Hi Brooke,
I’d love your take on something. I started dieting at 12 and developed anorexia at 15 and then became a binge-eater around 17 years old or so. I’m now 49. I’ve chosen to engage in disordered eating for the majority of my life. I stumbled upon you through your weight loss program you did with Susan Hyatt some years back. Learning that my thoughts create my feelings was life-altering. But I still chose to binge eat. I say choose but it doesn’t always feel like a choice. I recently started reading a book called “Brain Over Binge” in which the recovered bulimic author talks alot about the lower brain being what is creating the urge to binge. She recommends that by just being aware of that that’s where it is coming from, we don’t have to act on it. She goes on to suggest that we don’t binge to deal with our emotions, difficult situations, etc but we binge in order to just stop the urge to binge(this is based on the fact that she was prescribed a medication that suppressed urges and she was successful not bingeing while on the medication and didn’t change anything about handling emotions, thoughts, etc). And the urge to binge comes from dieting. I was following my protocol for a few months and the urge to binge kept coming. I felt (thought) that the way I was eating was too restrictive and it feels as though that lower brain of mine kicks into gear from when I weighed 89 lbs as an anorexic and says “Eat! Or we’re going to die!” and days later I’m still bingeing.

I’d sure appreciate your insight.