Binge eating 101: Why It Happens and How to Make It Stop

Have you ever felt like you just couldn't stop eating?

Maybe it starts with "just one cookie," but suddenly you've eaten half the package. Or you tell yourself you'll only have a small bowl of ice cream, only to find yourself scraping the bottom of the container. Afterwards comes the guilt, the shame, and the promise that tomorrow you'll "be better."

If that sounds familiar, you're not alone.

In this episode, we're having an honest conversation about binge eating. What it actually is, why it happens, and why it has very little to do with willpower. I'll help you understand the difference between occasionally overeating and true binge eating, share examples that may feel incredibly familiar, and explain the common physical and mental patterns that keep the cycle going.

Most importantly, you'll walk away with practical strategies you can begin using today to reduce binge eating episodes without relying on more restriction, guilt, or starting over on Monday.

If you've been stuck in the binge-restrict cycle or feel like food has too much control over your life, this episode will help you understand what's really happening and show you a healthier way forward.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• What binge eating really is (and what it isn't)
• The difference between overeating and binge eating
• The physical and emotional factors that fuel binge eating
• Practical strategies to interrupt the binge cycle

If this episode resonates with you, share it with a friend who needs to hear that they aren't alone. And if you're enjoying the podcast, leaving a rating and review helps more women discover these conversations.

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JOIN THE WAITLIST FOR THE FOOD NOISE BOOTCAMP! 

Coming Fall 2026: https://laurabhealthy.myflodesk.com/foodnoisebootcamp 

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💌 Connect With Laura:

1. Website: Health Coach for Teachers & Busy, Working Women
2. Instagram: LAURA B. | Teacher turned Health Coach | Podcaster🎙️ (@laura.b.healthy) • Instagram photos and videos
3. TikTok: Laura B. | Health Coach (@laura.b.healthy) | TikTok

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Topics covered in this episode: binge eating, binge eating recovery, emotional eating, food noise, sugar cravings, overeating, healthy habits, mindset, relationship with food, binge-restrict cycle, intuitive eating, nutrition, health coaching, weight loss mindset, habit change

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Isn't She Powerful Podcast. I am absolutely thrilled to have you here for another episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. If this is your first episode, my name is Laura V Healthy. I am the face behind the V Healthy brand. I am so excited to have you as a part of my podcast world. I hope you will subscribe and listen to many, many more episodes. There are over 220 others that you can go back and listen to, and there are multiple that come out every single week, whether that be here on YouTube or whether that be over on the Apple Podcast or Spotify Network, there are a lot more that come out on just podcasts than come out on YouTube. So if you're finding me on YouTube, make sure you head over there. In this episode, we are going to be talking about binge eating, which is something that I'm telling you, if I would have had a resource like what I'm about to give you guys back whenever I was young. My binge eating started when I was in high school. And if I had had a resource like this, then I would have saved myself years of torture. So I'm very excited to teach you and help you understand what causes this binge eating, why it is something that you struggle with so much, what's going on in your head, what's going on in your body. I'm gonna help you understand some tools and some strategies that you can use to get rid of it and I'll let it be a thing of the past. And if this is something that you find, yeah, this was beneficial to me and I need more information like this, I'm going to drop the link for a very special upcoming offer down in the show notes below. I will be hosting a food noise boot camp starting in September, and I would love for you to be a part of it. I'm gonna help you understand exactly what is going on with all of that noise inside your brain, why it's there, and help you adjust your daily habits and your mindset so that you can get rid of it entirely because that is 400% possible. I've done it for myself, but more importantly, I've done it for over 100 women, and I would love for you to be one of those people. So I'm gonna leave the information for that down in the show notes below so you can drop your name on the wait list and get the information as soon as that offer is available to you. For now, let's dig into this episode where we are talking about binge eating. Welcome to the Isn't She Powerful Podcast. I'm your host, Laura B, health coach, educator, and founder of the Be Healthy Lifestyle. I'm here to bring you all of the health education and motivation so that you can sign off each week feeling equipped and empowered to tackle all of your health goals. Come along with me as I teach you the basics of healthy living so that you can have everyone in your life say, Isn't she powerful? As I already mentioned, binge eating was something that I struggled with for years. I've already told you that when I was in high school, that was a major struggle for me. I was so restrictive when I was in high school. I would not eat breakfast, I would not eat lunch, I would skip snacks, and then I would go exercise, run cross country, or play soccer in the afternoons, and then I would go home and I would eat this one singular meal, and then I would binge eat. I would eat so much just snack type foods, like peanut butter crackers or fiber one bars, like things that are quote unquote healthy, but I was eating them in excessive amounts. And that's really ultimately what binge eating is. There's a big difference between binge eating and overeating. Overeating is where you sit down at a meal and then you're like, oh, I accidentally ate more than I had planned. Like it's almost like I I heard I kind of heard the voice in my head telling me to stop, but I ignored it. Maybe you ignore the voice because the food tastes really good and you want to keep eating it. Maybe it's because there's only a few bites left, maybe it's because there's a voice also telling you, but you can't eat this food again. There's no sense in taking the leftovers because this food's really bad for you. And if you eat this food again later, then you're gonna have two bad meals. You might as well just eat it all now, way past the point of full, and then we we can move on and we can start over again tomorrow and we can try to be healthy again tomorrow. That is overeating. And by the way, on the audio only version of the podcast, Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, wherever you listen to just audio podcasts, I just released a recent episode all about overeating at restaurants and how to avoid that happening. But binge eating, however, is when you are eating so much so fast, and there's a voice in your head and it's like, stop, this isn't good. You don't want this, you need to stop, but you can't stop. It's like this food just has this power over you. I like to think of it as this gravitational pull and it's pulling you towards that food no matter what you do, no matter what you tell yourself, you cannot make it stop. This is something that I felt to my core whenever I was teaching. I would spend the entire day. I would wake up in the mornings, and if you've been listening to the podcast, you've heard me say this before. I'd wake up in the mornings, I still can remember the apartment I lived in, staring at the ceiling and saying, I'm gonna be good today, we're not gonna eat any sugar, I'm gonna stay on my diet, only being good today. And then I would spend the entire day at work avoiding the workroom, avoiding other teachers' classrooms, anywhere where there might be junk food and sugar and candy, all of those things that were no's that were complete off limits to me. I would spend the entire day ignoring those areas of the building. And then in the afternoons, when my classroom was quiet for the first time, I didn't have anything else that was calling to me. It was like my it was like food was just like calling to me all the time, and that's what I refer to as food noise. And you probably have experienced it before. I would then go search out this food. I would go find this food somewhere in the building. Maybe I had brought it with me, maybe it was in the classroom where I was supposed to be saving that for the students, or maybe it was somewhere else in the school. I would then lock the door to my classroom, turn the lights off, close the blinds, pretend like I was not there, and I would eat so much candy within a matter of minutes. Like it was so fast, and the whole time I would be telling myself, Laura, you don't want to do this, you shouldn't be doing this. Why are you doing this to yourself? And yet I would not be able to stop. I had no control over food, no control over my actions. I just ripped open the candy, stuffed it in, and kept kept doing that over and over and over until I literally physically felt sick. And then finally, once I got to the point where I felt nauseous, I would get all of those wrappers, pile them up, take them to the trash can, bury them in the trash can so that nobody would be able to see what I had done. And then I would go crawling to my car and crawl home and lay on the couch because I felt so sick from the amount of sugar that I had inhaled within literally 15 minutes. That is binge eating. Binge eating is when you cannot stop and it feels like food is just calling out to you, even though it's like it's like you have these two little people on your shoulders where there's one guy and he's saying, Don't eat that. This is not gonna make you feel good. You know you don't want to be doing this, and the other one's like, sugar, sugar, sugar. And no matter what you do, the sugar guy always wins. That is binge eating, and that's what I want to help you learn how to understand because that's the that's the at the root of all of it. When you can understand why these voices exist and why this is happening to you, then you can start to make some changes to make it go away. You have to understand it. I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that I'm going to be doing a food noise boot camp, and the first phase of that boot camp is understanding why this exists. You have to have this understanding of what is going on in your body. Why does this exist for you? That is where you can begin to start to see the change once you understand why it's happening. The truth is, binge eating rarely happens randomly. It's rarely something that comes out of nowhere. There's always this stepping ladder, there's always like you took one step and another step and another step. There's some trigger along the way that caused you to start binge eating. So I want to go over what a few of those could be. Now, there's a long list of what it could be, but I'm gonna share with you what the most common ones are. Because, like I said, I've worked with over a hundred women to make this go away for them. And these are the things that I see pop up over and over and over and over again. It is so common. So let's get into them. Quick pause from the episode. I'm not gonna take long, but I know that you struggle with food noise and sugar cravings and silencing those voices in your head that are constantly asking for food. I know you struggle with it because you listen to this podcast. In a few weeks, I'm going to be opening the doors to a brand new 45-day boot camp. It's all about understanding your food noise, what triggers it for you specifically, and then adjusting your daily habits to get rid of it altogether. You can head straight on down to the show notes right now to get your name put on the wait list. I would absolutely love to serve you in this program and honestly just silence the voices in your dang head. Number one is skipping meals. I hate to say it, but you've got to start eating breakfast. You've got to stop skipping meals. I commonly see women, they're not eating breakfast or they're not eating lunch or both. And one of those could be maybe you don't eat breakfast because you're trying to save your calories, maybe you don't eat breakfast because you're not hungry at that time, which I'm not going to get into it in this episode, but if you're not hungry during this time, that is a sign of a slow metabolism. I had a one-on-one client that I just recently met with, and she was like, I'm starting to wake up like really hungry. And I was like, that's a good thing. That means that your metabolism is doing what it should be doing. It's running like a well-oiled machine at this point, and we want you to have a metabolism that runs that way. So it's a good thing to be hungry in the mornings, and it is a sign that your metabolism has slowed down pretty drastically if you're not feeling hungry in the morning. So maybe you're skipping breakfast or potentially you're skipping lunch because you're too busy, you don't have enough time, whatever the excuses, you're finding excuses to skip meals. And that is causing your body to go into this mode where it's like, okay, well, we're just not gonna burn any energy. But guess what? Your body needs energy from food, it needs those calories to turn into energy to power you through your entire day, and it's going to get those calories from somewhere. At some point in the day, it is going to make sure that it gets what it needs. So what happens is you spend the entire day not eating breakfast, not eating lunch, maybe snacking on something here and there, a little nibble of this or that. And then by the time you get home in the evenings, your body's like, cool, she's not doing anything now. She's not busy, she's not running around, let's eat. And so she's start your body starts to send you all these signals. It's like alarm bells going off in your brain. It's like, eat food, eat food, eat food. And of course, the thing that you're gonna want to eat is all the sugary junk food because that's the easiest thing for your body to convert into immediate energy. So it's gonna ask for the cakes and the cookies and the pastries and all of these sugary things that is 100% normal for what you are doing during your day. So, number one thing, restricting, not eating enough food. You are literally causing this to happen. Number two thing that I see not eating meals that are well balanced. You might be eating a breakfast, lunch, dinner, but what you're eating during these meals is not in the right portion sizes. And so your body is not getting all of the nutrients that it needs. There are two important things that need to be on your plate whenever you eat protein and fiber. Protein fills you up, fiber keeps you full. And if you don't have those two things, number one, you're gonna feel hungry when you leave the meal. Number two, you're going to feel hungry about an hour later. You must have protein and fiber at every single one of your meals. That's why so much of what I talk about on social media is hey, here's a recipe that has protein and fiber. Hey, this is what your plate should look like for a healthy breakfast that has protein and fiber, because those two things are the key components to making your food noise, this desire to binge eat, all go away. The final thing that I see that causes a lot of the binge eating is an unhealthy relationship with food. And this could require an entire podcast episode. Honestly, it's a big piece of the work that I do with my people because it's not something that I can just say one magical sentence to you and heal your relationship with food. It takes time, it takes a lot of intention, it takes a lot of conversations. That's why so much of my work is conversational with my people because we need to work through this. It's not just something that happens in the blink of an eye or a quick change in the way that you view all of these years of food. Like you have you have a mindset that's been curated since before you were born. It's been building from generations past. The way that the people before you looked at food is very similar to the way that you look at food, unless you've had somebody help you with your relationship with food. But I hear a lot of people saying, oh, this food is good, this food is bad, and I do not like that language. I really, really enjoy whenever I hear people say, yeah, I'm eating this food, done. It's not like it's bad for me, it's not like it's good for me. It's just food. Some foods have more nutritional value than others. That's obvious. We all know that. I don't have to sit here and tell you that a head of broccoli has more has more nutritional value than a sheet pan of cookies. Every person here knows that as a fact, right? But those foods aren't good or bad for you. They're just food. What whether they support your body in different ways or not, they all are just something that supports your body. So shifting that language around food makes a really big difference with the binge eating because what I find is when people have an unhealthy relationship with food, you typically also have an all-or-nothing mindset. And those two things like fuel each other. It's like one is gasoline and the other is a match, and they just fuel this fire constantly. So what happens is you eat one food that's quote unquote bad for you, which is a sign of an unhealthy relationship with food that you feel that this is a quote bad for you food. And so you eat that one food, and then because you have an all or nothing mindset, you start to get into this mindset of, well, I've already screwed up, I've ruined it already, I've messed up completely. So I'm just gonna start over tomorrow. So what that means is I'm gonna eat this entire sheet pan of cookies right now. I'm gonna eat every single thing of chocolate that we have in this house. I'm going to eat up all of this junk food so that I can start over again tomorrow. What I teach my clients to do is say, okay, there's a sheet pan of cookies available to me. They aren't good, but they aren't bad for me. They're just a sheet pan of cookies. They're just food. And you can learn to eat say two of these cookies. I'm gonna take two cookies off the sheet pan. I'm going to sit down, I'm gonna be present with these two cookies. I'm going to enjoy these two cookies. I'm gonna let my mouth feel them and my mouth taste them. I'm going to really enjoy these cookies. And then I'm gonna do something else and I'm gonna completely move on. I don't need to eat the entire sheet pan because guess what? I didn't ruin anything. This is all part of the lifestyle. Let me tell you, you I already know you want to get to the point where you can not have the food noise, but that doesn't mean you want to get to the point where you never eat cookies again. You just don't want to always think about the cookies. So instead of treating it like, oh, I I can never have these cookies again, let's learn to eat these cookies without binge eating these cookies. So what does that require? It requires you to sit down, eat two of them, really enjoy them, really be present with them, and then move on and do something else. You're not in your head saying, oh, I've messed up, oh I ruined everything. You're just saying this is part of the process. I'm eating the cookies, I'm enjoying them, and then I'm moving on. So to recap, some of the major things that are the fueling factors behind why your binge eating exists, why you start eating and then you feel like you just can't stop, even though you really want to. It's the under-eating, it's the relationship with food, it's not getting the proper nutrition from your food, it's blood sugar dysregulation. You're eating meals because they don't have enough protein and fiber to them, they're spiking your blood sugar up. And all of these things are physical. They're causing physical sensations in your body that is making your body wanna keep eating. That's a huge thing that I do with my clients, is help them understand it. You're not wrong for this. It's not like you're weak. This isn't about a about a lack of willpower. You aren't, it's this isn't a character issue. This is the fact that when you eat certain things that spike your blood sugar up, it gonna it's gonna cause a blood sugar roller coaster, which is gonna cause you to want to eat more of these foods in the end. So here's what I want you to do as you're leaving this episode. I want you to start paying attention to what are you eating on your plate. Do you have protein on your plate every single time you eat? Do you have a source of fiber on your plate every single time you eat? I recently, like a week or two ago from when this episode is coming out, released a video on my Instagram page where I talked about what should your plate look like for keeping the food noise away. I'm wearing a purple tank top if you want to go find the video. And in there I show you the exact visual portion sizes for what your plate should look like to keep the food noise away. I want you to make sure that you're eating a breakfast, lunch, dinner, a snack. You should be eating enough food during the day. And then I want you to start paying attention to those little voices in your head that say, this is a good fruit food for you, this is a bad food for you, you should eat this, you shouldn't eat that. That all or nothing mindset starts to come in when you eat something that's bad for you, and then you start to say, well, might as well eat all of the bad for me food and start over tomorrow. Pay attention. Catch that behavior and say, no, I don't need to start over tomorrow. I can eat two of these cookies and then I can move on right here, right now, and I can make a healthy choice at my very next opportunity. I don't need to wait till tomorrow. I don't need to overeat on these foods. If I want to eat two cookies every single day, I am allowed to do that. It is okay for me to have that behavior. The freedom from the binge eating, it doesn't come from having more willpower or white-knuckling your way through this health and wellness journey or being more disciplined. That's not how you get rid of the binge eating, and in fact, that is fueling the fire of the binge eating. Getting rid of it requires that you understand what's causing it in the first place. For every person listening to this, it could be something slightly different. So pay attention to your own cues and your own lifestyle habits that are creating this. I mentioned a few of the big ones here, and I am so happy to help every single one of you unpack this in more detail for you specifically. And then it comes from creating an environment in your brain and in your everyday lifestyle where your body no longer has this need to binge. Because right now, nine times out of ten, it's a need. You are doing something that is causing your body to feel like it needs to scream at you to eat this food. So by making these tiny shifts, you can completely change what's going on inside of your body and therefore change that outcome of always binge eating. I hope that this episode has been beneficial for you. I've hope that it's connected a couple of dots and helped you understand a little bit of what habits you have that are currently causing your reality to be this cycle of restriction and then binge eating. If this is something that you're like, yeah, I'm I it's time that I make a change on this. I'm done struggling with this. I'm ready to get rid of the noise in my head. I'm ready to stop this cycle of binge eating, then go down into the show notes, put your name on the wait list for the Food Noise Bootcamp. I am so excited to host it and cannot wait to get to have you a part of it. And until then, I will see you right back here for another episode next week. Thank you so much. I can't wait to see you again next week. And always remember the more you know, the more you grow.