I enjoyed and "got" the book but struggle to put it into practice. I spent 10 years in OA basically learning that overeating is an incurable disease and I'd never find any relief from it until I became a perfect OAer. I'm still trying to unlearn those teachings and it's difficult. But I think overeating is exactly like smoking in so much as it is a bad habit. Unfortunately you cannot just stop eating.

I've finished the book and agree with virtually everything the author says. In a nutshell, she posits that:

• Binge-eating is nothing more than a bad habit that's become entrenched
• Bingeing does not fulfill a deep-seated psychological need that must be addressed in order to beat the disorder
  • We have more control over our bingeing than we think, but we don't fully "get" that we're in the driver's seat so we don't assert our control
• The only way to stop bingeing is to stop bingeing (circular, I know)
• Once you train your brain to resist the urge to binge, doing so becomes progressively easier.

According to Hansen, white-knuckling is not a good way to begin resisting the urges. A better way is to distance yourself from these urges -- to treat them as neurological junk produced by your lower brain and at odds with your true desires. Once she was able to create this separation in her mind, resisting the urges became a lot easier than before -- and soon became effortless.

I found it refreshing that Hansen identifies binges as pleasurable. In other books and articles, binges are often portrayed as compulsive and joyless events. (I think people are afraid of pointing the gluttony finger; without pleasure, there can't be gluttony.) I beg to differ: there's the pleasure of anticipation, of planning, of preparing food, of eating with abandon, of feeling very full -- and of course, the sensuous pleasure of the food itself. Even if someone eats to the point of intense discomfort, there are many pleasure points along the way. Hansen says she had to face the loss of this pleasure head-on. Realizing she was trading it for even greater pleasures (full engagement with family and friends, pursuit of life goals) helped her stay the course.

So... all in all I heartily endorse the author's philosophy, while acknowledging that it may not click for others as easily it did for her. It's really more an attitude shift than anything else.

There's just one of Hansen's tenets that I disagree with: she maintains that there's no point trying to find substitute activities for a binge, because such activities just won't cut it. If you feel the need to binge, having a hot bath or cup of tea won't do the trick, she says. While this may be true in some cases, I believe that cultivating other pleasurable pursuits can help fill the void created when giving up the pleasure of binging.

Freelance

p.s.: The author had a variant of bulimia called exercise bulimia, which involves "purging" through exercise. It amazed me to learn that she would have a 7,000 calorie binge on one day, and spend 7 hours in the gym the next day to burn it off. So much time! Apparently she tried several times to make herself throw up, but was physically unable to do so.

It's all about changing your mind. There are useful lessons to be learned a long the way and none of us adhere to one method. I tried to do BoB 2yrs ago and found it really hard to put it into practice. At that time though I had no relationship with my own hunger/fullness signals. I had no idea how to nurture myself. I had a good-food-bad-food approach to eating and I was stuck in compulsive cycles of restriction and then binging. At the time, applying the BoB approach felt like restriction and white knuckling. Of course it didn't work. I can imagine though that now that I'm more in touch with my body's needs and all the hard work I've put into intuitive eating that BoB makes a lot more sense to me now. I can now separate between my emotional eating and my habitual eating. At the end of the day we develop habits and how we face our binge is very personal. If it's one thing that IE suggests is to "sit with one's feelings."

To me, BINGE is a feeling. It's a strong urge. So I've been trying to sit with this feeling. I am trying not to judge it, not to question it, not to ignore it or to fight it. I just sit and observe it. I tell myself it's ok to feel this. I tell myself that it will pass and to just observe it as it flows in and out of me. I'm at the start of this right now so I don't know how well I will do with it. I had a strong urge to eat oreos last night and tried this technique and it did pass. So we'll see. One thing I know for sure - eating is a behavior and I have to change my behavior and to do that I have to change my mind.

@freelance how's it going with BOB? Is it working?

So far it hasn't made much difference in my eating, but I've been applying the general philosophy to other areas of my life.

I think my mental block is that I haven't accepted (let alone embraced) the idea of moderation yet. I do it when I have to, but I resent it. Obviously I need an attitude adjustment.

F.

But you've lost a lot of weight and kept it off.

This post is so perfect, you hit the nail on the head with everything and your summary was spot on.

I also agree that it does help sometimes to have alternative behaviors as long as the behavior itself is not your primary means of getting through the binge, but rather a supplemental sort of thing. She even recommends this as an option in her workbook.

I'm just speaking for myself here but I strongly believe that learning how to eat according to physical hunger, getting in touch with those natural physiological satiety signals is so freaking essential to succeeding with the Brain Over Binge method.

Kathryn was "naturally skinny" before her eating disorder began and she had that "when I'm hungry I eat. when I'm not hungry I don't care to" relationship with food, which she remembered clearly even during her ED days. After her recovery, she returned right back to that way of eating and her weight gained from binge eating dropped right off.

I just read in my physiology book that mammals actually have a built-in weight regulation system. If an animal is force fed an excessive amount of food to the point of weight gain, once it's allowed to eat according to it's physiological cues again, it's body actually directs it towards eating less food, so that it can return to it's natural size.

My theory is that the reason we don't see this in humans is because we humans get SO intimately involved with our psychological impulses to eat (binge eating, as well as other compulsive or even moderate-intensity overeating behaviors), ignoring our physical ones almost completely, that we don't even realize that if we WEREN'T gorging ourselves all the time for a million reasons besides actual hunger, we would probably be LOSING weight pretty much effortlessly.

Also I want to target what you said about moderation. I don't like that word because again, it feels artificial to me. Once you start learning to eat according to hunger then of course you'll have to learn when to say, "my body has had enough, it is time to stop eating." But to me, when people say moderation, I feel like they typically mean "portion out x amount of food and make sure you only eat that much".

When you're truly connected with your hunger/fullness signals you don't have to do that. You truly don't. I have had so many experiences when I was hungry (I like to start eating at a 2/3 on my "hunger scale"), started eating literally whatever (my preferred meals range from greek yogurt or grilled chicken wraps to the occasional meat lovers pizza & poptarts), and got to this point where I could just sense in my body that the food was sufficient and I was done. I didn't have to tell myself "don't eat any more pizza, one slice was enough!" - the type of behavior that most people would refer to as moderation. My body could just tell that the food was enough, it was physically satiated, and I obeyed.

Glad you're back yumsoup, I really want to learn more about BOB. I'm rereading the book again. When I did it the first time it didn't work because I was restricting myself pretty severely. I would set out to eat a very light meal and then tell myself that I would push away thoughts of eating and attribute them to my monkey brain. Although it felt ok to push away those thoughts I ultimately ended up binging because my body was truly hungry. Now that I've been practicing IE for over a year I'm familiar with the sensation of real hunger versus head hunger. Real hunger should never be ignored.

I haven't read this book, But I just finished Jon Gabriel's book on visualization that talks a lot about our Leptin resistance and how restrictive dieting mimics a famine. He calls this survival mode the FAT- famine & temperature program our caveman bodies have. Our Hypothalamus (or survival brain) does everything it can to conserve calories and build up fat stores if it believes a severe winter or famine is coming. This part of our brain only perceives that we are in stress and either determines that we are stressed because of famine & weather or determines we are stressed because we are being attacked ( like a bear chasing us). For one case- Our body hangs onto fuel- for the other (being chased) it releases our "fat" fuel so we can "run" fast. The thing is to get our caveman brains to believe we are being chased. Jon Gabriel has a great, fun way of doing this in his book about Visualization (I haven't read his "Gabriel Method" one.
BTW he has lost 202 pounds to goal where he has stayed doing these things. There is a lot of scientific stuff he explains, but I love doing the one where you visualize being chased and really believing it. You can up it by actually running faster, or running in place really fast while you visualize this (he uses crazy dogs-because they really did chase him once- I do the same with wasp- bee's & yellow jacket. Running as fast as I can (in place) but in my mind into my house where I slam the door and say to myself "Whew! Thank you body for releasing all that fat as fuel so I could run fast enough to safety. I'll check Out Brain Over Bing on my nook as soon as I can. Sounds like the same idea.(
http://www.3fatchicks.net/img/tulip-...9/129/211/.png )

I'm going to check out this book. I like the different attitude here... instead of the universally accepted psychological reason for eating. It makes so much more sense to me. I had a delightful childhood and while I've had some difficult times in my adult life, I was fat way before any of that happened so I can't blame those things. I always felt like I was searching for a reason that wasn't there and maybe relying on that too much... "i obviously have something wrong with me, and I can't fix it until I identify it, so I might as well keep eating". Sounds like this book is more likely to tell me something I can use to take control.

I don't like the word "moderation," much either. To me it means I need to be able to eat nice little lady-like servings of my trigger foods and I just can not do that.

Palestrina said:I like this very much. I'm going to try to do that instead of running away from my urges with busy, busy activity, or quickly giving in as though I don't want to give my better self time to offer a rebuttal.

I binged today. After two weeks of controlled sugar-free eating, I simply said to my husband, "Let's go to the Golden Corral!" and we did. I ate some of almost everything on the buffet and two desserts. Why? I really don't know. Yes, I was very hungry at the time but we could have gone to one of our usual lunch places where I could have had a nice salad. We just felt like doing something different and silly, but it is so not worth the regret afterward.

The word moderation does not mean that to me at all, I guess we all have different interpretations of what words mean. Moderation has nothing to do with being lady like. To me it means being able to encounter all foods with the same attitude. It does not mean to censor my eating experiences. Censoring and restricting always leads to binges.

Ahh, I remember the golden corral when I lived in the south. Super fun place. Glad we don't have buffets up here in nyc.

To me, moderation means: be reasonable.

That's the interesting thing about words, and specifically, about books regarding eating (or intuitive type programs). It all depends on your interpretation, your background, and your experience in this world. Also, anything in print lacks the facial nuances and vocal inflections - so these forums can be completely misinterpreted at any given time, not to mention when your brain is tired and simply doesn't read the information correctly!

I read BoB in April (I think), and I still stand by it, although I learned BoB after I learned IE, so it could be that you need IE first to break through all the dieting hype. But, then, once you've loosened the bonds a bit, you can start to moderate. BoB gives you the logical progression - a way of thinking that allows you to take back control. Without BoB, I just ate and ate, rebelliously, or I ate super restrictively. No happy medium. With BoB, I was given a power - to use my prefrontal cortex, to practice moderation and being reasonable.

When I did BoB before I learned IE it was a major disaster and lots of rebound binging. I didn't know how to recognize real hunger so I treated all hunger (even real physical hunger) as something to ignore and push through. Disaster. Now that I have firm IE tools the BoB concepts (most of them) make sense and are easier to implement. With IE I've been able to stop binging. With BoB I'm able to start letting go of residual bad habits.