I spent four and a half hours in the car yesterday, driving to a big city to pick up the new dogs my husband and I are adopting. My husband has a meeting he cannot miss, so I made the drive myself.
I love long drives because they provide lots of time to delve into a good book. For me, I decided to re-listen to a book called Brain Over Binge by Kathryn Hansen (you can find a link to the book below). It’s one I’ve read before, not because I suffered from Binge Eating Disorder, but because I thought intuitive eating was the way to go for me.
At the time, it didn’t resonate much. Her journey, which she describes in poignant, honest detail, involves bouts with binging. But I wasn’t a binger. I didn’t tend to eat huge quantities of food at a time.
My problem wasn’t how to stop bingeing, it was how to stop compulsively overeating. So I didn’t know how to implement her ideas. What do I stop? I wasn’t getting accurate information from my body about what and how much to eat. I wasn’t sure what to do with her approach. book went onto the bookshelf.
This time, though, wow. What a difference. Now that I’ve got two years of trying to do Bright Line Eating, and I know what I need to stop doing (stop eating sugar and flour and stop eating between meals), this book suddenly clicked.
She advocates the idea that in an addiction, the ancient, reptile brain (the part that controls basic bodily functions like eating) comes to see the addictive behavior as a necessary life function. When an urge hits, it’s because the body believes it has to do that thing right now or it will die.
The prefrontal cortex, however, is the part of the brain that represents your truer self. It’s the brain that knows that binging (or smoking or drinking alcohol or whatever) is not right for you. It’s the part of you that wants to recover from your addictive brain.
The reptile brain has a critical role to play in your life because it produces life-sustaining urges. If it’s sending out an urge to breathe, that’s great. But when it thinks binging (or smoking or drinking) is vital and sends out that urge to binge (or drink or smoke or whatever), that’s false information. It’s just neurological junk. Your reptile brain doesn’t know the difference. It just thinks it needs that hit as vitally as it needs a breath of oxygen.
In Brain Over Binge she learned to separate herself from the false urges. When an urge to binge arose, she just told herself it was brain junk that should be ignored.
That is what hit me so powerfully. Maybe every urge I get to eat off my BLE plan is just false information my brain is sending me. Maybe the key to staying on plan is to start ignoring those urges.
Not everything in this book fits me. She decided not to eliminate certain food groups, but I find the idea of abstaining from sugar and flour compelling. And she did not feel emotional pressures tended to trigger her binges, but in my case they really do.
Still, I’m going to try this approach, setting aside what doens’t work for me.
Every time I get an urge to have a snack between meals, to eat a little bit extra than what I planned for, to eat some crackers or bread or other flour-based food, I’m going to tell myself:
“This isn’t my real brain. This is just brain junk my animal brain is sending me. I don’t need to pay attention to it. I can just observe it and let it go.”
This is fundamentally different from what I’ve been doing for two years. My usual approach when an urge hits is to hang on for dear life. I try to white knuckle through it. I try to distract myself from the food thoughts, wait 10 minutes for the urge to subside.
Those never work. The food thoughts don’t go away. And no wonder! My reptile brain thinks it needs its food hit to survive.
But viewing urges as false junk my brain is sending me, well that means I don’t need to fight it. I just need to notice it as junk info. And let it go.
This approach now seems both transformative and exciting. So I’m going to try it for the next few days.
If you’re interested in the book, you can see more information about it here: http://a.co/d/euz34Tv
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