Hey, it’s Katy and welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body.

The month of July was ROUGH at my house. We had the stomach flu, migraines, COVID…It seemed like someone was always sick (knock on wood, I didn’t catch any of it, so my job was to take care of the sick people, sanitize the crap out of our house, and try to keep whichever kid or kids were healthy occupied so that the sick people could rest). 

For those of you who are parents, you know what it’s like when you have kids and people in the house are sick – it’s like you’re treading water in the deep end of the pool and someone throws you a cinder block to hold onto and expects you to keep your head afloat. It’s exhausting.

By the end of the day, once I got everyone settled in bed, all I wanted to do was have a bit of time to myself and watch a show, or read my book (I’ve been on an Ann Rule kick lately – so if you’re an Ann Rule fan, DM me with your favorite Ann Rule book). 

One particularly challenging afternoon I remember thinking to myself, “I can’t wait to get into bed tonight, turn on the TV, and eat some ice cream.” It was that thing where I didn’t even know if I was going to be hungry 6 hours from now, but by golly I was planning on eating ice cream. 

What did that ice cream represent? It represented the joy that I was needing. It represented comfort. It represented something that felt good to me, which was in such stark contrast to all the things that felt bad earlier that day.

It wasn’t the ice cream I was needing per se. It was about my need to feel good, to have something to look forward to, to have excitement and pleasure in my life. 

Did I eat the ice cream that night? Yes. 

Was it emotional eating? Yes.

Did I still listen to my body? Also, yes. 

I got my bowl of ice cream – they’re these bowls that are probably at least 40 years old that came from my grandma’s house, and they’re insulated so the outside of the bowl doesn’t get that condensation on it. They’re the family ice cream bowls and they’re iconic. When my grandma passed this was one of those super nostalgic things that I wanted from her house, because birthdays were a big deal in our family, and there was this cluster of birthdays in March and April, so we’d get together with my aunts, uncles and cousins and we’d have this big family birthday party, and grandma would make cake, pie and she’d serve it with ice cream in these bowls. I have such fond memories of these bowls.

It’s no wonder that I associate ice cream with joy and happiness, right?

So I got my bowl of ice cream. I’ve been really into this ice cream that is chocolate and it has 2 different kinds of cookie chunks in it. It’s SO GOOD. So I got my bowl of ice cream, I turned on some reality TV, and I let myself have that pleasure without shaming myself for it. 

Now, what would NOT have been pleasurable is if I had binged on the ice cream. If I had eaten myself to the point of sickness on the ice cream. 

So often we do that, and we tell ourselves how much we’re enjoying the food, but if we pause to ask ourselves if it’s REALLY enjoyable to eat to the point of feeling stuffed and miserable, then no it doesn’t actually feel good.

And if you find yourself binging on ice cream (or any other food) at night, and that this is basically the only thing you have to look forward to in your life, then (I say this lovingly, because I care about you), we need to talk. 

If food is the only thing that brings you joy, and if binging every night is your MO at the end of the day, and you’re feeling stuck, frustrated, ashamed, and worried that things will never get better – I’ve got you. You’re in the right place, and we’re going to dig into all of it here in this episode. 

Before we dive into our main topic for today, you know what time it is…We’ve got some Wellness Woo to talk about. 

Wellness Woo is the stuff that diet and wellness culture tells us we should do in the name of health, but it’s really based on pseudoscience, exaggerated claims, or just nonsense. 

Today’s Wellness Woo is: Euphemisms like “play food” and “sometimes food”

• A lot of people who are embracing the IE approach understand why it’s not helpful to label foods as good/bad. (Talk about why…)
• So instead they’ll categorize food as play food, or sometimes food, thinking that this is a better way to think of food for themselves, and I see this a lot with parents trying to teach their kids about food and nutrition. 
• There are different takes on this from various dietitians in the IE space, so you might hear some of them teaching it like this, but I don’t. And here’s why:
  • It’s still a way of categorizing and labeling the food
  • It has an innuendo that still gives good/bad food vibes
  • To me it’s just a euphemism that basically means the same thing
• People often ask, “Well then how do we categorize food instead?”
  • My first question would be, why do you need to? 
  • We can just call the food what it is – a cookie is a cookie, cheese is cheese, broccoli is broccoli. If you wanted to get a little more specific, you could say cheese is dairy, broccoli is a vegetable, cookie is a grain. 
• What is your fear of NOT labeling food? 
• Different foods have a different meaning for people, and different things support a person’s needs.
  • Someone who is recovering from a lifetime of dieting might need to be eating french fries in order to heal their relationship with food, and that is a healthy choice for them. 
  • For someone else, a healthy choice might mean eating more vegetables to get more fiber because they’re hardly eating any
  • Another person might be going way overboard with vegetables and have orthorexia and need to cut back. 
  • You see, we can’t make these sweeping declarations about food because each person has unique needs, and the labeling – even with things like “sometimes/play” food creates a hierarchy and judgments about the food. 

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you want to share, send it to me at rebuildingtrustwithyourbody@gmail.com. 

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…looking forward to things in your life besides food

If your main source of joy in life is food, then there’s a bigger picture problem happening here (and I can promise you it isn’t because you’re “addicted” to food)

If all throughout the day you are thinking ahead to what you’re going to eat at dinner and the ice cream you’re going to binge on before bed, then that’s telling us something really important, and we want to pay attention to it. 

Here’s what it’s NOT telling us:

• That you need to meal prep all your meals and snacks so that you can stay in control with food
• That you shouldn’t eat past 8pm
• That you have no willpower
• That you’re addicted to food or sugar
• That you’re some pathetic loser who is just obsessed with food

It’s telling us that you aren’t getting your needs met in your life outside of food.

Did you catch that? It’s telling us you aren’t getting your needs met in your life outside of food.

Beyond looking forward to food, you deserve to also look forward to things like hobbies, your relationships with other people, social gatherings, vacations, your pets, projects you’re working on, your job, your family, time to play and do things for leisure, time to rest and recharge, things that pique your curiosity.

There is so much more to life outside of food. And when our life and our enjoyment centers around food, that means that food is taking up too much space in our life. 

Now, don’t get me wrong – it’s not bad to enjoy food or to look forward to food. It’s normal and wonderful to enjoy food. 

However, we want to put food in its proper place in your life. It’s one source of enjoyment, but not your ONLY source of enjoyment. 

What’s Your Total Conscious Time (TCT)?

Here’s an interesting way to think about this. It’s called Total Conscious Time, or TCT, and this is something that we look at inside my signature program, Non-Diet Academy, so you’re getting a little sneak peek behind the curtain here. Total Conscious Time is the amount of time on an average day that you are spending thinking about food, weight, your body, exercise, or anything that falls under that umbrella for you. 

What would be considered normal (clinically speaking) is a TCT of about 15-20%. We wouldn’t want it to be 0%, because you have to think about food to a certain extent in order to remember to eat, to cook, to get groceries. And same with exercise, you have to think about what you’re going to do, when you’re going to do it, packing your bag for gym, changing into your workout clothes. So we wouldn’t want to never think about these things. But they also shouldn’t take up an excessive amount of time and space in our thoughts. 

The tricky thing with TCT is that the average person in our society is walking around with an elevated TCT. So what looks “normal” because it’s so common isn’t actually normal in a clinical sense – what would be considered psychologically normal.

So I want you to ballpark for yourself, what percentage of your thoughts on a given day are about food, weight, your body, exercise, or anything else related to these things? If it’s too hard to think in percentages, rate it on a scale of 1-10 and that will give you an approximate percent. The accuracy and precision here isn’t that important. We just want to get a sense of how often are you thinking about food in particular for this discussion. 

This would include thinking about what you ate earlier, or what you ate yesterday, awareness of calories or macros, any type of food tracking that you’re doing, thinking about what you want to eat later, thinking about what you’re going to allow yourself to eat later, thinking about what you wish you could eat but can’t, or what you’re going to have at a party next weekend, or the thing that the cafeteria at work is serving for lunch. 

Interestingly, a lot of people have food on their mind the vast majority of their day, even if they’re also thinking about plenty of other things. I have worked with a LOT of clients who are very high functioning in their jobs, or in school, or in their tasks at home or with their kids, so they’re focusing on these things throughout the day AND food is always background noise in their mind 24/7. 

So, like I said 15-20% is normal, and what we’re going to try and get you to over time. This is one of the things we are working towards inside Non-Diet Academy. Simply being on a diet, or being stuck in the diet mentality (even if you’re not on a diet per se) will usually bump the TCT up to about 40-60% (which is why I mentioned earlier that it’s pretty much the norm that people in our society are walking around with an elevated TCT because a huge percentage of people are either dieting or have the diet mentality going on – diet culture is EVERYWHERE). When we get up into that upper quadrant of 75-100% that’s usually a good indicator that a person might be struggling with disordered eating or an eating disorder. This might be eye opening for you. 

I don’t want you to panic or freak out if you’re realizing just how high your TCT is. It’s just data, and it’s telling us something. If your TCT is higher than 15-20%, then we want to work on putting food into its proper place in your life and opening up space for other things. 

(As a quick side note, it’s pretty normal for TCT to remain elevated during the early stages of the process of intuitive eating and healing your relationship with food, because you are having to think more consciously about food and checking in with your body. This is a really conscious process for a while, and over time you won’t have to think as much about it. I always tell my clients that before we can bring that TCT down, we must first rewire the content of the thoughts before we decrease them.)

How to Decrease Food Obsession

The first thing that we need to look at is whether or not you’re eating enough in general. That’s why inside NDA after we’ve assessed where you’re at, and we’ve looked at your TCT, the next thing we do is set up an intentional pattern of eating to make sure your body is adequately fueled with satisfying food all throughout the day. So I teach my clients how to do set up an eating schedule that’s ideal for their bodies, and how to strategically pair foods together for pleasure + satiety, and to make sure that they are biologically fueled throughout the day – because if you’re not, then your brain is going to be more preoccupied with food. (If you’re not eating enough, your brain is going to think about food more in an attempt to get you to eat enough.)

I know you might be listening to this thinking, “Katy, the issue is definitely NOT that I’m not eating enough. I’m eating too much!”

I hear you. And that might be true when it’s all said and done if you’re binging at the end of the day – HOWEVER, not eating enough in the earlier parts of the day is often part of why someone is overeating or binging later in the day. And it becomes a vicious cycle, because if you binged on ice cream before bed then you might not feel hungry the next morning for breakfast, or you might be feeling guilty so you tell yourself not to eat breakfast because you don’t need those calories, and it keeps the cycle going. 

So the first thing we do to decrease food obsession is make sure you’re eating ENOUGH. And then we look at WHAT you’re eating and whether you’re getting in a good combo of carbs, proteins and fats, as well as any mental restriction that might be going on. This is where making peace with food and doing the mindset work to literally think differently about food is absolutely essential. 

To get a feel for what’s driving and contributing to your binges, I have a worksheet that you can download for free. It’s going to help you uncover your triggers, the variables that are playing into your binges, and steps to take to break out of this cycle. Push pause and grab it right now. It’s at nondietacademy.com/bingecycle. It will be waiting in your inbox when we get done with the episode.

The worksheet is going to help you discover past experiences that are playing into your binges, the unhelpful thoughts and beliefs that are keeping you stuck, your triggers for eating, and ways to cope. Again it’s at nondietacademy.com/bingecycle and I’ve linked to it in the show notes for you. 

Beyond the Food

Next, we need to look at what’s going on outside of food. I was talking with a client the other day, she’s actually one of my previous NDA students, and she was telling me how she doesn’t really binge anymore, and food isn’t the center of her world any longer. There was part of her felt really proud about this and excited, but another part of her that felt a little lost and empty because she didn’t know what to fill that space with in her life. Food used to be the main thing she looked forward to each and every day. She couldn’t wait to get home from work and basically eat all evening. So we talked about ways she can connect with other things that she values, and spend more time and energy on those things now that food has been put into its proper place in her life. Food is still important to her, and she still enjoys it. But it’s no longer the most important thing to her.

If food is all you look forward to, then we need to cultivate some other things in your life to look forward to. For help with this, we are going to turn to Dan Siegel, a neuroscientist. (He’s written several popular books you might be familiar with, including Mindsight, The Whole Brained Child and No Drama Discipline.) 

He talks about how we need a balance of various things for our brain health and mental health. He created this resource called the Healthy Mind Platter that depicts the things that our brains need for our wellbeing, and it includes: focus time, play time, connecting time, physical time, time in, downtime and sleep time. 

So this is a good way for you to audit what areas you’re lacking in as you’re exploring what it is you’re needing outside of food. I’m going to walk you through this, and you might want to come back to this part of the episode to take notes later so you can journal about it:

• Are you getting enough focus time to challenge your mind in a goal-oriented way? This might be through your work, or projects you are doing at home, or an organization that you volunteer with, or the jigsaw puzzle you’re doing, or the Lego set you’re building. 
• What about playtime? What do you do for FUN? What do you do just because you enjoy it? What new and novel experiences have you had lately? 
• Are you getting enough connection time with others? How are your social relationships with your family and your friends? Do you need to work on meeting new people, or cultivating connections with the friends you already have? Maybe you need to join a book club, or attend a meet up in your town, or set up a get together with your girlfriends.
• Physical time – are you moving your body? This is actually really important for your brain health. (BUT we also want to make sure that your thoughts about exercise aren’t significantly increasing your TCT.)
• Perhaps you need more time in, and time to connect with yourself through therapy or journaling. This might be a productive use of your time in the evening instead of grabbing the pint of ice cream from the freezer to numb out. You might be surprised what you get in touch with internally when you stop avoiding and numbing with food.
• Maybe you need downtime. And instead of food functioning as your way to experience downtime you learn to let yourself relax without food. This might actually NOT feel relaxing at first, but it’s a skill we all need to have. Let yourself veg out on the couch and watch Netflix, or read a book. Go swing in your hammock outside or sit in your patio chair and listen to the birds or the sound of the breeze. Kick your feet up and listen to an audio book. You don’t always have to be doing something.
• Sleep – let’s not overlook this one. I was meeting with a client the other day and I asked her what she thought she was needing outside of food the other night when she binged, and she said, “Honestly, I think I was tired and I just needed to go to bed.” A lot of people run into trouble with binging at night, and they’re staying up too late, and the physical and mental impact of the binge is interfering with them getting good quality sleep. Perhaps you can focus on creating a rock solid wind down sleep hygiene routine for yourself and start getting to bed earlier. You might be shocked at how much better this makes you feel. 

I encourage you to do this audit with yourself and to consider what areas you might be lacking in, and what your needs in your life are outside of food. When food takes up less space in your behaviors and in your thoughts, it opens up space for other things in your life.

Bottom Line – Letting LIFE In

We need to create more space for you to let LIFE in, and this happens when you are thinking less about food. As wonderful and positive as this might sound, it can also be scary. There might be very uncomfortable reasons you’ve been turning to food in this way. 

You might realize that your nighttime ice cream binge has been your way of coping with unresolved trauma. Or perhaps you come to realize that food has been a replacement for people in your life, and that you’re really lonely. Food has been functioning as your best friend, or as your partner. Without it you might feel profound sadness and heartache. You might come to realize that you have no hobbies, that you hate your job, that your marriage is in trouble, that you have a child who is struggling with something and you feel helpless. 

As hard as all of this might be, when we remove the food as a numbing agent and as a distraction, it allows you to lean into what’s actually going on in your life that needs to be addressed. 

For some of you listening, no longer binging at night will create time for fun, hobbies, connection and joy – and that’s amazing! I love that for you!

For others who are listening, it might be incredibly challenging and painful to no longer use food in that way. It may have been helping you cope with or avoid some really hard stuff.

Whatever your experience, I want you to stay curious and be gentle with yourself.

The thing is, when you can address what’s going on outside of the food, you are going to find the peace, freedom and healing that you’ve been yearning for – not just with food, but in a much broader sense in your life. 

I’ll leave you with this. I had some of my clients recently reflect on the progress they’ve made and the things that have shifted for them, as a way to see how much has changed and how far they’ve come. One of them told me, “I don’t binge anymore. This I can’t explain, but my brain has just learned that it doesn’t serve me anymore.” 

How incredible is that?! And so different from white-knuckling it and trying to use willpower to not binge by not letting yourself keep your binge foods in the house (which was previously her strategy that wasn’t working). By making peace with food, and getting in touch with her needs and with her life outside of food, she no longer feels the desire or need to binge. THAT’S what we’re aiming for here.  

Wrapping Up

I want you to really sit with this episode, and to maybe even listen to it again. What we are talking about here has the power to truly change not just your relationship with food, but your LIFE in really beautiful ways. 

Let’s recap what we covered:

• We talked about how if food is the only thing in your life you look forward to, that’s telling us something really important (and it’s not that you have no willpower or that you’re addicted to food)
• Then we discussed the TCT and how thinking about food a large percentage of your day indicates that we need to look at what’s going on to decrease the amount of your thoughts about food AND to shift the way you’re thinking about food
• We covered how to decrease food obsession by first making sure you’re eating enough, and that you’re not depriving yourself throughout the earlier parts of the day in particular (and there’s a lot of strategy to this that we didn’t get into today, so if you want more help with that feel free to reach out to me)
• Then we covered the Healthy Mind Platter and the areas of your life to check in with to see what’s lacking and what areas need attention
• And we looked at how decreasing the space that food is taking up will allow you to let LIFE in, which might be really fun and exciting, and it might be really hard and terrifying. None of that is good/bad/right/wrong – it just is. And there’s tremendous opportunity here for healing and for making your life better through doing this work. 

Don’t forget to grab the free worksheet that’s going to help you explore all of this. It’s at nondietacademy.com/bingecycle.

And that’s a wrap. In case nobody has told you today – you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.

Resources: 

• Grab My Free Breaking the Binge Cycle Worksheet
• Dan Siegel’s Healthy Mind Platter

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