Ep 77- 4 Insights from Brain Science That Can Help You Stop Binge Eating for Good
July 31, 2025
Today I share the top 4 things I learned from a Practical Neuroscience Training I attended in Vegas this week! This will give you a sneak peak into how my coaching works & how I incorporate the latest research to help you stop binge eating.
We’ll be getting a bit more science-y today, but I promise, these insights will blow your mind.
I cover:
Why you don’t need to find the root cause to change your habits
The surprising OCD study that proved “mind over matter” is real
The 3 non-negotiables for neuroplasticity to happen in the brain
How unconscious beliefs (like “I’m addicted to food”) secretly run the show
Why typical overeating advice misses 95% of the problem
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, confident Eaters. I just got back from an amazing week away. I took the week off to go to Delaware for a family reunion. I got to spend a lot of awesome time at the beach, and then I went straight to Vegas for a two day Practical neuroscience training and a hypnosis conference. So I had a lot of learning and a lot of insights that I wanted to share with you this week.
Now, next week, I decided to break this episode up into kind of two episodes, so we will be talking about how you can use hypnosis to help you stop overeating. Hypnosis is something I use a lot in my coaching. Something you may not know about me, because I tend to bring more of the practical side of things to the podcast so you can listen to it in a very practical way because a lot of times hypnosis, it needs to be pretty customized pretty unique for what you're dealing with in that moment. It's a little bit harder to do it on your own. There are like general hypnosis that you can find online, but I find them not very effective because again, it's not targeting what you're working on uniquely.
So if you're not already hitting, follow and subscribing to the podcast, make sure you are so you can learn more about the latest research on hypnosis and its implications for changing our eating habits next week.
But today we're gonna talk about just some of my top takeaways and what the latest research shows about changing our habits and changing our brain. I am gonna go over these things that I think you need to know about the latest neuroscience and how they can apply to helping you stop binge eating. Now, I'm gonna try to stay away from too much lingo here, at least break it down but this is an episode on neuroscience, so I'm gonna use a couple bigger words, but stick with me. I knew you were all very smart people so you can handle it. And this will really give you the behind the scenes of how my coaching works too and why it is so potent and effective and completely unique from anyone else in this industry.
I see so many coaches who are really just mentors telling you exactly what to do based off of what they read in a book online. And nothing wrong with that, but it's kind of all the same regurgitated Bs of eat this many calories, track your macros, have this portion of protein, drink more water, go for a walk.
All of these things are fine. They're an important aspect of your health and they can work, but it's not gonna help you stop binge eating permanently because they aren't changing your brain or dressing all the habits and beliefs underneath the overeating.
So when we're working together, you truly do get the latest neuroscience. I go to this hypnosis conference every year to learn all the new research so I can help you change even faster. I know that if you decide to work with me one-on-one, my program is not the cheapest thing on the market, nor do you want it to be the cheapest thing.
I'm working with an aesthetician right now to help my skin, and she had me start this really expensive cream called Osmosis Rescue md. It's like $180. Okay. And I am someone who spends like $50 on skincare the entire year. So it was a big shock to me, but she was like, no, you can find these ingredients anywhere else in any other sort of product you need this one in it. I must admit, it has been pretty life changing. I would recommend it. It has really helped my skin. Okay.
But that's kinda the same thing with coaching. You get what you pay for and I want you to get the best of the best information so we can actually change your eating habits so much faster and permanently.
Okay? So what I do in my coaching at a high level is called therapeutic memory reconsolidation. This is the way of accessing a memory that's going to light up all associated neural networks.
So what this looks like practically is I almost always start my coaching sessions with asking, what do you want to change today specifically? When did that happen specifically? Tell me about this last time that you overate specifically, and I'm always trying to find the specifics because when we get that unique, specific moment of what you want to change, what that does in that moment is it is locking that neural network and makes it changeable.
You now have essentially taken the key into your brain, made it unlocked, so now we can change your reaction to these foods, to these habits. So when you say, for example, I walked into the party with my husband and I spotted the dessert table with 30 options, and I felt the swelling of energy and anxiety come over me and I was just so stressed because I felt like I was going to eat it all. I felt like I couldn't handle myself around that food. When you have activated that, that is now a well lit up brain pathway, that now can be changed. So a big mistake people do when they're trying to make change their eating habits is like, well, I just wanna lose weight. Well, I just wanna stop overeating. And then we talk about it on a very conceptual level, but we don't get down to those specific moments, and we need those specific moments literally, in order to rewire your brain.
Now with therapeutic memory reconsolidation, the new science shows us that you do not need to go to the original memory to change your brain. This is often what is taught in therapy that you need to find the core origin of where all of this started, when really that is just not necessary. So oftentimes in therapy, you'll be asked like, what happened in childhood? What was going on in your life when you first started dieting? And there might be some insights there. It's not that it doesn't work to go there, it's just it's not necessary. And honestly, a lot of us started binge eating and struggling with food the second we started dieting. It wasn't like some big traumatic thing happened in our life. It's, no, we were 15, we thought we were too fat. We went on a diet, we restricted our calories, and then next thing you know, we're struggling food for the next 20 years. That is what, how binge eating formed for most of us.
So the good news is that you don't need to spend the next 10 years in therapy in order to rewire your brain. All you need to do is find a specific moment that's happened specifically, and then you'll be able to change everything else.
So how this works is, let's say you go into the party and you change how you react. You have learned through coaching or you've done your own mindset work to feel calm when you walk into the party.
When you go into the party, you feel calm. You don't binge at that table. That change in your brain will update and it will generalize out and change all other associations. It's like a domino effect. So when you change how you act at that party, that will also change the first time you ever binged at a wedding 10 years ago and everything ripples out. So that's good news because hello, we don't need to change every single event that's ever happened. We just need to change the one. So you can rewrite your early learnings, all of the beliefs that you took on from childhood, which there's probably a lot that you wanna get rid of. We can change these. We can rewrite our story with memory reconsolidation. It's not permanent. It's one of the biggest advancements in the mental health world. No one else is talking about this that I know of in the, at least the eating world. But I promise you, in the next 10, 20 years, you are going to be hearing about therapeutic memory reconsolidation, because it is truly like life changing.
A good example of this in play is, let's say you're walking down the stairs and you don't realize there's another step. You know, like you thought you were at the end of the stairs and then you stumble and you're like, oh my gosh, there's another step. What happens in that moment? Your brain wakes up and starts to pay attention. It hyper focuses in on what just happened. You look at that stare and you're like, oh, I didn't even know there was another stare there. And it focuses in so it can update because it predicted that there wasn't another stare and there was, so this prediction error happens, and this is the moment we start to change when we have a prediction error. When your brain predicts.
Tonight, we're gonna feel anxious after dinner and we're gonna want to binge. And then you don't feel anxious after dinner anymore, and you don't binge. Your brain is like a Google document and it will rewrite it in that moment. So that is literally how your brain changes.
Okay, so the second insight comes from a study done by Jeffrey Schwartz. Jeffrey Schwartz was an OCD researcher and what he did truly revolutionized the way we thought about our thoughts. It was basically the study, the start of a lot of what we know now about cognitive behavioral therapy and essentially changing our thoughts, seeing how our thoughts are not true. Updating our mindset.
So what he did is he took people with OCD, the people who would wash their hands for like two hours. He put them in a brain scan, he took them out and he showed people their brains in the specific region of their brains from the brain scan and said, this is where your brain is making a mistake. You can literally see it lighting up in the brain scan. This is where you think your hands are dirty, but they are not. And in a few weeks they went back into that brain scan. After consistently telling themself, my brain is making a mistake here when I want to wash my hands for another two hours, this is not actually me. This is my brain doing its thing, making this mistake. And when they went back in their brain scan, their brains looked totally different. That part of their brain that was activated before when they had OCD was no longer active.
This is actually what I do in my guided audio to help you stop a binge. So if you have gone down to the show notes before ever, and if you have not, you can go there now and downloaded my guided audio to help you stop a binge. I do this in the audio. I remind you that your brain is making a mistake. You don't actually want to binge, you don't need a lot of food, especially and only really if you are no longer dieting, if you are starting to eat consistent meals again, if you are refueling yourself, if you are eating mostly nourishing foods with some foods in there for pleasure, and your brain is still telling you, I need to binge right now, I need to eat more. What it's doing is going on a habit loop that is not indicative of who you are, what you really want. It's just like an old record player going around.
So this study was one of the first pieces of scientific evidence showing that this mind over matter could physically rewire the brain or neuroscience terms, that intentional mental activity could change the brain's function, which is a core concept in neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is the ability for your brain to rewire itself. And this is my third insight, something that we learned that's really interesting. In order for neuroplasticity to happen so in order for you to go someone who is binge eating to someone who's not binge eating and changing your brain, so it lasts forever, a few things must happen.
We used to think for a long time that your brain did not change after you were five, that you just had your habits and that's just the way you were, unfortunately. And then we sort of thought, okay, no, your brain is actually updating and changing all the time. And yes, our brain is learning in every moment, but we're not actually rewiring our brain in every moment.
And this was something really new for me as well, because what the latest research has shown is that in order for our brain to change, we need two things. Awareness and attention. If we do not have awareness and attention, our brain does not change. Your brain does not rewire itself just because you do something new.
So what this looks like practically is you need to be aware of when do I binge, when does it happen, what do I wanna change? And then have your attention on it. Not in an obsessive way, but as in making it a goal. Making it a goal that today I am going to leave food behind on my plate to get out of this habit of finishing my plate
when you are a child, every new experience, more or less does change your brain, but as we are adults, our brain does get more rigid. That does not mean it's not going to change. Do not use this piece of evidence against yourself, okay? I promise you adults brains can still change, but because we have habits that try to make our life easier and to save brain energy, they do start to become more rigid. So we have to have alertness on our habits so we have to have awareness and attention.
And then the second part that we need is sleep. Neuroplasticity happens when we sleep, but what's interesting is it also happens during non-LEP, deep rest, which occurs during hypnosis. Non-LEP deep rest is when we are not sleeping. It's like exactly as it sounds when we're not sleeping, but we're resting. So what this can look like is when you close your eyes for 10 minutes, but you don't actually fall asleep.
Those moments increase the rate that neuroplasticity happens. This is also called Yoga Nidra, but it's kind of been rebranded as Nons Sleep Deep Rest. And oftentimes what really helps it is having this guided portion to it. So not only just like closing your eyes and zoning out, although that can be effective for neuroplasticity, but what also can help is having a guide through it. So having someone, for example, I do visualization a lot in my coaching sessions, so I'll walk someone through, okay, you're finishing up dinner, you are washing the plates, you're feeling excited to watch your TV show. You clean everything up. You notice the pantry, you walk right past it. Like I guide them very specifically through the steps that they want to implement. And the actions they wanna take so they don't overeat at night. And that in that trance state is where neuroplasticity happens.
Okay. My final insight that I'm gonna leave you with today is that our unconscious brain is always at play. 95% of our processing every single day happens in our unconscious. That means only 5% of what we are doing is in our conscious awareness.
It is not very much, and this means we need to address our deeper layers of our brain. It's not enough to just read a book and hope that it sticks. It is not enough to just scroll on TikTok and see a couple tips and try to implement them. They can work for a little bit. But if your unconscious brain, the whole time is telling you in believing how you can't stop binge eating, how you are just addicted to food, how it's too hard for you to lose weight, guess what? Those things are all gonna play out. So two things that prove this. I mean, there's a lot of them that I could go over, but two I wanna share today. One is that people hold a warm mug or more likely to rate the others around them as warmer, friendly. Why is this? This is because when we are babies, everything that is warm means good for our survival. A warm dry diaper, a warm hug against the mother's chest warm breast milk. And everything cold means bad. A wet, soggy diaper being left alone, a cold front coming in without a blanket. So in our unconscious mind, we do not consciously think, oh, warm is good. We might know that, oh, I feel good when I have a blanket on, or I don't like being cold. But it's because our unconscious brain has learned from childhood that warm is good, that when we do something like hold a warm mug, we we're more likely to believe that others around us are good, and that they're friendly and that they're open.
Not because they actually are, maybe they are, but because we have something warm into our unconscious brain that means safe, good. All of those things. So one interesting one that involves food. There was a study done where people held grocery baskets, so they're like pulling in a grocery basket, bought more of the things that they didn't wanna buy than those who pushed a cart.
Let's think about why this is when we're pulling a basket into us. It signals to our unconscious brain. We're pulling things in, so we're more likely to pull in things out of the grocery aisle and get those fruit snacks and get those cookies and pulling them in versus the unconscious signal of when we're pushing a grocery Our unconscious interprets that as we're pushing things away. So I share this because your brain is so, so much more powerful than you think, and it is really fascinating when you start to look in all the studies about it. And the truth is, if you are not doing things that address your unconscious brain, you are missing 95% of the puzzle.
So if this is something you'd like to work through and you want someone who's truly an expert in helping people stop binge eating with the latest neuroscience and psychology, I would love to help you.
In my one-on-one coaching program. You and I will get together every single week, and this alone is so powerful because we're bringing in that awareness and attention. Like we said, that's necessary for neuroplasticity to happen. You're bringing your attention to your eating habits each and every week. It's hard to keep ourself accountable guys, we're so busy these days. So if we are not setting aside time to work on our eating habits, bringing that attention to it, and we aren't aware of what's at play, we're not gonna change.
Don't need to be the negative Nancy here, but I just wanna be honest with you about what we know about brain change. Because I see so many people stuck for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 plus years, still gaining weight, still overeating, having horrible health consequences. IBS Diabetes and they wish they would've gotten out of this sooner, was something that actually worked not with a diet, not with a random meal plan, not with a personal trainer, but with someone who actually understands the brain.
So I have a free consultation call in the show notes if you are interested in making an investment in yourself to do something new, to learn how to become a normal, natural eater who never struggles with food again. This is what I can help you do in my six month Confident Eater program.
Okay. I'd love to have you join me next week so you can learn all about hypnosis and how we can use hypnosis and what the science says about how hypnosis can help us stop overeating. Have a good week.