Ep 71- Giving Up the High of a Binge

June 19, 2025

Is binge eating your brain’s way of chasing a “high”?

Today on the Become a Confident Eater Podcast, I break down the emotional rollercoaster of binge eating—from the initial rush to the crushing low—and why letting go of this toxic high is key to food freedom.

You’ll learn..

• Where the high of the binge comes from

• The hidden cost of the emotional low that follows

• How to find new highs that feel good before, during, and after

• What to do if food feels like the only exciting thing in your day

TRANSCRIPT:

 Hello, confident Eaters. Today we are talking about giving up the high that you get from binge eating. So let's first go over what we're talking about when we think about the highs and the lows of binge eating. Binge eating is this cycle where we get this high of starting to eat the food, but it's very quickly followed by a low, and sometimes it can feel really difficult to give up those high parts, and our brain will give us this very elaborate story about how pleasurable binge eating is, how it's fine, how we enjoy it, how we don't actually want to give it up.

So the high of the binge is that first moment when we start eating right. It's when we give into the urge and we say, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna binge. We start to put the food in our mouth. We chew it, we taste it, we say, oh my gosh, this is so delicious. We want more and more, and we keep eating and we do get this temporary hit of dopamine because we're usually consuming a large amount of sugar or carbs.

Which our brain thinks is good for our survival. So it's gonna give us a little hit and we're gonna keep wanting more. Now when that's happening, we kind of feel like a high both emotionally where it feels like there's a big rush of energy. It's a very high intensity emotional state. But also we almost feel a high in the sense that like a high, similar to smoking or a drug where it feels like we're in this fuzzy haze that we are numb from the world, that we are in our own little bubble, that nothing else exists beyond this moment of the high, that we don't worry about the stresses of the day anymore. So it's very similar to a high you might get from some sort of drug, this sort of dissociation and numbness and fuzziness from it all.

But then of course after that high, that is not the end of the story. We don't just say, wow, that was great, and we move on with our day feeling amazing because if that was the whole story, then there would be no reason we'd wanna stop binge eating. There'd be no reason you'd be listening to this podcast today.

But there is, because after that high comes a deep, deep low, right? We have a big peak of the high followed for very low dip where we end up feeling worse than when we started out. So if you think about like a straight line as your baseline, the first part of the binge feels like this way up high from your baseline, but then you end in a way lower dip than your normal baseline of energy, of happiness focus of concentration were a low in a lot of different areas. So the low starts after the binge sometimes even during the binge, like  partway through the binge we might be flooded with guilt and shame and anxiety of, oh my gosh, what am I doing?

What have I done? What's gonna happen after this? How I'm gonna make up for it? That can sometimes start even before the binge is over. I know for me, sure, I felt that. Just in the middle of the binge too. But then the low happens where we're looking at the wrappers around us. We're feeling our stomach and how full we feel.

We're starting to feel that sugar high that we know is gonna crash soon. And the longer after the binge, the worse the low often gets. Whereas our food starts digesting. We have a lot of indigestion, a lot of bloating, maybe heartburn. We feel so sluggish the rest of the day. Our brain is filled with a buzz of thoughts.

Around how bad we just were. Why did this happen again? Why can't I get this together? Can't believe I did it. Okay. So while there is a high, there is equally as low. Low. I would even say there's even a lower low. Like if the high is a little peak, the low is two times that peak lower.

So it's important to realize that the high of the binge is temporary. It is not giving you any sustainable happiness or joy or pleasure or fun, but the low is not temporary. The low is long term. The effects of the low after the binge last for hours, days, months, and even years beyond just that initial binge.  So why might you be looking for this high of the binge? Sometimes life can be stressful, but sometimes lives are just so boring and dull that the high and low of binge eating can be kind of fun and bring some excitement to the day-to-day monotony.

Most people in our modern society just wake up, go to work, come home, make dinner, go to the gym. Maybe if you're in the not majority of people, like if you're already going to the gym after work, you're already doing so much better than most of the population. But this is like Groundhog Day over and over and over again, and it can be super boring and meaningless. And so sometimes the binge eating can bring this fun drama to our life, this high, this low, this contrast to that numb dullness that we feel each and every day.

Your brain can start to get addicted to this feeling of drama. So it's not just the food that you want, but the rollercoaster, the buildup, the sneaking, the food, the rush, the high, but then the shame, the promise to be better tomorrow. The retreating in words.

This is very similar to a toxic relationship. If you've been in a toxic relationship or you've known someone in a toxic relationship, this will sound really familiar, where you get this high of being with that person. I'm telling you how amazing you are, how much they love you, only to do something toxic, only to cheat on you, to pull away. To verbally or even physically abuse you, right? There's these highs and the lows, but that intermittent ness of is it gonna be a high, is it gonna be a low, is what keeps our brain feeling addicted to these things.

So the food, our brain can't quite predict, is this something that's exciting? Is it something that's not exciting and painful? And that inability to figure out whether or not this is something that is serving us or not is what keeps us going back.

So the key to stopping binge eating is realizing that binge eating is not giving us anything pleasurable that we actually want. There is no decision to make on is this something that's pleasurable or not. We start to recognize, oh my gosh, this is something I do not want in my life at all. Just like when someone overcomes a toxic relationship, they get out of it because they realize this is not serving me anymore. This is causing me so much more pain than joy and love. This is taking away from my life.

I remember when I broke up with my first boyfriend in high school, that was the question I used of whether or not I should break up with him. It was, is this relationship bringing me more happiness or more pain, like what percentage?

And I realized this relationship is bringing me a higher percentage of pain than it is pleasure. And that would be interesting to look at with your relationship with food too, is what percentage of my relationship with food is actually bringing me pleasure and what percentage is bringing me pain and really showing your brain, look, brain, this habit is not worth keeping.

This habit is not giving me anything that I need.

Your brain starts to mistake the emotional intensity of binges for emotional aliveness. I'm gonna repeat that again. Our brain starts to mistake the emotional intensity of the binges for emotional aliveness. So sometimes we think all of this chaos means we're feeling alive and we're feeling better. But there is a big difference between feeling stimulated and feeling fulfilled.

Feeling stimulated is just feeling these emotional highs and lows, but it does not give us this long term happiness. Right? It feels like a lot of energy shifting, but it doesn't feel like this long term fulfillment and wholeness within your body of the things you actually want to do long term and who you actually want to be.

In order to stop binge eating, you are going to have to give up the highs and lows that come with it, and sometimes there's a bit of a grieving process with that.

Calm in your life might feel boring at first. Because you're not used to it, because it's different, and that's okay. If your nervous system is used to being constantly activated, calm might feel like emptiness at first, but you are retraining your brain to feel safe in the calmness of life.

This is something that happened in my business when I was getting coached. I was like, I feel so at peace in my business. Like I'm not worried. I just feel so much joy. I feel so excited to show up every day and talk about how to stop binge eating and serving my clients. And it felt so weird at first because I had to overcome a lot of limiting beliefs that business had to be really hard and it had to be very taxing on me, and I had to take a ton of work. And I had to drain myself  to the ground in order to help people. And so once I start to feel good in my business, I start to feel calm. My brain is like, what is going on? This is not okay. This is not normal.

But that's exactly what I wanted. I wanted that calm in my business, and I had to show my brain how it's actually safer to do business the way I'm doing it now than how I used to do it. And it's the same thing with binge eating, showing your brain how your new binge free life will be so much calmer, so much safer, so much more enjoyable and pleasurable than it is now even if it feels boring at first when you get to that calm place.

The good news is when you don't have the high highs of the binge, you will no longer have to deal with those deep, deep lows. Right. So instead of these sharp peaks of highs and lows and highs and lows, without binge eating, you're just going to feel this consistent feel good like neutralness. I would say I feel slightly above neutral most days I kind of feel this peace and calm in my life, but it's for sure not those high highs. And we'll talk about in a second how you can get those high highs without food. But the truth is because especially these processed foods are a lot of times artificially manufactured, like similar to how cocaine or alcohol, it does not exist in the wild. It has to be artificially manufactured. Because of that, it's giving  this us, this high that we're probably not gonna feel elsewhere. And that's okay.

You can allow yourself to have that bit of grief around, you know, I'm not gonna feel these highs anymore. Right. Just like if someone gave up crazy nights out drinking, they're not gonna get that same experience quite the same. That's a good thing because then you don't have to deal with the hangovers the next day and all of the misery. And so it's the same thing with binge eating  where yes, you might never get that high, high of binge eating again, but that allows you to never get that low low and that is so worth it.

And when you think about giving up this high, I wanna even reframe these words of I'm giving something up. Because the truth is you're not really giving up anything that's joyful, fun, or pleasurable. You're giving up chaos that is pretending to be fun. But real fun and pleasure is slower, safer, and more sustainable.

It's like creating a healthy, loving relationship for the first time. Real love is soft, gentle, kind, loving, supportive, nourishing. That's what you want your relationship with food to be like.

Okay, so you've decided you're ready to give up those high highs so you no longer get the low lows, but the good news is you can get a new sort of high of life that is so much pleasurable than anything you ever got from binge eating.

One, just the high of not bingeing eating itself. Like when I first stopped binge eating, and I started seeing the scale go down and I started feeling super energetic every day, and I was able to leave bites behind that meal and feel so proud of myself. I was the slowest one when I was eating because I was paying attention to my fullness. I got a high like no other binge could ever gimme in the world.

I felt like, oh my God, if I could conquer binge eating, what else can I conquer? Right? If you listen to any of my client testimonials on this podcast, you'll hear the high that they are feeling and they're like, oh my gosh. My life has changed in so many amazing ways. I could not even even imagine at that beginning and that is priceless to me. That is worth the high. That is a greater high than anything else I've ever felt with binge eating.

But I made a little list of some other highs that you can look for in your life, and I want you to make your own list remembering that for now at least, I am creating a worksheet with every single episode  of the podcast. So go get your free worksheet for this episode, and I will have the list of these things. And I want you to make your own list of where else can I get a high in my life that actually feels good before, during, and after. That's how we know something's gonna be pleasurable, is if we look forward to it, it's gonna feel good before while we're doing it, we feel amazing and after it leaves us with a positive effect.

So some of my favorite things to get a high are after a run or some sort of cardio. And let's be honest, I don't actually run that much, but I do love to hike and I love long walks and I love dancing. And whenever I do some of these like longer state cardio things, you get that runner's high where you just feel so good like I'm cloud nine.

During and after hanging with a best friend, specifically if we are laughing or we had a really great deep conversation where I could really be vulnerable and open up and I felt heard and supported. Oh my gosh. That connection is like nothing else in the world when you have that deep best friend who you just feel so safe and supported around.

After I organize, oh my gosh. I look at a drawer that is color coordinated with all of my clothes or with all of the pens and the erasers and different containers, and I get this sort of high in euphoria from seeing those things organized. Reading a good book, going to the airport. Anytime I go on an airplane, I just feel filled with possibility and excitement.

I know some people hate the airport, but I could never understand that the airport is my favorite. I also have the Capital One credit card, which is like the best credit card, by the way, the Capital One Venture X. If you need a recommendation, because I get to go to the Capital One lounge in Denver and it is such a beautiful lounge, and I get this wonderful high, and I guess there is food involved with that, but the high is more around this excitement of going somewhere new, of traveling. So I love getting the high of doing that anytime I make a big accomplishment and work.

I just found out that our podcast become a confident eater,  is now in the top two point a half percent of podcast worldwide. How freaking cool is that? I am on a total high today because of how hard I have worked for this podcast and to grow it and to provide value for you each and every week. And it feels so good to know that I have that accomplishment.

So look for other accomplishments in your work life, or maybe if you have kids as a mom or do you feel really proud of yourself as a mom, or you see your kids do something amazing and you just feel this high. Your husband tells you how amazing you are and you feel this high. There are so many other areas. I could go on and on for hours here. With where you can get this high in life that feels good before, during, and after. That has nothing to do with food. And if you feel like your life feels dull right now, this is an opportunity to assess.

Why does my life feel dull?

Look at where you can push yourself to grow. Going after a goal is filled with highs and lows, and if you do not feel like your goals are pushing you, then you are not dreaming big enough.

Anytime you set a goal, there's going to be the rush of setting it. There's gonna be the high of hitting these accomplishments, then there's gonna be the lows of hitting an obstacle, running into a challenge, and that is so fun. Like your journey with binge eating, I'm sure that is your biggest goal right now to stop binge eating. Find the highs and lows of the journey of stopping binge eating.

Maybe you have other goals in your life that you wanna set. Dream bigger for your career. Dream bigger for your relationships. Dream bigger for your health, for your physical fitness, and that will give you much more excitement.

You don't have to settle for a life that feels boring and dull. We have free will on this planet. We can do literally whatever we want, any day of our life. And if you decide you wake up one morning that you don't like your life, the good news is that you can change it. You're not stuck here. You're just one moment, one thought away from a totally different life.

And when you set these bigger goals for yourself, I can promise you the journey is filled with so much fun and excitement and joy beyond anything that you've ever experienced before.

So to recap, today,  while it might feel like you're giving up this high of binge eating in the moment, you'll soon realize that that high was a false high. It wasn't what you wanted. The low made everything so much worse and really practiced showing your brain the low.

Have a fantastic week. Go find the highs of your everyday life and I'll talk to you next week.