Have you ever felt like you’ve done so much work learning about binge eating, you’ve ingested all the material there possibly is to ingest, but when it comes down to it – the moment of a binge renders it useless?
This was one of the most frustrating and hopeless feelings I felt. I spent decades reading books and garnering knowledge (and it made sense! When I read it, it felt so true!) but nothing touched the behaviors.
It makes you feel broken. What more can be done, if you’ve done it all?
I’d like to offer two reasons that this happens in today’s email, based on what I’ve learned retrospectively. Please note that these are not the only two reasons available, but they’re big ones.
Reason #1: Biological Hierachy.
You’re not wrong when you resonate with recovery information – there is a world in which these concepts do make sense for you, where you can absolutely use them productively. But if the foundation of our biological safety is still unaddressed, it’s like standing in front of a crevasse and having no bridge upon which to cross. Just because you can see it doesn’t mean you can access it. You need the bridge.
The “bridge” is biological safety, and this resides in healing physical and mental restriction. When your body understands food as scarce (either because it is actually restricted or because our minds are threatening to restrict it -- aka go on a diet), the primal brain takes over to GO GET THE DAMN FOOD.
It doesn’t matter how many emotional coping skills you have, how many delay tactics you use, or how much you remind yourself that you cognitively don’t want to binge. Your body offloads responsibility to the SURVIVAL part of your brain, and that part of your brain is an entirely different system. In the same way that you cannot logic your way out of needing to go to the bathroom, you cannot logic your way out of the desire to eat. These are basic building blocks of survival and we are wired to pursue them.
This is why binge recovery is so focused on healing our restriction patterns – they are literally the foundation upon which everything else becomes accessible. Until the body understands that food is abundant, it will not be able to recruit higher brain thinking.
Reason #2: The Nervous System.
If you are someone who deals with anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, and/or a history of T/trauma, your nervous system may be dysregulated.
A dysregulated nervous system is more sensitive to being thrown into a sympathetic state, otherwise known as fight or flight. In this state, you may notice that you feel perpetually on guard, or easily activated, defensive, impatient, fearful, irritable. Sometimes, we live primarily in this state, as opposed to our calm, regulated, productive parasympathetic state. You may not even recognize that you are operating in fight-or-flight because your system is so used to it and it feels “normal.” (You may, in fact, believe that you are the one who is abnormal because you “can’t handle the littlest things”.)
When we binge, we are typically in fight or flight. It is rare to be inside of a binge state and feel calm and peaceful. When we are in fight or flight, we are once again operating from our primal brain rather than our higher brain (which houses things like logic, reason, and compassion).
Here’s the thing: all those techniques and concepts that make so much sense when you learn about them are actually housed in the higher brain.
So when you are thown into a fight-or-flight binge state, you literally don’t have as much access to the parts of your brain where things make sense. You’re operating from instinct. That instinct may be triggered by feelings of food scarcity (see Reason #1) OR feelings of being unsafe and under threat due to some kind of trigger.
So – what can you do?
The first thing we have control over is our restriction. By addressing physical and mental restriction, we can significantly impact the sensitivity of our nervous system to send things into primal.
The second thing we have control over is the regulation of our nervous system. There are new fields of treatment that address this specifically, called somatic healing. As an occupational therapist, I am trained in some of these techniques as they are often used for children with dysregulated systems. I am also in the process of training in this area so I can better help my clients. You can also look for therapists trained in Somatic Experiencing or Polyvagal Theory to learn more about this.
