the program says is either too much food or not the right kind of food? Then what?

Here’s what: You’ll probably use willpower to muscle through.

The only trouble is, one day, you’ll be working out of the office, away from your predictable sources of food.

Or, one night, you’ll be trying to get some shut-eye, but can’t sleep because your partner snored all night.

Or, one afternoon, your ex will text (kind of like he did last month) that everything you’ve planned for the kids is wrong.

Where’s your willpower now? Well, if you’re like most humans, if you’re challenged or under-slept or triggered, that willpower not to eat food that you really want to eat is long gone.

At some point, you’ll get tired because willpower is about fighting against your desire for food that you’re not allowed to have.

Think of willpower like trying to hold a beach ball under water. Sooner or later, your muscles will fail or you’ll get swayed by a wave or you’ll get distracted by an itsy bitsy Speedo, and that ball will come flying up and out of the water. You know what I’m talkin’ about!

So, using willpower to fight doesn’t help—or at least, it doesn’t help for long haul. What then?

Well, what would it be like if you didn’t have to fight the desire to eat food that you’d really rather not eat because you know it makes you feel like crap or makes you gain weight? It would be a lot like walking past a dealer if you don’t do drugs. This time, you’re not fighting against your desire to eat foods or amounts of foods that don’t serve you because you no longer have the desire to do either one. So much better, yes?

Right now, you have the desire to overeat. How do you know? Because if you don’t allow yourself to overeat, you feel like you’re missing out on something or giving something up. You feel deprived. And that feels pretty awful. The binge to make that awful feeling go away is starting to make more sense now, isn’t it?

But, remember, it’s the desire to overeat that makes it painful not to overeat. If you didn’t desire overeating, overeating wouldn’t be a problem. If you didn’t want to overeat, you wouldn’t have to use willpower or have to feel deprived to stop yourself from overeating.

So, how do you get to a point where you genuinely don’t want to overeat or you genuinely don’t want to to eat foods that don’t serve you?

Let’s suppose that food right now is cream cheese icing right out of the carton. How do you get to the place where you could have the carton right in front of you without it being a problem, without feeling like you’re missing out on all the fun by not spooning it into to your mouth until it’s all gone? Without feeling deprived if you don’t eat it or needing willpower not to eat it. Without having to make someone make sure you don’t go near the carton? Without needing to adjust in any way because the icing had no power over you?

In this space, the icing isn’t a temptation or an issue for you. The icing is irrelevant. That’s the freedom that we’re after. That’s what reducing the desire to overeat is all about.

One of my clients Natalie said to me recently, “You know, the weirdest thing has been happening at work. There’s junk food at the office and I don’t care. It’s so strange. I’m not eating it and I don’t want it.” Candies and cakes that once haunted Natalie and made her feel like she was held hostage just aren’t that interesting to her anymore. And here’s how she ended that session, “Oh, and by the way, my pants are almost falling off.”

Natalie had focused on desiring less, not on eating less. Do you see the difference?

Now, it might seem like the desire to overeat just happens, like it’s just a given.

My guess is that you can relate to something like this: You’re at the grocery store and walk by the bakery aisle, smelling of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. They look good and so you buy the 12-pack, thinking that you’ll eat just one. But then there’s construction on the way home and the drive takes twice as long. You get home and look down at an empty container. Whaaaat? Wait a minute? Where did they go?

It’s almost like you’re eating behind your own back, almost like you’re eating against your own will?

But the desire to overeat doesn’t just happen. The desire to overeat isn’t just a given. Your desire is learned. And it can be unlearned.

To unlearn it, we need to understand where it comes from in the first place. The desire to overeat tends to have four main sources:

1. We use food to anaesthetize painful emotions.
2. We’re conditioned to eat by society—that’s the topic of this episode.
3. Our dopamine system gets hijacked by high-sugar foods.
4. Our hormones are out-of-whack and scrambling our hunger and fullness signals.

We’re going to be taking these one at a time in the coming episodes, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, remember, you can hold the beach ball under the water, or you can let it go and watch it drift away. The first is about fighting, the second is about freedom. You can’t be free when you’re fighting and there’s no need to fight when you’re free.

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.