"Greg called and said he was running late, so I was left alone to eat. After I finished a normal-sized meal and some dessert, I began hearing a few enticing thoughts encouraging me to continue eating. What happened then was truly surprising. I heard all the familiar reasons I should binge, and I felt the craving, but I told myself those thoughts and feelings were not my own. I told myself the habitual urge was coming from an irrational and primitive art of my brain that mistakenly sensed that I needed to binge to survive.
I told myself that I was completely separate from the part of my brain that generated these cravings, and I reminded myself that I had complete control. I pictured myself standing outside my own brain looking in, listening to those thoughts as if they were distant from my own, and knowing that the urge had absolutely no power to make me act. I reminded myself that I -- my higher brain, my human brain -- was the only one who could walk to the refrigerator and begin to binge. And I had chosen not to.
It felt strange to form a divide between me and my urges to binge, but it also felt empowering. As I experienced my urges from the standpoint of a detached observer of my brain, it became immediately apparent that I didn't have to make them go away. I didn't have to try to talk myself out of my thoughts or feelings; I didn't have to reason with them or fight them; I didn't have to futilely attempt to distract myself; I didn't have to figure out what triggered my urge; and I didn't have to determine what emotional need my urge symbolized. Observing my brain in this way allowed me to see that my urges to binge symbolized nothing. They were not laden with deep emotional significance or hidden meaning. They were simply automatic functions of my brain, expressing an appetite for binge eating--an appetite I'd been feeding for far too long.
That night, I decided not to feed the urge, and a remarkable thing happened: the urge just went away. I remained detached from the thoughts, and they simply subsided on their own. I didn't get caught up in my feelings, and they died down. I'm not saying it was completely effortless, but it was certainly not the painful struggle that resisting binges had been before this night. The urge was present for only about an hour at most, which was a major improvement. Furthermore, the hour wasn't distressing. It was actually quite interesting to observe the thoughts and feelings that had gotten the better of me for so long."
"The definition of BED is basically the same as bulimia, minus the purging:
Binge Eating Disorder (BED) ... is characterized by recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food (often very quickly and to the point of discomfort); a feeling of a loss of control during the binge; experiencing shame, distress or guilt afterwards; and not regularly using unhealthy compensatory measures (e.g., purging) to counter the binge eating."
"Stopping my binge eating was not simply treating the symptom of a deeper problem or disease. Binge eating was the problem."
"Over time, I've come to realize that the fullness of life includes the good and the bad, and there is no need to constantly strive for an ideal version of myself. Of course, everyone wants things like increased happiness and better self-esteem, but learning to accept all of life is a path that leads to more peace. Maybe I was misinterpreting what therapy asked of me, but knowing what I know now, it was completely unrealistic to try to achieve so much in order to stop binge eating -- especially when it's not even necessary to achieve those same things to have a fulfilling human experience."
Excerpts from Brain Over Binge
By: Kathryn Hansen
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