Ep 67- 10 Tips to Stop Binge Eating in 10 Minutes

May 22, 2025

If I had just 10 minutes with you to tell you how to stop binge eating… here’s exactly what I would say.

These are my top 10 binge eating recovery tips I wish I had known earlier that helped me become a confident eater & heal my relationship with food.

TRANSCRIPT:

  Hey, my name is Amber Avila. I am a binge eating and overeating coach, and I am here to give you my top 10 tips to stop binge eating. In under 10 minutes. I am giving you these tips after years and years of struggling with food myself, obsessing over food, dealing with food noise, and not finding a way out until I learned how to view binge eating as a habit.

So, without further ado, here are my top 10 tips.

 One, stop obsessing over the actions you are taking and start looking at your thoughts. This is the most common mistake I see all the time, which is where people just keep trying to do more. One, this is exhausting, but two, it doesn't work. You need to look under the hood at what thoughts are driving your actions and feelings around food because this is what will give you permanent results.

So I want you to start journaling. What do I think about food? What are some of the common thoughts that I have each day?

This will give you so much more awareness than just slapping a quick tip over it. You need to know, even though you have the tips, why are you not doing them? Which leads me into number two. Just because you are having thoughts around food does not mean they are true. This concept absolutely changed my life in so many different areas.

Because I learned that just because my brain told me I want to binge right now, or you should eat a lot of food, that does not mean I actually want to binge or I actually want to eat a lot of food. And I knew that because every single time after a binge, I would regret it. I would wish I hadn't done it.

So whatever thoughts you were journaling out that you start to recognize.

I want you to question them by asking yourself the question, is this true? Can I absolutely be sure this thought is true and that will help you start to change your thoughts. Three. The food itself is not addictive. This one is controversial.

I know it, and I am not here to debate the science about. Food in the biology of how it interacts with our body. But if food itself were addictive, everyone in the world would be overweight. Everyone in the world would never stop at just one, and that is not true. We see natural eaters, these people who have never dieted, who are naturally thin, they will have like half a piece of cake at a birthday party and forget about it.

They will maintain their weight effortlessly without having to think about it. And we'll eat foods both processed and unprocessed, so we know it's not the food that's always the problem.

Yes, food can be a factor and we want to eat majority whole foods, but it's 100% possible to eat things in moderation because I have learned to train my brain to do that. And you can too. Two, four. Feeling deeper is the key to stop escaping your emotions. Yes, there are a million gazillion techniques out there that can help you feel better, and I teach you some of those in my Cator program.

But until you learn that emotions are not a problem and you are safe to feel them, you will not ever fully be free. Emotions are just sensations. Emotions are just energy and motion. They are just vibrations in our body. And when you can realize you can handle any vibration in your body. And you will not die.

You will be okay. Then you won't even need to try to make yourself feel better with food or another technique. You can just allow yourself to feel shitty some days and move on without overeating.

Five. Food can only solve hunger. If hunger is not the problem, food is not the solution.

Hunger is our body's way of telling us that we need calories and food is our source of calories. Yes, food can feel comforting. It can be a source of connection. It can have these other purposes, but if we are not hungry first, it cannot do those things for us. Food will not bring us joy if we are not hungry for it, because then we are overeating and that causes us pain.

Which goes along with six. Stop telling yourself that binge eating is pleasurable, that you're getting a big hit of dopamine when you do it again. Even it might be true that you're getting a hit of dopamine, it's not helpful because if you tell yourself, but binge eating feels so good, but I get pleasure from it, but I get joy from it, you're gonna want to do it.

Those thoughts are what I call desire increasing thoughts, and they're going to make you desire binge eating. You need to tell yourself the truth about binge eating. Which is that it's not pleasurable. I don't care if it's pleasurable for 10 seconds. After that, it is immediately painful and you're not even enjoying the food.

You're not tasting the food. You're shoving it down so fast that you get to the end, and you have gotten zero pleasure outta that food because you didn't even recognize what was happening. You were in a blur of a binge, and that's not pleasurable. That's not fun. So stop telling yourself otherwise. Seven, you are not giving up anything when you stop binge eating.

This goes along with the last ones where sometimes people will tell me, but I don't wanna give up this as a coping mechanism, and maybe I could even make seven as binge eating is not helping you cope with anything. Binge eating always and only makes everything in your life worse. So when you give up binge eating, the only thing you are giving up is pain.

You are not giving up pleasure because I promise you, I experience infinite more times more pleasure with food now than I did when I was binge eating. Because I've gotten rid of the guilt. I've gotten rid of the shame I'm eating foods in moderation that feel good to my body. So the only thing that you were giving up when you stop binge eating.

Is the harm that it's causing you in your life?

I truly believe that binge eating is not giving anything you want to keep. And it is much more of a self-harm behavior than you imagine.

Eight. Make your meals bigger to stop snacking.

If you find yourself every afternoon raiding your pantry, or every evening raiding your pantry, I first want you to try increasing your meal size. I know this can feel scary at first because it feels like you're eating more. I used to have these small little meals and I told myself, all my meals have to be under 450 calories, just so like a random number.

But the truth is I would do that and I would be so hungry throughout the day in between my meals and after my meals that I would just end up snacking on much more processed food that I didn't wanna be eating,

and my overall calories for the day would be much higher. So make sure all of your meals have protein, fat, carb, and fiber at each one so you can properly fuel your body.

And you stop getting these strong biological cravings to eat.

Nine. Now, if you hate me for saying this. I promise you it is true, but it takes some time to believe, and that is feeling confident in your body actually has nothing to do with your body size. We have all probably had an experience before where you have gotten down to a lower body weight and you still have been not happy with your body.

That is because you didn't do the work to change your thoughts, or you still thought I could lose another five pounds. I'd look better if I toned up a bit more. You will never feel the confidence you want to feel about yourself until you start doing the work to think confidently to start believing. I am beautiful and worthy of love just the way I am.

You don't have to love every single part of your body. In every way. But you do have to accept it because if you do not, you are going to make your journey to stop binge eating and loving yourself a million times harder. And we see all the times celebrities, people at this ideal body size that do not love their bodies because they are not thinking confident thoughts.

In the final tip 10 I would give someone if they told me they were binge eating, is to work with someone who actually specializes in binge eating. I have had people who have come to me after spending tens of thousands of dollars in wasting 10, 20, 30 years of their life in therapy and other coaching programs that don't specialize in binge eating.

In nutritionist, in personal trainers, all these other people who don't actually address the root cause of their binge eating, who don't actually use the latest psychology and neuroscience to change. And they are still stuck when they come to me. And I've had clients who, when two months or less, completely stop their binge eating because we are addressing their unconscious brain and binge eating as a habit for the first time in their life.

I promise you, you are not alone in the struggle. I have been there and I can help you as I've helped hundreds of other people. You don't have to stay stuck anymore. I'd love to help you out of this, and your first step to start in my Confident Eater program is by booking a free call with me.

And if you have a friend or someone you know who is also struggling with food, there's no shame in it. And share this episode with them so that they can be helped as well and get these tips.

And if you'd like to start with some of my free resources, I'm gonna add in the show notes, my guided urge audio, which is a quick and easy audio that you can pop in your ears that I'm going to walk you through what to do when you get an urge to binge and how to handle it. I also have my own podcast that become a confident eater.

That you can listen to anywhere you get your podcast, as well as my social media in the show notes.