What do bison and summer camp 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 there! Welcome to my latest episode of The Done Bingeing Podcast! 

Every time I promised myself I’d quit bingeing, my first instinct was to trade carrot cake for carrot sticks and run so hard I’d practically slide off the treadmill. 

But no matter how dedicated I was to so-called “clean eating” and marathon gym sessions, the binges always came back. 

Here’s what I missed back then: 

There are key things you can do—things that have nothing to do with counting carbs or surviving bootcamp—things that can markedly shift bingeing.  

Paying attention to these strategies can help in a couple of ways: 

First, they can ease the tension in the perpetual standoff between the part of you that desperately wants to stop the bingeing and the part of you that just can’t stop bingeing just yet.  

Here’s what happened anytime I tried to shore up the troops on the Stop Bingeing side: the retaliation of the Keep Bingeing side came back with a vengeance so relentless that it razed the Stop Bingeing side to the ground—or it lay in wait, haunting my days, stalking my nights, until it found its moment to attack. 

A day finally came when I learned how to foster peace and harmony between these warring factions. But until then, it was an exhausting deadlock.  

Maybe you can relate.  

For me, these strategies I’ll be sharing with you offered a welcome reprieve from the fighting. 

The second thing that non-food-and-workout-related strategies can offer is the space to notice the powerful effects other factors have on eating and the desire to be active.  

How’s that for a mind warp?! 

It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true. Focusing away from restricting and working out often yields a desire to eat and move in ways that serve us—body, mind, and soul. 

Taken together, these strategies lay a critical foundation for healing. 

I’ve already talked about one of these strategies in Episode 79: Hydration Hacks for Healing Binge Eating.  

In all, there will be 10 tips in total. 

And because we all love a bonus, I’m whipping up a free, handy-dandy checklist just for you, for when we’re done going through all of them. It’s called 10 Quick Wins to Heal Binge Eating—Before Ever Focusing on Food. You’ll be able to keep it close, so it’s ready whenever you need a quick reminder.  

Here are the 10 strategies at a glance: 

1. Understand how your bingeing make sense
2. Treat yourself with respect
3. Get enough sleep
4. Move in ways you love
5. Ensure adequate hydration
6. Address a stressor
7. Have some fun
8. Dip into a feeling
9. Be real
10. Give yourself time

In upcoming episodes, we’ll be going through the rest of the list. 

In this episode, we’re focusing on the power of understanding how your bingeing makes sense.  

This one might surprise you, so please bear with me if you will. 

For decades, I have hiked in the Canadian Rockies. I used to think the trails were established by park rangers or mountain explorers. 

I was wrong. 

Many of the paths had been broken by animals—the buffalo, the bison, deer and elk—foraging before. 

Instinctively they found the safest, most efficient routes through the terrain. Over time, humans followed the wisdom of the animals, the ones who knew the wilderness and the way. 

So often, in my desperate search for how to stop binge eating, professionals would tell me the way to go. 

I needed to: 

• eat more food—that idea went over really well 

• stop talking about wanting to lose weight (at a hundred pounds overweight, that was another big hit) and 

• just start loving my body—that was an ideal I absolutely espoused to, but I just couldn’t reach it back then 

I also needed to think differently (I have a mile-high stack of thought records testifying to my efforts). 

I needed to distract myself (I still have some of my old crossword books) and I needed to surf my urges (but, to be honest, I just screamed inside as they surged toward me, then drowned as they flooded me). 

Then there was the talking about my childhood for years and years. When those years turned into decades, I left. 

It’s not that these ideas were necessarily wrong. Some of these ideas helped me some of the time. 

But what they did not do was this— 

This did not honor the path of the part of me that binged, the one that knew the way to the reasons why—and could take us there, if only we asked with humility.​​​​​​ 

My bingeing part had been waiting at the trailhead all that time, waiting for the day that someone would come without the answers. 

​​​​​​​Dr. Richard Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems, introduced the IFS concept of the “trailhead”—a signal that a part of us need attention. 

My bingeing was a signal, a beacon that beckoned me to follow, to trace the well-worn track from bingeing to pain, then across the brook to the cave of shame. 

For me, that’s where the healing needed to happen. 

Thirty failed years of trying to get help for my bingeing left me feeling broken and flawed. 

But I wasn’t broken, and neither are you. 

My bingeing actually made sense if I could only open my heart enough to listen. 

I totally get that this idea can feel like a huge stretch, but I wonder if you’re open to considering that your bingeing must make some kind of sense on some kind of level, or you wouldn’t be doing it despite your earnest efforts to stop. 

Even after I’d stopped binge eating, I was still trying to figure out why this eating pattern had been so hard to end. It was listeners of this podcast who kept telling me to check out Schwartz’ work.  

That’s where I learned about an experience Dick had that changed everything in his career and life. 

As a family therapist, he was, at the time, working primarily with families in which a member was bulimic. (Just a note that bulimia is characterized by binge eating combined with attempts to try to compensate for the bingeing with intentional vomiting, use of laxatives, or excessive exercise [Herpetz et al., 2011].) 

Dick had been trained to believe that if you addressed unhealthy dynamics in the family, the bulimia would resolve on its own. But he tested this theory with an outcome study, and found that his clients kept bingeing and purging anyway. 

Then he did something radical—he did not make his clients wrong. 

Instead, he asked them why they kept doing this. 

They often answered like this: “A part of me really wants to stop. But another part completely takes over and makes me binge. It feels like I have no control.”  

That was the moment Dick began to explore the idea of people having different parts with different motivations and actions. He didn’t use what he learned to pathologize his clients, but to better understand them and help them heal. 

His work has revealed that binge eating isn’t about any kind of flaw. It’s not about a lack of commitment, character, or willpower.  

It was parts—protective, loving, deeply human parts—that were trying to ease pain and ensure a person’s safety, the best way they knew how. 

My guess is that you’ve felt a similar tug-of-war to the one shared by Dick’s clients: one part of you saying, “I’m all in, let’s deal with this bingeing,” and another part saying, “I can’t stop doing this—it helps, even if just for a moment.”  

Both sides are trying to help you in some way. Both make sense. 

Dick discovered that when we separate the intention to protect that’s behind the bingeing, from the consequences of the bingeing, we can finally start to appreciate our behavior.  

Binge eating isn’t a problem to squash; it’s a signal to explore.  

It’s your part at the trailhead, waving and saying, “Hey, something here hurts. I need help.” And Internal Family Systems can offer that help. 

If you’re curious to know more, I’d be happy to have a free consultation with you. Just go to holdingthespace.as.me/free30. That’s holdingthespace.as.me/free30. I promise, there’s no salesy ick factor, just tenderness and understanding. 

Here’s why appreciating that your bingeing make sense is a such a win: The moment you recognize bingeing as a loving, protective act from a part of you that’s trying so hard to help, it creates more space inside for curiosity and compassion, where there may have been mostly tension and criticism. And this powerful spaciousness can markedly change the choices we make around food. 

When I was bingeing, many well-meaning people, including therapists and health care professionals, would remind me that I didn’t need to eat a whole birthday cake—that was my favorite binge, bonus points if there was a tub of icing on the side. They’d list all the reasons why bingeing wasn’t a great choice, like cavities, weight gain, fatigue . . . premature death.  

Believe me, I definitely got the picture.  

And, they weren’t wrong. I knew that eating entire cakes wasn’t exactly on the Recommended Daily Values list. But here’s what none of us fully grasped back then: logic rarely touches the deeper reasons why we binge. 

Don’t get me wrong: Logic can be a great ally in planning and creating a supportive environment around food. But if all of that managerial-type futzing ignores the pain behind the bingeing, all that logic does is set up yet another tug-of-war.  

At summer camp, tug-of-war was a blast. But this one, isn’t much fun. 

Year after year of seeking professional help for my bingeing, it felt like I was literally given a rope with a blue flag on one side for my parts shouting, “Bingeing makes no sense! Make it stop!”  

No one seemed to notice that that just inflamed my parts that clung to the bingeing to survive.  

What did they do? They picked up the other side of the rope with the red flag and pulled as they screamed, “But we have to survive somehow. No one else in here knows how to deal with this kind of pain.”  

When I could see the impossible situation my parts had been in for so long, my heart opened, and that was a beautiful thing. It became possible for me to move beyond only hate for the part of me that binged. 

Compassion isn’t just a feel-good sentiment—it’s an essential precursor to understanding why we’re bingeing in the first place. As the spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas (2008) says, it is only in the presence of compassion that we can see the truth of who we really are.  

Being able to be with the truth of our experience gives us the clarity we need for our next steps. 

Maybe you don’t fully believe this. That would make sense to me.  

But perhaps you’re open to gently allowing yourself to consider that maybe, just maybe, your bingeing has a loving intention behind it. That it’s not a sign of lack, but a strategy that’s tried to help you cope. 

If you’re open to this, you’ll find that when your parts begin to feel understood, the road toward healing becomes easier. 

If you’re interested in exploring further, I have a worksheet just for you called, Getting to Know the Part of You that Binge Eats. You can find it at: https://www.holdingthespace.co/getting-to-know. 

So, my friend, if it feels right for you, start here: Your bingeing makes sense.  

That compassion has the power to light the way, past the trailhead, and down the path that was laid by the parts who know which way to go. 

That’s it for Episode 80. Thank you for listening! Remember, if you’re curious to know more about how IFS can help you heal your bingeing, I’d be happy to have a free consultation with you. Just go to holdingthespace.as.me/free30. That’s holdingthespace.as.me/free30. 

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. 

 

References 

Almaas, A. H. (2008). The unfolding now: Realizing your true nature through the practice of presence. Shambhala Publications. 

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: Author. 

Herpetz, S., Hagenah, U., Vocks, S., von Wietersheim, J., Cuntz, U., Zeeck, A., et al. (2011). The diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders. Deutsches Arzteblatt International, 108(40), 678–685. doi:10.3238.arztebl.2011.0678 

Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No bad parts: Healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the Internal Family Systems model. Sounds True.