Brain Over Binge (9 page)

11
: I Had Control All Along

T
his theory of two brains—the human brain and the animal brain—that Trimpey presented seemed reasonable to me. It seemed to explain why I sensed my urges to binge were not really me, but instead an imposter taking control of my mind and body until I gave in and binged. It seemed to explain why part of me wanted to binge more than anything and part of me truly wanted to quit. There were two brains in conflict within me.

The most important thing I learned while reading
RR
at the gym that day was that I had ultimate control over my actions. My human brain—the seat of my intelligence, reason, language, and voluntary movement—was the only part of me capable of the voluntary act of binge eating. This new and rather simple information gave me a feeling of power. It gave me new hope that I could overcome my urges to binge eat. It gave me reason to believe I had a choice when the urges arose.

In a sense, the information in
RR
was something I already knew but hadn't been able to express. I'd already known that I didn't
have
to act on my urges to binge even before reading the book; but until that point, I'd felt powerless against them. In therapy, I learned that I needed to develop alternative coping skills or fulfill my emotional needs in other, noneating ways. Yet when the urge to binge arose, it always seemed that nothing else but food would do.

MY URGES WEREN'T REALLY ME

RR
seemed to explain why my urges were so irresistible. Maybe it was because I thought those urges signaled a real need, whether that need was physical, emotional, or even illness-based. Maybe I believed the thoughts and followed the feelings that were urging me to binge because I thought they were
my
thoughts and
my
feelings. It only made sense that I believed this, because the urges certainly seemed to be coming from me.

When I had the urge to binge, I heard enticing thoughts, in my own voice, saying things like,
It won't hurt to binge just one more time. ... You can work out tomorrow and then start over. ... You've had a hard day and need to relax. ... You've done so well for the past three days, so you deserve it.
I heard myself giving all the reasons that it would be OK to binge just one more time, and sometimes they seemed like very logical reasons. As the urge grew stronger, my feelings of anxiety and craving mounted and I felt I truly needed to binge in order to feel normal again. My feelings felt like my own as well, and like my thoughts, they expressed what I sensed to be a true need.

RR
made me realize that perhaps the thoughts and feelings that encouraged binge eating didn't correspond to any of my needs—real or symbolic—and that maybe those thoughts and feelings didn't even come from
me
at all. Maybe they were an automatic and unthinking voice coming from the more animalistic part of my brain and didn't have any power over me or my actions. Maybe all I needed to do was separate my true self from that lower part of my brain for the urges to go away on their own.

As I continued exercising and reading
RR,
I came to a significant realization. All through the years of therapy, I had been trying to make my urges go away or prevent them from ever arising. But what if that was the wrong approach? What if I didn't need to make them go away, but just needed to change how I reacted to them? What if I could separate myself from my urges and choose not to follow them anymore? Perhaps, I thought, in spite of even the most powerful urge, I could choose not to open the refrigerator, not to drive to the convenience store; and maybe if I did that over and over, the urges would simply go away on their own.

I decided to try what I'd learned from
RR
and my own insights that day. After all, what could it hurt? I wasn't having much success resisting my urges any other way. I decided to view any thought or feeling encouraging binge eating as an automatic function of my animal brain, believing that it had no power to affect my actions. I decided I would separate myself from my urges to binge and use the power of my human brain to choose not to follow them.

IT
WAS
ABOUT THE FOOD

When my day of working out was complete and I had nearly finished reading
RR,
I drove home with a new perspective. This was not the same "new perspective" I usually had after successfully purging by working out—that feeling was all too familiar, and it never lasted. This perspective was different because, during the seven hours I'd spent at the gym, I had reinterpreted my eating disorder. Thanks to information from
RR
and my own self-reflection, my bulimia suddenly stopped being a mystery. I felt as though a curtain had been lifted and I could finally see my behavior for what it was: a terrible habit.

That evening in May, I stopped believing, once and for all, that my urges to binge were about anything more than food. I decided that there was no deep emotional meaning there. I began believing that I binged because I'd created a habit—possibly an addiction—by doing it so many times. I began to see that I binged primarily to relieve my cravings and also for pleasure, but certainly not to satisfy some symbolic inner need. A part of my brain had become dependent on binge eating, and that was why I found it so hard to stop.

As I now understood it, a lower part of my brain—my animal brain—believed I needed to binge to survive and was therefore generating urges for this beyond my conscious awareness. I couldn't control these thoughts or feelings, but I could recognize them for what they were. Although I knew binge eating was wrong and unhealthy, my animal brain thought it was as necessary as oxygen, because I'd taught it that by binge eating so many times. Although I couldn't talk my animal brain out of these demands, I didn't have to follow its lead. I, residing in my human brain, could control my actions.

As I approached home that night, I decided that I was going to try to stop reacting emotionally to my urges and stop acting on them. I decided I would just let my thoughts and feelings about food surface, then observe them as if they were not coming from me. Then I would not do what they told me to do. This seemed like an easy plan, and part of me thought it was too simple and would never work. But little did I know as I got out of my car that evening, my bulimia was almost gone forever.

12
: Resisting the Urge

I
t didn't take long for me to get the opportunity to practice my new strategy. I walked into my house after my day at the gym, put my workout bag on the floor, placed
Rational Recovery
on the kitchen table, and began making dinner. Greg called and said he was running late, so I was left alone to eat. After I finished a normal meal and dessert, I began hearing a few enticing thoughts encouraging me to continue eating. What happened then was truly surprising. I heard all the familiar reasons I should binge, and I felt the craving, but I told myself those thoughts and feelings were not my own. I told myself those thoughts and feelings were coming from an automatic, unthinking part of my brain that mistakenly sensed that I needed to binge to survive.

I told myself that I was completely separate from the part of my brain that generated these cravings, and I reminded myself that I had complete control. I pictured myself standing outside my own brain looking in, listening to those thoughts as if they were distant from my own, and knowing that my cravings had absolutely no power to make me act. I reminded myself that I—my higher brain, my human brain—was the only one who could walk to the refrigerator and begin to binge. And I chose not to.

It felt strange to form a divide between me and my urges to binge, but it also felt empowering. As I experienced my urges with detachment, it became immediately apparent that I didn't have to make them go away. I didn't have to try to talk myself out of my thoughts or feelings; I didn't have to reason with them or fight them; I didn't have to try futilely to distract myself; I didn't have to try to figure out what triggered my urge; and I didn't have to determine what emotional need my urge symbolized. Observing my brain in this way allowed me to see that my urges to binge symbolized nothing. They were not laden with deep emotional significance or hidden meaning. They simply were automatic functions of my brain, expressing an appetite for binge eating, an appetite I'd been feeding for much too long.

That night, I decided not to feed the urge, and a remarkable thing happened: the urge just went away. I remained detached from those thoughts, and they simply subsided on their own. I didn't get caught up in my feelings, and they died down. I'm not saying it was completely effortless, but it was certainly not the painful struggle that resisting binges had been before this night. I experienced the urge to binge for only about an hour at most, which was a major improvement. Furthermore, the hour wasn't distressing. It was actually quite interesting to observe the thoughts and feelings that had gotten the better of me for so long.

Listening with detachment made the urge to binge infinitely less intense. I did not get anxious, fearful, or angry as in the past; instead, I just listened without reacting emotionally. I went on with my normal activities: I watched TV, did some dishes, and checked my e-mail. Then I spent some time just sitting on the couch paying attention to what was going on in my head. I didn't feel I needed to do or not do anything in particular while the urge was present. The only thing I needed to do was not binge.

Throughout my urge, I truly felt the control I had over my actions. I didn't try to convince myself I had control without truly believing it, as I had done in the past. This time, my control was tangible. Maybe it was because I knew—based on the simple discussion of the anatomy and functions of my brain in
RR
—that I really
did
have control. I knew that no matter what crazy reasons my animal brain generated, I didn't have to act on them, because my human brain gave me the power to say no.

I realized there was no hidden disease, underlying emotional problem, or trigger that could make me walk to the refrigerator to take that first bite. There was no mysterious force that could take control of my body and commence the binge. It was my choice, and it had been my choice all along. I simply hadn't known how to exert that choice over the intense messages coming from my brain. I realized I was the only one to blame for keeping up my behavior, and I was the only one responsible for stopping it.

I BINGED TO COPE WITH MY URGES TO BINGE

After my urge to binge subsided that night, I thought about something I'd read in
RR.
Trimpey said that the only thing a [bulimic] is coping with when she [binge eats] is not [binge eating].
29
When I'd read this statement earlier at the gym, I wasn't sure I quite understood what it meant; but now, after experiencing an urge and riding it out successfully, I saw exactly what Trimpey was talking about. Throughout my years of binge eating, I had binged primarily to deal with the negative effects of not bingeing. When I'd tried to resist urges to binge, I'd experienced anxiety and discomfort, and bingeing successfully, albeit temporarily, had quelled that anxiety and discomfort.

In the past, binge eating had immediately turned off my urges to binge; it gave me relief from irrational but unremitting cravings; and it brought me immediate relaxation because I no longer had to struggle against my urges. It was the only thing that satisfied my desire, so in effect, I'd binged to cope with my urges to binge.

I binged to cope with urges to binge,
I thought over and over that night, wondering how such a simple truth could have eluded me for so long. It made so much intuitive sense; but it also seemed too simple compared to all the explanations of binge eating I'd gleaned during therapy. However, none of those explanations had ever helped me simply resist an urge to binge, as I had done that night after reading
RR.

After over six years of binge eating, I seemed to finally have a viable answer to the question I'd been pondering for so long: What was binge eating helping me cope with? I saw clearly that if I had binged that night, it would have been primarily to turn off the thoughts and feelings urging me to do so. It would not have helped me cope with any of my other problems or emotions; it would have only served to quiet the messages from one part of my brain. But I hadn't felt desperate to quiet that part of my brain that night, because I'd stayed detached from it. I hadn't reacted emotionally to my urge to binge, so I hadn't had any extreme anxiety or discomfort that I wanted to get rid of; and I hadn't felt the need to make my thoughts or feelings go away. In other words, I hadn't needed to cope with my urge by binge eating; in fact, I hadn't needed to cope with my urge at all.

This was not the answer I expected to find after all those years of therapy. I expected the answer to be far more complex, possibly related to my past, my depression, my social anxiety, my brain chemicals, or my personality. But every complicated answer I'd come up with over the years did not ring true to me. This simple answer did.

I realized that I was healthy, my brain was healthy, and I'd been healthy all along. There was no longer a mystery as to how I would stop my bulimia. Now that I knew my urges were the real problem, and now that I knew these urges weren't really me, I realized that all I had to do was completely separate myself from them and not act on them.