S2 Ep4
A lot of people can describe their binge eating in great detail, but when I ask where the cycle starts, they usually point to the binge itself. They say things like it starts when I lose control, or it starts when I eat too much or it starts at night. But if you've been listening to the first few episodes of this series, you already know something. Binges don't come out of nowhere. They come out of patterns. And today I want to help you see where the binge and restrict cycle actually begins. Because once you can see the beginning, you're no longer stuck trying to fix the end. And I want to say out loud, before we go further, I'm with you in this. If you've been carrying this privately, trying to figure it out, trying to be strong and disciplined and okay, please hear me. You don't have to go through this alone. Let's zoom out. Most people imagine the binge restrict cycle as something like this restrict binge regret. Restrict harder. You've lived this. That's not wrong. But it's incomplete because there are really two beginnings. The beginning that happened today, the moments where pressure started building and capacity started draining, and the beginning that happened long ago. The learning experiences and survival strategies that taught your system to use control and food in the first place. If we only talk about what started it today, it can accidentally sound like you're supposed to catch the exact moment you slipped and fix it. I know how that feels like your whole job is to be hyper vigilant. I want this to make sense in a deeper way for a lot of people I work with. The pattern of binge eating and restricting did not start with a binge. It began years earlier, often in childhood or the teen years when food started getting linked to approval, safety and belonging socially. And I want to say this very carefully when I talk about early experiences. This is not about blaming parents. Most moms and dads were doing what they honestly believed was helpful, protective or healthy. Diet culture was loud when I was growing up. Doctors recommended restriction to kids. Weight was treated like a character issue and many parents were scared. The point isn't fault. The point of discussing this is your nervous system learned something, and if that lands with a wave of sadness or anger or even relief, whatever comes up is okay. If you're listening to this and feeling seen in a way that kind of hurts. Stay with me. You're not being dramatic or overreacting. This is real. If you're feeling tender hearing this, it makes sense. Here's a story I hear in one hundred different versions. You're a girl. Maybe nine, ten, or eleven. You're standing in the kitchen and your mom is watching what you eat. Not angrily. More like she's worried. Maybe she's on a diet herself. Maybe she's talking about points, calories, fat grams, or being good. And at some point you get pulled into it. You're taken to Weight Watchers with adults or your handed a diet plan, or you're told you need to watch it. And then there are the moments that really stick. It's a birthday party and the other kids are having ice cream. You reach for it and a parent says, not you. You can't gain any more weight. Or you ask for candy and you're told you don't need that. Sometimes it's not said harshly, it's just said like a fact. But to a kid's brain, it lands like my hunger isn't trustworthy. My body is a problem. Food is dangerous. So you adapt. You learn to manage your appetite instead of just meeting it. And at the same time, restriction makes food feel brighter and louder, so it creates hesitancy and desire. You want forbidden foods more, but you also feel afraid of them. That push pull can follow a person for decades. And there's another way this pattern can start long ago that doesn't get talked about enough. Kids don't only learn food rules from what their parents say. They also learn from what their parents do, especially when they're stressed. Sometimes a parent is the model of emotional eating or even binge eating. Like mom disappearing into her room with a container of ice cream, or a parent eating your entire Easter basket and then apologizing and trying to replace it the next day. Again, I'm not telling these stories to shame anyone. A lot of parents were struggling too, using the tools they had, but a kid's brain learns quickly. Food is how you cope. Food is how you soothe. Food is where the comfort lies. So now you've learned two powerful messages at the same time. First, foods are dangerous, especially the really tasty ones, and you should control yourself. Second, Food, especially the really tasty type, is also comfort and relief when life feels hard. And kids also learn something else that's uniquely painful. Unfairness. Other people can eat candy, other people can have ice cream, but you can't because you have a larger body that lands as so much more than a food rule. It lands like I'm different. I'm being watched. I have to earn what the other kids just get to have. And that kind of unfairness doesn't only create cravings, it creates resentment, vigilance, and a deep longing to feel normal. And sometimes it isn't even a parent. Sometimes this is school or sports or camp. I have a memory from summer camp that still makes my stomach drop when I think about it. All of us campers are eating pizza for lunch. We're outside and the pizza is on large industrial aluminum cookie sheets cut into rectangles. They're all lined up buffet style on a long row of picnic tables. A boy bigger than the other kids reaches for another slice and I overhear his counselor say, hey, first name. That's the last slice for you. The boy objects. This is only my second piece. And the counselor says, well, enjoy it, because that's it. I remember feeling awful for him, and I also remember what my kid brain did immediately. Wow. I'm glad my counselors haven't said that to me. I was allowed to just eat freely like the rest of the campers. My weight wasn't a project that summer, but apparently this kid's weight was. I don't know if that counselor had some message from the kid's parents or somebody else to try and help him reduce his weight over the summer. But it hurt me to think that this kid didn't get to eat pizza like the rest of us did, which was taking more if we wanted more. It just seemed really unfair. That's how children learn that body size means a lot. It means what you're allowed. It means whether adults monitor you, and it means whether you get to be normal. If you grew up with moments like that, whether they happen to you or you watched them happen to someone else, no wonder food started to feel loaded. No wonder being good around food started to feel like a way to stay safe. And I have a second camp memory that fits right alongside that one. So in my bunk, some of the girls were much smaller than me, and they got more attention. They got more affection. The counselors used the word cute constantly, but it was almost always about the smallest girls. The counselors would hold their hands. When we walked from activity to activity. They would hoist them onto their shoulders or give them piggyback rides. We were the same age. I was just a larger child, but they never went to hold my hand. And I remember seeing it so clearly. The ones that looked younger and smaller. Everyone loved them. Me and the other campers who just happened to look a bit older, even though we weren't, were basically ignored. That's not a little thing for a child to notice, because what we learned in moments like that is small equals lovable. Small equals safe. Being cute equals being chosen. And once that belief gets wired in, it makes so much sense that as an adult, looking good and being likable can start to feel like your job. And food, especially the rules around food, can start to feel like the way that you earn it. For a lot of women, thinness becomes shorthand for being acceptable, likeable, desirable, chosen, and safe. So you become the person who's easy to be around. You're nice to everyone. You keep the peace, you're high functioning, and you're still very hard on yourself. That combination early restriction, plus the need to be good and likeable creates a perfect setup for the binge restrict cycle later. Because once your brain learns, control reduces anxiety, even temporarily. It will keep reaching for the control button under stress. And once your brain learns that food changes your state, numbing, distracting, comforting, rewarding you, it will keep reaching for food when you're depleted. So the long ago beginning is your nervous system and your beliefs. Learned a set of tools, and then years later, those tools show up in a very predictable loop. Now let's talk about the beginning that happens today. By the time you're consciously restricting, the cycle has often already been running for a while. The daily beginning often starts with pressure. Pressure to eat better. Pressure to compensate. Pressure to get back on track. Pressure to not mess up again. This pressure doesn't always feel dramatic. Sometimes it feels responsible, motivated, even hopeful. You wake up thinking, okay, today I'll be good. You might eat a little less, you might skip something. You might choose foods that feel safer. You might try eating like the influencer that you saw on Instagram. You might try to control hunger instead of responding to it. At this stage, it may not even feel like restriction yet, but something important is happening underneath. Pressure on the system is increasing. As I spoke about in episode one, willpower isn't a trait, it's a capacity. And capacity gets drained when pressure goes up. Now here's where emotional eating often enters the picture. When pressure is moderate, many people don't binge. Instead, they emotionally eat. That looks like snacking mindlessly, grazing, eating past a comfortable fullness. People reach for food to take the edge off of stress or discomfort. This isn't a failure. It's often your system trying to regulate itself under strain. But here's the problem. Emotional eating under pressure often causes guilt. And now that guilt adds more pressure. So now the cycle deepens. You emotionally eat, you feel guilt, and then you tighten control. When you tighten control, the pressure increases. And as the pressure increases, urges get louder. At some point, the system tips, and that's when a full out binge is more likely. This is why it's so common to hear people say, I was doing fine until I suddenly wasn't. Well, you weren't doing fine. You were holding. You were keeping it all together. And that holding takes energy. Let's walk through the cycle more clearly. Step by step. Step one. Pressure builds quietly. This might look like eating lighter earlier in the day because you want to be good or make up for something. Subtle rules like no carbs, no seconds, no snacks. Delaying food as a way to feel in control. Oh, if I don't eat anything for breakfast, I'll have a lot more calories for later. Or trying to manage hunger instead of responding to it. If I drink diet soda all morning, I don't really notice those hunger pangs. None of this necessarily feels extreme, but it adds load. Step two capacity gets depleted. Stress. Fatigue. Decision making. Emotional labor. All of it draws from the same pool. And as your capacity drops, flexibility drops with it. Step three emotional eating shows up as a pressure valve, food becomes a way to soothe, distract, or decompress. So you start grabbing food at times when you aren't actually hungry just to try and keep yourself going. Again, this makes sense, but because it's happening in a context of control and scarcity, it doesn't feel neutral. It feels like a problem. Step four you tighten control. You respond to emotional eating by promising to do better, to eat less, be stricter, or regain control. And this is the moment many people think the cycle starts. But it's actually the middle. Step five the system tips into binge eating. Pressure finally exceeds capacity. Urgency spikes, thinking narrows, and stopping feels impossible. And then the shame story arrives. See, I can't be trusted. But what actually happened was predictable. This wasn't a failure of discipline. It was a system under too much pressure for too long. So if you're trying to stop binge eating by focusing only on the binge, you're intervening very late in the process. That's like trying to stop a pot from boiling over by turning the burner off after it's already splashed all over. The most effective interventions happen earlier. They happen at the pressure points. So what does that mean for you? It means the question is not How do I stop once I'm in a binge? The more useful question is where does pressure start to build for me? Is it in the morning when you decide to be good that day? Is it in the afternoon when you don't quite eat enough to meet your appetite? Is it in the evening when you're exhausted and still trying to hold it together. Is it after emotional eating when guilt spikes and tells you to clamp down? This is where recovery starts to feel less mysterious, because instead of trying to be perfect at the absolute hardest moment, you start supporting yourself earlier. You can lower pressure before capacity runs out, and that's what changes the trajectory. Before I move on, I want to pause and talk to a very common reaction people have to everything I just described. Some of you might be thinking, okay, this sounds right, but I don't relate to the idea that pressure starts somewhere. I am always under pressure. Like pressure is just my baseline. So if that's you, I want you to know I hear you, and you're not broken or missing the point. It just usually means that your pressure has been chronic. And when pressure is chronic, it can feel like there's no clear start. It's just always there. This is where I want to connect it back to what we just talked about that long ago beginning. If you learned early that your body needed monitoring, that appetite was risky, or that being smaller meant being safer or more lovable or not having so much scrutiny, then pressure doesn't show up as a temporary spike because it's just become a background setting. That can look like a quiet vigilance around food, even on good days, or an automatic urge to compensate after you eat something out of the usual. It can look like a constant evaluation of your body in the mirror, in photos, in social situations, we call this body checking or the feeling that you need to be easy, pleasant and put together while never needing too much. And when that's the water you've been swimming in for years, of course, it's hard to rewind the tape and find the first domino, so if you can't find a clear starting point, we zoom out instead of zooming in. Rather than asking, where did this start today? The more useful questions become. Well, what keeps this pressure high in my life overall? Where do I rarely get relief or to take a day off? What beliefs about food, my body or being good are always humming in the background? Where am I working hardest to control myself? For people living in chronic pressure? Recovery isn't about catching one early moment and stopping the cycle. It's about creating small, reliable reductions in that pressure, even when nothing feels acute. So that might mean eating more consistently. That might mean building in one predictable break in your day that isn't food. So your nervous system gets some kind of relief. Or maybe you'll loosen one rule that's always running in the background. Here's a real life example. I spoke with a client this week who realized she carries this constant pressure to look good, among other things. For her, looking good means a full face of makeup and hair done every time she leaves the house. She wouldn't dream of stepping out that front door au naturel. So when I asked if it might be worth experimenting with going out of the house barefaced once she was honest, that just sounded way too uncomfortable. So we did not make it an all or nothing assignment. We found a compromise. I suggested, what if you just skip one piece of the routine like no mascara one time, but everything else on your face? Or go without lip color just once? In her mind, that sounded doable. And the reason it matters isn't because there's anything wrong with makeup. It's because lowering the standard on purpose reduces the background pressure of having to be good, pretty, likable, and presentable all the time. That kind of pressure doesn't just live in your cosmetics bag, it lives in your nervous system. And when we start easing it in small, concrete ways, food doesn't have to work as hard to give you relief. Practicing being a little less pleasing and a little more honest about your needs can go a long way. When pressure is chronic, change can look slower, but it's also more foundational. You're not looking for the spark. You're bringing the background pressure down a notch. And when that overall level comes down, the cycle has less fuel, often without you having to identify a single dramatic starting moment. For this week. I don't want you to fix the cycle. I want you to observe it. Pick a recent binge or near binge and gently rewind the tape. Sometimes the near binge is the perfect one to learn from. Ask where did the pressure start to rise? Where did I start muscling through instead of supporting myself? And where did guilt add fuel? There's no right answer. The goal is awareness without judgment, because once you can see the loop, you're no longer trapped inside it. I'll be rooting for you as you make these observations and gain awareness of pressure in your own life. If you want extra support between episodes. I have a paid subscription called All Access. It's where I share recorded real life coaching sessions with my clients, always with their permission, so you can hear what recovery actually sounds like in practice, not theory. Real conversations. Real turning points. Real. What do I do when this happens? Moments. It's about five dollars a month depending on your country, and you can join at georgiefear.com/podcast or sign up right inside Apple Podcasts. In the next episode, we'll zoom in on a quieter but very powerful source of pressure that keeps this cycle alive. The demand to be good, and the belief that you have to earn rest, ease, or trust through losing weight or controlling yourself. Until then, I'm with you. You're not alone, and you don't have to solve this perfectly to start getting free. As always, if you have thoughts, I would love to hear them. Please drop me an email at georgiefear@gmail.com Be nice to yourself.