Ep 75- How to Stay Patient When You Don’t See Results Yet

July 17, 2025

You’re doing the work to stop binge eating, but you’re not seeing results yet. Today, we’ll dive into an often overlooked skill: how to stay patient in binge eating recovery.

Whether you're just starting your confident eater journey or you’re months in and wondering if you're doing it "right," this episode will help you zoom out, stay motivated, and trust your path.

I cover…

• What actually causes us to feel impatient & want to give up

• What to do when you feel like “nothing’s working”

• The hidden signs of progress in binge eating recovery

• The mindset shift that helps you stay committed and consistent

TRANSCRIPT:

 Happy Thursday confident Eaters. Today we're talking about patience. And lemme tell you the theme of my life, the past few months has been patience, and so I was really excited to have this conversation with you today because I know how easy it is to get impatient when you're trying to change your eating habits and stop overeating too.

Even just before I hit record on this episode, my cat was scratching up my bed and my furniture and was really testing my patients. So this is a skill that is important to have in so many other areas of life, whether it be changing our eating habits or in our relationships, or just any of our other goals.

Patience is a very necessary emotion to have in order to get through the hard parts. So a few areas that I first want to give an example of where I've been using patience is in my friendships. I have wanted to create new entrepreneur,  besties for a couple of months now, and I have done my best to achieve this goal.

I posted in a Facebook group with a whole bunch of other women entrepreneurs, and I asked who wanted to be my friends. I met up with some of them and I'm starting to create these friendships and I found myself last weekend being like, I just wish I could have my friends come over and watch movies with me on the couch and hang out, and I'm sure I could ask them to do that, and maybe that is my next step.

But I know it also takes time and patience for someone to go from a stranger to a best friend. And so I have to be patient on my journey to want new BFFs and realize that I need to continue to invest in more time before it gets to that point.

I also have a goal this year for myself to get on 50 podcasts and be a guest on them, and it has been so much fun. I have been on 23 so far, so I'm getting closer to my goal, but it's hard to see fully when and where people find me and come into my world. So I haven't really seen specific evidence yet of new people joining into my world in my podcast, my Instagram and finding me. So I felt a little impatient with that process of when am I gonna get the results of being on these podcasts and having some awesome new people in my audience.

So this feeling of impatience comes up when we are doing the hard work. We are taking the actions, but we don't get to see the results yet. The results are still pending. They're in line to come, but we have to continue doing the hard work in order to get there.

We feel impatient from thoughts like, this is taking too long I'm not making progress. I should be there by now. I shouldn't still be struggling with this. I just want to be done with this all. That creates the feeling of impatience. So notice if you're thinking any of these thoughts while you're trying to stop binge eating.

When we feel impatient with our journey, then we want to give up. We feel unmotivated. We stop trying, which results? What we want happening even slower in taking more time.

So if you feel like I've been doing all the actions, I've been eating mindfully, I've been listening to my hunger in fullness. I have been listening to Amber's podcast religiously, but it is still not happening where I'm not losing weight, where I'm still binge eating, where I'm still having slipups more than I want to.

Notice that if you tell yourself, this is taking too long, it's too hard and you're feeling impatient, what do you do? You probably give up and say, screw it. I'm not gonna even try. Let me just go binge anyways. There's no point. I'm never gonna change. It's just not possible for me.

And then you're never going to stop binge eating and overeating. You're always going to be this person, and you're never gonna get to the place where you're gonna be this natural, normal, confident eater. So it's going to take as long as it needs to take, and giving up will not help us get there any faster.

Here's another thing about impatience. Impatience is usually grief in disguise. We feel the grief that it's not happening on our timeline, that we thought we would stop bingeing by now and we're not. There's the grief of the version of your life you imagine having by now, that you don't quite have yet. There's the grief that you feel like you're doing everything right and it still doesn't feel like enough.

So I want you to give yourself time and space to process any of this grief that's coming up, any of this feeling of loss around what you wanted, and knowing that you haven't actually truly lost it. It just coming differently than you imagined. And so we're having to grieve our old expectations of that.

The first question I want you to ask yourself if you find yourself in this impatient position is first, do you believe you're doing the right things?

Now, there's no way to know 100% sure if what you're doing is the right actions or the wrong actions. So my follow up question would be then. Would this be your best guess of what you believe is right to do?

Sometimes we feel impatient because we're doing the wrong things, and maybe it actually is taking much longer than it needs to take. So maybe we need to try something new. Maybe you need to try new strategy. Maybe with what you're doing right now, it's not right for where you are in your journey with food. Maybe you need to change your mindset. You're having the wrong thoughts around food, and that's making it take longer. If you're still dieting, that is definitely doing the wrong things. If your goal is to lose weight, be healthy and be a normal eater.

Now when you're dieting, it can feel like you're working so hard. It can feel like you're spending so much time doing it. You're using so much energy and willpower and effort, but what you're actually doing is just running in place, right?

Imagine if you're standing in place and you're running, you're using a lot of energy for that, but you're not actually going anywhere. So again, there's no way to know 100% sure if you're on the right path or the wrong path, but taking your best guess based on what you know in the past, based on what you've learned from me in this podcast of do I feel like I'm doing the right things? And if you're not sure, feel free to shoot me on message on Instagram. My Instagram is in the show notes always, and I'm happy to navigate with you your actions are in the right place and you should need to be patient. Or maybe you need to make a little bit of a shift.

Okay? But let's say that you are doing what you would trust to be the right path, and you're still not getting results. They still haven't come at the speed that you want them to.

First of all, we need to define what does it even mean to be getting results Specifically?

For most people, they look and see, oh, I'm not losing weight, and that means I'm not getting results. But is that true that you're getting zero results just because the number on the scale has not gone down?

No. The number on the scale is just a measure of our gravitational pull on this Earth cannot tell us how well we are eating. It cannot tell us how healthy we are. It could give us a small hint, but it's not even telling us how much fat we have on our body. It's literally just telling us our overall mass.

And is losing weight your only goal if you lost 10 pounds, but you still felt like shit around food. You were still thinking about it all day. You were still struggling with food noise all the time. You still panicked every time you went to a restaurant.  you still had to have your husband lock your cabinets so you didn't get into them.

Would that really be what you wanted? My guess is probably not. You want more than just losing weight, and just because the weight doesn't go down, that doesn't mean you're getting zero results. There is something still changing, likely, you know, maybe there's not. Maybe if you're gaining weight, there is nothing changing.

But again, we're we're guessing that you're taking the right actions here, that you are on the right path. You're just having to wait and be patient a little bit longer.

Maybe getting results to you mean you've completely stopped binge eating, and even that can be a little bit vague. Does that mean you've never binged again? And only then are you getting results? Does that mean you've gone a week without binge eating a couple days? Because every single day you don't binge. You are getting results. You are being a normal, natural eater. You are getting closer to your goal of never binge eating again.

So really defining for yourself, what does it mean to get results or not get to results, and is it true that there's nothing I am accomplishing in my eating goals right now?

My guess is there is probably one area that you can find you are improving on, even if that area is just, I am feeling more patient with my journey. I'm not giving up so quickly. I am continuing on when most people would give up at this point, most people are not very patient people in this world.

This is why people don't have successful businesses. This is why people are overweight. This is why people don't exercise  It's because they are impatient. They're not willing to wait for the results, and they're not willing to do the hard work and to take these actions even when you can't really see what's changing.

But what can help with this is to see what are the small wins that I can celebrate? What are the signs that I am making progress?

This is why in my Confident Eater Program, when I work with people, I give you a progress tracker that we do together. That is a way to help keep yourself accountable and see all the areas you're changing in that have nothing to do with the scale.

Some other signs that you can look for are, do you have more awareness around food and your thoughts around food, your feelings around food when you binge, when you don't binge. Are you sitting with your emotions more, allowing them, telling yourself you're safe  to feel them accepting when you feel sad instead of going to food right away.

Are you eating more mindfully? Are you chewing slower, giving yourself more time to eat your meals, sitting at a table, turning off the tv? Are you listening to your hunger a bit more? Giving yourself food when you are hungry and not restricting or allowing yourself to sit with hunger. And not just panicking and acting on it right away. Maybe you're stopping at fullness a little bit better, or even at one meal a day, speaking kinder to yourself, not being a big bully, pausing more before you eat, before you take an action.

All of these things are examples of ways that you are changing that you might not even notice. And if we don't notice them. We don't get to feel the joy and pride with them, which is what reinforces those habits and makes it more likely that we'll continue doing them. So it's so, so important to start to see these little wins because they're not so little after all.

All of my most successful clients, the ones that change the fastest in my program, the number one thing they all have in common is that they always celebrate their wins, and they do it often in big. This doesn't mean you need to go get a massage or treat yourself. What it means is taking time out of your day to say, I'm proud of you. You did amazing pausing when you had that urge. Look how great you did today with Waiting for Hunger.

When they do that, they continue to feel motivated. They see all the ways that they're changing, and then they actually change more and faster. So it's the easiest thing you can do to 10 x Your success today is just to celebrate your wins more.

If you were to look at the timeline of what you think, I want you to look at what do you expect yourself to do in a certain amount of timeline and why? What do you expect yourself to accomplish in one month, in two months, in three months, six months, a year? And why have you set that timeline for yourself?

It's really interesting to see what artificial timelines our brain puts on our goals. For example, with my friendship goal, I have this underlying expectation of, well, we should just hang out like two or three times and we should be best friends, and then I shouldn't have to work at this anymore, I should just have my besties. And it's like, hmm, that might not be a realistic expectation to have to grow a deep relationship.

Are you expecting to change your eating habits in a month after you've struggled with them for 20 years? And why do you expect that of yourself Now? Of course, in our modern day society, and with all the marketing that goes around, we are usually taught to expect something faster than it actually will happen because it makes good marketing.

If someone can tell you, Hey, you can lose weight in 30 days and then never have to lose weight again, it's going to sell very well, but that's just not really realistic for what our body can safely do to lose weight. It takes a long time to lose weight happens pretty slowly if we want it to be sustainable. If you actually want to lose it and have it never ever come back.

Something that's come up with my clients before is my confident eater program is six months. Some people think, well, I must change in six months then, but the truth is, even though my program is six months, and most people do change in that time, that nothing has gone wrong. If it takes you seven months or eight months or nine months, because again, I want you to think about when you've had these habits for how many years? You should give yourself at least that many years to solve it.

Now, of course, it's not gonna actually take that many years. If you've been struggling with 10 years, it's not gonna take 10 years to solve it. But I would give yourself that permission that if it needs to take 10 years to solve this, I will give myself that time, because that's how long it took to build these habits.  And then when you do give yourself as much time as you need to change your eating habits. Then every day you show up to eat normally it's going to feel so much lighter and easier, and when you don't have that pressure, you're actually going to change faster. Right. It's kind of the irony in it all that when we take the pressure off of it. When we take the, I must need to change now and this needs to happen today, it actually happens so much faster.

Let's come back to your vision of what you want for your future. We tend to get impatient when we are focusing too much on what we notice in our life today. What results we may or may not have created, and I want you to zoom out a bit of what will be the impact of the positive changes you're making today in a year from now, in five years from now, in 10 years, 20 years from now.

Like really take a moment, pause this episode even to think about if I continue doing these positive habits, what will my future look like? Create that positive vision for yourself. Remind yourself of why this is so important to you in the first place of how you wanna be around for your kids for years to come,  of how you want them to have a beautiful example of a mom who treats their body well and has a beautiful relationship with food.

The vision where you can go to weddings and birthday parties and not be binging in the corner on the dessert table. That future where you're able to travel anywhere in the world that you want without needing to count calories because you trust your hunger and fullness and you know how to use your built-in calorie counter that way.

Where every day you get dressed, you are kind to your body and you feel confident. You can go out on dates with a new partner or with your  current partner, and you just radiate joy and confidence because you're treating yourself well.

Where anytime you feel a strong emotion, negative or positive. You allow yourself to feel it fully. Instead of going to food, get super duper clear just how I was right now, of the specific ways your life is going to change when you become a confident eater and stay clear on that vision because that's what will help motivate you so that you don't give up.

Okay. The final question I wanna leave you with today. Is, how would you act today if you knew that everything was gonna work out, that the future was inevitable, where you were going to be a normal natural eater and stop binge eating for good?

If you knew that was 100% true and everything was gonna work out, how would you act today? When you start showing up as that person, you'll direct your future there. It's like when you look at an airplane, you can tell what direction they're going before they get there.

So if you start showing up as that future version of yourself, who is eating when they're hungry and stopping when they're full, letting go of their diet mindset, working on changing their mindset around food because you knew that this was going to work out, that is what will make this future inevitable.

All right have an awesome week. Stay patient with yourself, with others, with your journey, with your goals in any area of life because patience is what will allow you to keep going.