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Why I binge ate two Magnums and a snickers bar

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After a 4 month sugar free diet (couldn’t even eat a carrot!?), I found myself scootering to a mini mart on a desperate mission.

I bought a white chocolate Magnum, a dark chocolate Magnum and a Snickers bar, then went back to my bungalow in Canggu, Bali and ate them all in secret.

Then I felt sick.

And then I did the same thing the next day.

And again a week later.

< Pst – note from Andrea — this is a flashback post that I originally posted back in 2015! — I’m currently bloody busy running corporate workshops for the next few weeks so I haven’t had the brain space to write any new blogs… so in the meantime here ya go! >

I had been following a sugar-fruit-grain-refined-carb free diet (the Candida diet) bloody strictly for the four months before (to heal my digestive tract after two years of too many antibiotics and drinking excessively and eating peanut M&Ms daily while superyachting).

Then suddenly without warning, I swung full tilt over to the other side of the pendulum, hell bent on undoing my four months of good work.

All-or-nothing is my middle name. Also, Patricia.

For someone who had been so “healthy” for so long, and who coaches people on managing emotions,

I was pretty shocked to find myself bingeing with wild-ish abandon, unable or willing to stop myself.

I felt rather out of control.

This all occurred just before I headed off on a week long detox retreat in Bali where we drank 2 green juices a day plus a few herbs, and nothing else. I was mildly hopeful that the Detox would fix the damage I’d done after so many months of carefully helping my gut to repair itself.

They say that long distance relationships give you clarity on the health of the relationship.

If you’re in a bad relationship, you often don’t realise it until you take some space away and see things that you couldn’t see while wrapped up in the other person. Or in a plate of nachos, which, incidentally, I dreamed about for the entire 7 day detox retreat.

When I do long distance with my partner, it makes me even clearer how wonderful our relationship is.

The long distance with food made me realise that me and my other love (food) may have more of an abusive relationship than I realised.

Food and I were previously too entwined for me to see the dysfunction.

The day after the detox retreat I was feeling great again – energetic, light, clear headed.

They warned us not to eat any fats for a couple of days after the retreat to give our digestive system a chance to gear back up.

So I immediately ate a pizza. As I’d been warned, my stomach was not having a bar of it, and I had to prematurely end a coaching call to throw up unexpectedly.

I couldn’t believe the ridiculousness of my behaviour, yet the next day,

I tested out my body again and ate the second half of the pizza.

In recent years I’d thought that I had a pretty healthy attitude to food, I’d cleaned up my diet a lot since my toast-two-minute-noodle-red-bull architecture days.

As a coeliac, it has been very common in the past for me to go out to dinner or to a BBQ and end up not able to eat much (or anything) because everything was covered in some form of gluteny marinade or cooked by someone who doesn’t understand cross-contamination.

Or because some dude inevitably pours beer over the barbie and dips bread in all the gluten free dips.

There’s been many times I’ve sat and drank wine while all my friends eat something delicious. Specially when living in France, where they repeatedly did not give a shit about dietary requirements, despite me explaining in fairly fluent french, j’ai la maladie coeliaque et je dois suivre un régimé absolument sans gluten… to which they responded “eh”, and brought me out a steak on top of a piece of bread.

I also have this odd thing called dysautonomia, where my nervous system freaks out in response to certain triggers and I sometimes I have to lie on the ground unexpectedly to stop myself from fainting.

Sometimes in random public places, like that time in Ikea where I had to lie down on a pile of door mats. It makes my heart feel weird and my limbs all shaky, so I avoid it at all costs. One of my triggers for this is hunger.

So, naturally, I have developed a fear of being hungry.

Which has lead me to a sort of frantic style of eating. I eat rapidly, and all the bloody time.

I hate not having control over when I can eat, so I eat always, just in case, and I overeat, just in case.

Before I go out for dinner, I’ll eat. When I get home from an event, I’ll eat, even if it’s really late and I’m about to go to bed, because I know that if I wake up hungry in the morning, I’ll often get the shaky, nauseating response.

When I’m cooking dinner, I’ll eat other random things I find in the fridge as I go, like blocks of cheese. Then even though I’m not hungry, I’ll eat dinner too, and probably the leftovers intended for tomorrow as well.

Turns out I use overeating as a control strategy to avoid my fear of getting the full body shakes.

I’m feeding my fear, not my hunger.

As we learnt during my health coaching training, over or under-eating is never much to do with the food itself. It’s almost always about some underlying emotion we’re trying to avoid.

This was a big revelation to me when I learnt it, but I always thought it applied to other people, not me!

I decided to write this post even though I’m embarrassed about it to open up the discussion around these ‘secret’ behaviours that so many of us have shame about.

How many of us are doing things in secret?

Things that we’d never let others see us do, not even our partners or parents?

Things that we’d never tell anyone?

We hide our behaviours, we feel guilty about our lack of self-control, we berate ourselves, and then the guilt and shame lead us to feel hopeless, and so we do it again.

Rather than hiding my ridiculous eating habits, like I have in the past, I decided to tell a few of my friends.

Many of them nodded knowingly and contributed their own stories of random binge eating, and I started to realise that this is way, way more common than I realised. It made me feel way better.

Coaching has shown me loud and clear that almost all of us think that we’re alone in our struggles with our mind – we think that no one else could behave as self-destructively and illogically as we do.

Many of my 1:1 coaching clients say that they’re super relieved to read that I stay up doom scrolling instagram til 1am and eating too many M&Ms and picking pointless fights with my boyfriends too, it’s a relief to know that they’re not the only one. And that it’s possible (and normal) to have ridiculous self-destructive habits and still live a bloody good life.

So if you find yourself secretly eating an entire packet of Coles gluten free chocolate chip biscuits and throwing away the packet in someone else’s wheelie bin before you get home,

or making late night trips to McDonald’s alone for an M&M’s McFlurry with caramel sauce (just me?!)…

I hope that it will help to know that you’re very far from alone.

It’s just our mind doing what it does best – trying to avoid uncomfortable emotions by bingeing on biscuits.

(Or work, shopping, sugar, alcohol, drugs, social media…)

It’s not something wrong with us, just a sign that there’s some work to be done on uncovering lurking emotions.

This is where learning to tame our mind comes in bloody handy. Once we can see our unhelpful patterns, we start to become aware of the emotions that are running the show.

When we turn towards our emotions with curiosity rather than judgement and shame, they often have important things to tell us.

And when we listen for a change, they pass on in their own time.

Without having to expend all our energy on suppressing parts of ourselves, we become lighter.

Freer. More authentically “our self”

“Doing the work” to understand our mind and emotions is the most important work I’ve ever done (and continue to do).

I believe it’s the only sure path to a truly fulfilled Bloody Good Life.

I’ll be working on my lurky emotions right alongside you (probably with some cheese nearby).

If you’re not sure where to start with “doing the work”, check out the Bloody Good Life program, it’s where I’ve put all the best tools I know for helping you to be more “you”.

Ps — To learn more about regulating your emotions like the kind of legend that doesn’t throw coke at me, head over here to check out Bloody Good Life, an unconventional mind-taming program for overthinkers.

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