The Secret to Success: Rewire Your Brain to Stop Binges and Overeating
This secret won’t work for everyone. If you’re looking for a quick fix or magic solution without committing to personal growth, then you’re in the wrong place.
BUT, if you are ready to challlenge your deeply ingrained beliefs, then keep reading…
The secret? The Binge Breakthrough Formula.
The exact formula that helped Helen stop using food as an escape; it helped Emma feel happier with her “mum curves”, and it helped Bethan say “no” to food when she didn’t want it.
All three have transformed their eating habits, stopped their binges and overeating, without ever having to hide the binge foods.
In fact, it’s the exact formula I use to help all my clients stop bingeing, overeating and heal their relationship with food.
Read on to find out exactly how you can use my 3-step strategy to say goodbye to overeating and have your own binge breakthrough.
The Binge Breakthrough Formula is the secret to rewiring your brain to stop binges and overeating.
Here’s the thing.
If you’ve ever tried to “fix” your binges or overeating - which I’m sure you have - I bet you were told to banish certain foods from the house.
To empty your cupboards of chocolate, biscuits and crisps, and rid your freezer of ice-cream.
I bet you were told to throw “naughty” food away, to restrict, control and avoid.
But let me tell you, this approach makes binges and emotional eating worse.
It intensifies your cravings and fuels your desire for the exact food you've banished from your house.
Ever found yourself hiding food wrappers from your partner?
Or sneaking food in secret?
Or raiding the kids' chocolate stash?
When you try to hide food away, your body and mind actually work against you.
Especially when you haven't yet uncovered your triggers.
Or identified the underlying reasons behind your binges and overeating.
The truth is, until you dig a little deeper, you're fighting a battle that you'll inevitably lose.
That's why The Binge Breakthrough Formula is different.
Today I’m sharing 3 steps you can use to say goodbye to binges and overeating and hello to feeling cool, calm and collected around food, no longer tempted by your cravings.
The 3-Steps To Using “Binge Breakthrough Formula” to Rewire your Brain
Step 1: Uncover what’s keeping you stuck using the tornado model
Step 2: Balance your blood sugar levels and reduce your cravings using nutritional rehabilitation
Step 3: Cognitive-emotional reset
Step 1: Uncover what’s keeping you stuck using the tornado model
Many things might be going on in your life that are keeping you stuck with binges and overeating.
It’s not necessarily helpful to dig around in your past to try and uncover childhood traumas that resulted in you turning to food for comfort.
It can help for some, but sometimes it can actually make things worse.
So it’s better to focus on what’s keeping you stuck right now, because we can do something about that. We can’t change your past.
So what can we do instead?
Let’s take a look at our tornado model…
What words do you think of when you think of a tornado?
Words like powerful, destructive, damaging come to my mind. I think of something that sucks everything in its path inside itself.
The tornado is a great way of thinking about your binges and overeating. It feels like chaos, it’s overwhelming and takes over your whole life.
Now let’s look at what’s inside the tornado, the “maintaining factors” if you will. The ones that are keeping you stuck and going back (over and over again) to the binges and overeating.
These can be anything from mindset, habit, lifestyle, motivation factors, beliefs, diet chaos, appetite and metabolism, stress and emotion regulation, as illustrated in the diagram below.
And an important part of the binge breakthrough is to uncover which of these maintaining factors - the elements of the tornado - are keeping you stuck personally.
Take Becca for example. She had been dieting for over 30 years and felt wildly out of control around food.
No matter how many diets or healthy eating plans she followed, she just couldn’t control her overeating or binges.
She’d be “healthy” for 2 days and then she’d find herself surrounded by chocolate wrappers and tubs of ice-cream.
It felt like things were getting progressively worse. Not better. Even when her personal trainer put her on a calorie restricted diet, things didn’t improve.
She tried weight watchers, slimming world and Noom. None of these diet programs improved her binges or overeating.
It was only when she discovered that restricting food was making her binges worse.
In fact, research shows that people who restrict food are 12X more likely to binge. Who knew? Becca didn’t.
When we worked together using the Binge Breakthrough Formula, she started to introduce foods that were previously off limits. And along with her nutritional rehabilitation (which I cover in step 2) she made great steps to reduce all her cravings.
For her, diet chaos played a huge part in keeping her stuck.
But for Helen it was a different story. When we used the Binge Breakthrough Formula together, she learnt that habit, stress and emotion regulation were keeping her stuck.
Helen had been under enormous pressure in the previous 3 years. With a sick parent and then a sick child, she felt at her wits end trying to juggle her family, career and being Florence Nightingale.
In the evenings she turned to food for comfort. It started innocently enough. She was tired. She’d had a busy day and she decided to flop out in front of the TV. She had a family sized bag of crisps with her.
Before she knew it, she had eaten the whole bag. Then the next night she did the same, and the next night. This very quickly turned into a habit.
In working with Helen we uncovered how this habit also helped her regulate her emotions. Eating food in this way was an escape, a way to switch off and think about something else that was less stressful.
As for Tatiana, we discovered that what kept her stuck was mainly to do with her lifestyle.
Tatiana, a high powered C suite executive, was the main income earner for her family and regularly worked 16 hour days. She was constantly busy and in high demand by her team.
Using the Binge Breakthrough Formula we discovered that Tatiana never took a regular lunch break, she was always on the go, and she barely had a chance to stop and eat between meetings.
Sustenance during the day consisted of numerous cups of coffee, snack bars and the odd sandwich here and there. As a result she was ravenous when she got back from work.
Her husband - desperate to make sure she didn’t faint from exhaustion - would cook a sumptuous meal and she’d gorge on it until her stomach was distended. She would regularly overeat and after her husband went to bed, binge on the leftovers.
As you can see the tornado model is very useful in helping people uncover the things that are going on right now keeping them stuck. You can use this too…
Step 2: Balance your blood sugar levels and reduce your cravings using nutritional rehabilitation
The second step in using the Binge Breakthrough Formula relates to food and nutrition.
You might not know this, but during a binge or overeating session, because you’re very quickly eating high carb or sugary foods, this leads to spikes in blood sugar.
The rapid rise in blood sugar leads to a rapid crash, which often leads to tiredness, irritability and more cravings.
It’s the rapid rise and fall of blood sugar levels that keeps you craving sugary foods.
Frequent binges can also disrupt your hunger and fullness hormones. Here’s teh science bit: there are many hormones that help you regulate your appetite, two of the main ones are leptin and ghrelin.
Leptin makes you feel full and satisfied after a meal and ghrelin makes you feel hungry.
However, when you binge your hormones go a little haywire. Leptin becomes less sensitive (so you have to eat MORE to feel full) and ghrelin goes into overdrive so you feel more hunger.
This means that you feel hungrier for more food, even when your body might not need it.
The good news is that we can fix both of these, but it requires some commitment to structure. Nutrition rehabilitation can provide this structure and includes several elements that work together.
First you must ensure you are having regular meals and snacks. As we discovered earlier, skipping meals or getting overly hungry can make cravings and binges worse. So best to make sure you are eating regularly.
For some this means 3 meals and 2 snacks a day, for others it’s just 3 meals, or somewhere in between. This helps to stabilise your blood sugar levels.
You’ll also be less hungry between meals, which minimises the risk of binges caused by extreme hunger.
The second is about balanced nutrition. I highly recommend ensuring that you have some protein for every meal and snack. Protein helps you feel full, and also helps to balance your blood sugar so is fantastic in reducing binges.
I also recommend eating a variety of foods throughout the week. Ideally each meal should have protein, complex carbs, fats, vegetables, and fruits.
Rather than trying to cut out your “binge foods”, I encourage you to focus on adding new foods into your diet rather than cutting foods out.
When you restrict, it makes the temptations worse. So during your nutritional rehabilitation the idea is to widen the foods that you are eating overall.
The third element to focus on is mindful eating. I recommend taking the time to slow down, appreciate and savour your food. Enjoy the colours, the smells and the taste sensation.
By slowing down, you are better able to tune into your fullness cues. If you listen for fullness to emerge, and acknowledge it, then you are less likely to overeat.
This is also a fantastic strategy if you are tempted to binge. I highly recommend plating up the binge food and sitting down to savour it.
So let’s imagine that a certain type of chocolate is traditionally a binge food, and let’s imagine one night you are tempted to binge on it. Rather than trying to deny yourself, aim to eat it mindfully.
Put the chocolate on a plate. Sit down. Smell the chocolate. Enjoy and savour the smell. Then take a small bite and slowly suck or chew the chocolate. Do this very slowly and appreciate the flavour and texture.
Try and eat it as slowly as possible, allowing yourself the enjoyment of eating the food…
Yes this is hard to do initially, but with practice, I promise you’ll get to the point that after 2, 4 or 6 squares, you are done and you’ll put a half eaten packet back into the cupboard.
Need an experienced psychologist and nutrition coach to support your nutritional rehabilitation?
Step 3: Cognitive-emotional reset
One of the reasons why people binge or over eat is to do with emotions.
An emotion is basically how the brain “feels”.... We experience a trigger, the brain makes meaning of that trigger, and this results in an emotion.
We cannot not feel. The simple ups and downs of life will create emotions - both negative and positive.
And one way that a lot of people cope with emotions is by using food.
Food is used as a way to self-soothe, we eat for comfort, we eat when we’re sad and when we’re happy.
It’s not necessarily about physical hunger.
Now before I talk about the cognitive-emotional reset, it’s important to understand that eating by its very nature is laden with emotions.
We eat to celebrate, so show our love and to comfort and reward ourselves.
If you sometimes use food as a self-soothing tool, then that’s OK. We’re not here to completely eradicate comfort eating.
However, when using the Binge Breakthrough Formula we want to give you other ways to deal with your emotions.
To create the breakthrough that you’re after we need to find different ways to cope that don’t involve food.
One reason why people often find themselves stuck in a negative cycle with food is because they haven’t learnt how to deal with emotions.
And sometimes these negative emotions also trigger a deeper negative core belief about themselves.
Let’s imagine you have a rubbish day at work. You end up having a pointless argument with a co-worker and you come home feeling annoyed and frustrated.
These feelings trigger deeper negative beliefs like “I’m totally useless”, “nobody likes me, I’m unlikeable”.
So you try to cope with the negative beliefs by stuffing down food.
We’re not consciously aware that we are doing this. It all happens within your subconscious.
It’s just that one time you turned to food and it helped you cope with those bad feelings, so you do it again and again, without really knowing why you do it.
That’s why people can so easily get “stuck” in a negative cycle with food.
And that’s why it can feel so hard to stop binges and emotional eating.
Subconsciously you are using this habit as a coping mechanism. And food stops you from fully feeling those deeper and darker negative emotions.
So in this step - the cognitive-emotional reset - it’s about helping you to manage your emotions without having to turn to binges and emotional eating.
Here are the phases to go through for the reset.
#1 Permission to feel
Were you given permission to feel your feelings? If not, now is the time to start feeling your feelings.
This can feel a little strange at first, especially if you’ve been used to squashing down or hiding your feelings.
But in this first phase the idea is to experience your emotions.
If this means going into a room by yourself to cry, or feel the anger, sadness, or even the joy, then do so.
I encourage you to give yourself permission to feel your emotions - without shame.
#2 To know what you feel
To know what you feel may take some time so please be gentle with yourself during this phase.
It can be helpful to start writing a list of the things that make you feel a certain way, like this:
I feel happy when the sun shines
I feel annoyed when a driver cuts me up
I feel upset when my boss ignores me at work
I feel frustrated when my friend doesn’t reply to my text
I feel joyful when I go on holiday
And so on…
In this phase it’s important to start talking about your feelings and being more aware of your feelings.
A good way of expanding your conscious awareness of emotions is to play games where you name different emotions - you can do this with friends or family, or even just yourself.
For example, take an emotion like “joy” and then try to name other similar emotions. I’ve come up with: happiness, pleasure, amusement, excitement.
Or “fear”, I thought of: worry, nervous, scared, anxious and stressed.
The more emotions you can name the better. So now when you feel a certain feeling, try and label it with different names.
Like so: today I feel joyful, happy, pleased, amused and excited.
In this phase you are also developing an awareness of where the emotions show up in your body.
Here’s an interesting article (not written by me!) that talks about how emotions are felt in the body. The article contains a useful infographic to depict this. I recommend having a look and even downloading the picture so you can use it yourself.
Start to pay attention to where in your body you feel the emotions.
#3 Manage feelings (without using food)
Now, you might have spent years soothing yourself using food, and that’s OK. In this part of the cognitive-emotional reset we are helping you manage your emotions without using food.
There are several strategies you can try during this phase and here are just a few of them you can try.
Make a list of things you could do to help you cope with your emotions.
These should be things you enjoy and that nurture you. Do you like going for walks in the park? Being outside in nature? Doing stretches? Speaking to a friend? Watching funny videos that make you laugh?
Write down exactly what you will do for each emotion.
For example ”When I’m sad, I will watch 5 funny videos”
“When I’m angry, I will do some deep breathing and go for a walk around the block”
“When I’m disappointed, I will write my feelings in my journal”
When you feel tempted to use food as an emotional coping mechanism, try some of the options on the list instead.
Use “cognitive defusion”
Cognitive defusion is a technique that helps you deal with unhelpful thoughts.
Cognitive defusion is like hitting the pause button on a movie and taking a closer look at those unhelpful thoughts.
Instead of getting tangled up in your thoughts, you learn to watch them from a distance as if you are an observer.
When you are able to do this, the thoughts become just words and don’t have any control over you.
This is how to use cognitive defusion.
Notice your thoughts.
Notice your thoughts and then say to yourself: “I notice that I am thinking <insert what you are thinking, e.g. I’m not good enough>”
Pause and observe
Imagine you are watching these thoughts as if you are watching a movie. Then say out loud: “I accept this thought, at this moment”
Create Space
Instead of getting caught up in the thoughts, watch these thoughts from a distance and say out loud: “Thank you mind”
Breath out the negative feelings
Let the thoughts come and go without judging yourself. Thoughts are just words in your head and you don’t have to believe them.
Take a deep breath out and breathe out the negative feelings.
Choose your next steps
Remember that you decide how to respond. Even if your thoughts aren’t kind, you can still choose actions that are helpful and kind.
Change your self talk
You might have heard of “positive affirmations”. In my experience and practice, they can be very useful. However, for many people when you are first starting out on your cognitive-emotional reset, it’s quite hard to start saying things like “I love myself” when you don’t feel that way at all.
So a good way to start changing your self-talk is to start talking about the negative stuff as if it’s in the past.
So let’s imagine you find it hard to stand up for yourself, rather than saying “I find it so hard to stand up for myself” you can say instead:
I used to find it hard to stand up for myself
Instead of saying “I always eat Ben & Jerry’s when I feel sad” you can say:
I used to eat Ben and Jerry’s when I felt sad
And so on… this is a great way for your brain to start working towards more positive sentiments about yourself.
Now You Try It
Like I said at the beginning, the Binge Breakthrough formula won’t work for everyone.
But it DOES work for those who are ready to challenge their beliefs and work on a new mindset. And if you are still reading, then I bet you are one of them.
Sure, there are trial and error ways to “fix” your binges and your overeating, and yes sometimes they might work.
But they don’t last forever. What the Binge Breakthrough Formula offers you is a solution that lasts for life.
Something that rewires your brain so that you will never resort to binges and overeating again.
The rewiring happens after you have
identified specifically what is holding you back using the tornado model;
been through nutritional rehabilitation to balance your blood sugar levels so that the desire to binge is no longer there, and
done a cognitive-emotional reset that you no longer seek food for comfort.
With the Binge Breakthrough Formula you can finally say goodbye to binges and overeating without having to resort to restriction or hiding your binge foods away.
And you will have a solution that lasts a lifetime.
Ready for your own Binge Breakthrough?
The fastest way to say goodbye to your binges & over-eating is to join Dr. Lara’s Binges to Balance Academy (membership). It’s low cost and you can experience a complete transformation. Find out all the details here.