Brain Over BInge

Thanks to Lorrie over at The Token Fat Girl I've read a book called Brain Over Binge this week. It's a rather fascinating read, I must say, and offers a pretty great theory into what makes up eating disorders like bulimia, binge eating disorder, and compulsive overeating. Her story is very, very different than mine, but I really resonated with a lot of the things she had to say. She posits that binge eating is caused by the urge to binge, and nothing more. How and why bulimia may start may be different, but bulimia and binge eating becomes about the food and not about the psychological causes and unresolved past issues that psychotherapy tells us that it is, and you don't have to solve all of those issues to recover. She says that the urge to binge is something your lower cortex or "animal brain" sends out automatically, because of past deprivation perhaps initially, but eventually, because it is in the habit of doing so and it knows that sending out that urge will get it what it wants, which is food and lots of it. To overcome this, she says all you need do is look at those urges with your "highest human brain" housed in the prefrontal cortex, and stop reacting to them emotionally. There is where I like what she says, and where I get into trouble. I overthink things on a pretty regular basis. I overeat and binge on a fairly regular basis. I've fought my urges, tried to reason with them, tried to ignore them, tried to outsmart them...I felt like I'd tried everything. The inherent problem in that approach is that I was attempting to argue with what I thought was ME. But really, those urges are neural networks set off automatically for any number of reasons or no reason at all. It's not ME wanting to eat every last bit of the week's leftovers in the fridge, or whip up a cake and eat it before anyone gets home, it's just junk from my brain. Furthermore, those urges have no power unless I make a choice with my higher brain to follow through on those urges. They don't make me snap at my husband, they don't make me open the fridge, or put bite after bite of food in my mouth. Brain Over Binge teaches that, instead of arguing or reasoning or fighting with the urge, you recognize it for what it is, acknowledge it, and then dismiss it. The less attention you give an unhealthy urge, the more quickly it dissipates. And the more often you are able to separate yourself from those urges, the weaker they will be and the less frequently they will come back. I am having trouble finding the voice of my higher self in the cacophony that can become my brain in the middle of an urge. My habits are so ingrained that it's hard to remember what I sound like.