November 6, 2021 • 12 mins
Celebrating success in recovery is an important part of the Brain over Binge approach. For this episode, we brought on Outweigh listener Yasmin, who shares her personal story! When you generate excitement for your accomplishments in dismissing binge urges and eating adequately, you help new brain pathways form.
Here are some ways to celebrate success in recovery, without food:
- Go to a favorite place
- Spend the money you would have spent on bingeing on something else you want
- Relax and watch a show you enjoy
- Treat yourself to some form of self-care
- Read a favorite book or engage in a hobby
- Celebrate with positive self-talk, or simply notice and savor the good feeling of success
Thank you again to Yasmin for bravely sharing her story! If you would like to share your story, send an email to us at: hello@outweighpodcast.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I won't let my body out be outwell everything that
I'm made. DOT won't spend my life trying to change.
I'm learning to love who I am. I get I'm strong,
I feel free, I know who every part of me.
It's beautiful and then will always out way if you
(00:24):
feel it with yours in the air, she's some love
to the boom. I am there. Let's say good day
and time did you and die out? Happy Saturday? Outweigh
fam amy here. And if you've heard some of my
eating disorder story, you know that Catherine Hansen's book Brain
(00:44):
over Binge was a huge part of my recovery. And
I'm actually on her email list, so I get all
the newsletters that she sends out, and today I opened
up one that was talking about how celebrating success and
recovery is an important part of her Brain over Binge approach,
and I couldn't agree more. So I'm just gonna read
(01:06):
to you a part of what she put in this newsletter.
Here's what she said about celebrating when you generate excitement
for your accomplishments, and dismissing binge urges and eating adequately
you help new brain pathways form. Here are some ways
to celebrate success and recovery without food. Go to a
favorite place, Spend the money you would have spent on
(01:27):
binging on something else you want. Relax and watch a
show you enjoy. Treat yourself to some form of self care,
read a favorite book, or engage in a hobby, celebrate
with positive self talk, or simply notice and savor the
good feeling of success. So there you go. That's part
of Catherine's newsletter. I always enjoy getting hers in my inbox,
(01:50):
and I encourage you to maybe sign up for them
if you can, or if you have another program or
someone else you follow and they have a newsletter, having
stuff pop up in your inbox is a great reminder
and a form of encouragement to keep you going. Just
like we talked about following accounts on social media that
do the same thing, I feel like certain people that
I follow they are good for my recovery. They help
encourage me so so much. And another thing that we
(02:13):
think helps people is just hearing from others. And I
mentioned last week that we're gonna start featuring more personal
stories from other listeners just like you. So today we're
hearing from Yasmin, who sent us an email, which, by
the way, feel free to email us if you have
any questions or maybe you're interested in sharing your personal
story so that you can be there for others. You know.
(02:34):
The main thing is, we just don't want anyone to
ever feel alone. And so Yasmin emailed us again you
can too, and the email is hello at Outweigh podcast
dot com. But we opened up Yasmin's email and she
shared with us a little bit of her story and
we're like, you know what, we want you to share
it with our Outweigh fams. So here is Yasmin's eating
(02:55):
story and her letter to herself. Hey Otwei Fan, I'm Yasmin,
and I listened for Northern Virginia. I want to share
my outwag story because a life without disordered eating outways everything,
and I want to make sure people don't feel alone.
Here's my story. I grew up in the suburbs of
Northern Virginia, just out side of DC. Growing up, my
(03:17):
relationship with food, body, and exercise felt very natural and intuitive.
Because my mom is Korean and my dad is Egyptian.
I enjoyed food from both cultures. Making friends was always easy,
and I felt confident with who I was, and I
was pretty happy and carefree. While food came naturally to me.
My mom was also a very intuitive eater, any anything
(03:37):
and everything. However, there were some undertones from her to
my sister and I about standing up straight and stucking
in our stomachs. Could this be societal maybe, but I
don't think my mom meant to say these things maliciously.
I think she was just trying to make sure we
had good posture and an awareness of how he presented
ourselves to the world. My dad, on the other hand,
was always trying to lose weight. However, when my brother
(03:59):
and I would spend every other weekend with him, we
always ate fast food, which I loved, and he made
his cleaner plates, similar to how his parents raised him. Overall,
I was taught a fairly normal approach to food and
exercise for my family and friends, and my relationship with
food didn't really change for years to come. My eating
disorder began when I was in seventh grade. I had
(04:20):
been in my first year of middle school at a
huge secondary school. While I hadn't died before, I had
been conscious of my body, how it looked, and my weight.
Starting from when I was in sixth grade because of
the friend group I was hanging out with. They would
constantly talk about how they wanted to be skinnier, and naturally,
I started to question if I was skinny enough, and
(04:40):
soon it started to weigh on me even more and
more and affect my self esteem. I went from being
a care free elementary school girl to a young teen
whose body was changing through puberty and hating myself because
in my eyes, I was fat. That year in seventh grade,
I made a deeper connection. Eating less calories meant you
(05:01):
lose weight, which meant you look prettier, that you'd be popular,
boys would like you more, and that you'd be happy
come summer. With all of that information in my subconscious,
I would actually mistakenly skip meals because I was out
and about with friends at the pool, walking to different
friends houses than coming home for a bit before heading
to dance class or basketball. And soon I noticed I
(05:23):
lost a few pounds and I was so happy about it,
and of course attributed that to the fact that I
was skipping meals. This started a longing, an addiction to
skipping meals so I could see the scale go down
every single day. If I didn't weigh less every day.
That meant I would have to eat less, and this
spiraled into not eating at all. By the end of
that summer vacation, I had lost over forty pounds, not
(05:46):
once in my family saying anything, and the whole time
I was getting praised and even encouraged by my friends
about my weight loss. No one knew how unhealthy I was,
and unfortunately the encouragement and being thinner than ever, I
had felt even more worthy than I had ever before.
Looking back at pictures and remembering how I felt, I
wasn't happy at all. I looked brittle, my skin was pale,
(06:08):
I lost my period. I was never hungry, I was
always cold. I would either isolate myself from any experiences
involving food because I was scared, or I would lie
to others saying I had already eaten. Even though I
was suffering in so many ways and missing out on life,
I didn't care because I was so numb to everything
and nothing mattered more to me than seeing the number
(06:28):
on the scale get lower day after day. What's crazier
is that I didn't even know that I developed an
eating disorder and didn't realize how thin I really was.
That was until my sister came home from college after
not seeing each other for a while, and I was
shocked to see the state I was in. One night,
my mom and my sister asked me to come downstairs
and bring my scale. They made me weave myself right
(06:50):
there in front of them. I burst into tears, so
embarrassed and scared. After a long conversation, my mom took
me to my doctor, and the doctor said I was
a normal weight, nothing was wrong. While my mom did
try to help me, she didn't realize how deep my
eating disorder was. Once we got home, my mom gave
me an ultimatum to either gain weight or else I
wouldn't be able to take dance or plan my basketball
(07:13):
team anymore. Knowing that I wasn't willing to give up
my hobbies, Somehow, I was able to convince myself to
eat again, and as a result, rapidly gained weight, becoming
heavier than I was before while still under eating. I
didn't know what was going on, and I was scared
to eat. Now began seven years of restricting my food,
obsessively weighing myself and over exercising in an effort to
(07:35):
lose the weight again, but because my metabolism and hormones
were so shot, nothing worked, and I was trapped in
a body I hated a person, I hated being, and
felt like there was never going to be a light
at the end of the tunnel. Kind of senior year
of high school, I knew that I couldn't go to
college looking like I did. I still felt fat and unworthy,
and I couldn't be happy until I was thin, so
(07:57):
I decided to completely stop eating and exercise even more.
Throughout college, I became an obsessive runner, running for hours
a day and continued to deprive myself of any food
and sometimes even water. I'd do anything to keep seeing
the scale go down. I eventually lost a significant amount
of weight by the end of college and maintain my
(08:17):
weight through restriction and over exercising through my mid twenties.
Similar to my experience in middle school, my thinness still
didn't bring me any happiness. I felt worse than ever,
constantly exhausted physically and emotionally, so much that I didn't
have the energy to run anymore. I would sleep as
long as possible so that I wouldn't feel hunger and
punish myself at the scale everyone up. I even remember
(08:40):
coming home one weekend when I was living in New
York City and my mom noticing that I was missing
a patch of hair, and later learned that I developed
an autoimmune disorder called alabecia ariata. My body was completely
shutting down and even gaining weight with extremely limited food.
I felt like I couldn't bear to live in New York,
feelings so alone, tired, and numb in my body anymore,
(09:03):
and decided to move back to Northern Virginia where I
could spend more time with family and friends. After a
few months of having my very first apartment living alone,
I tried as hard as I could to continue living
the way I had been for the past thirteen plus years,
and eventually broke down one night and couldn't handle the
pain any longer. My mom was abroad, so I called
my older sister for advice on how to get out
(09:26):
of this decade plus long spiral. And my sister had
known for a long time I was restricting my food
and using exercise to control my body, but was alarmed
to hear the emotional, mental, and physical toll it had
taken on me. With her advice, I eventually found a
great eating disorder therapist and intuitive eating nutritionists who helped
me recover. Recovering from my disordered eating slash eating disorder
(09:48):
was the most difficult obstacle I'd ever faced. The hardest
part was that I was scared of be anyway, and
I didn't know if I could ever be quote unquote
normal again. In recovery, I cried almost every single day
because of the fear I had of getting fat. I
wasn't weighing myself anymore. I was starting to eat more,
my clothes were getting tighter, my body constantly felt bloated,
(10:09):
and I was losing my identity. I felt like I
no longer had control of anything. I saw my therapist
and nutritionists every week for about a year and a half,
focusing on improving my body image, accepting that this journey
would be worth it, learning ways to cope with my
body changes. We learn how to listen to my body's
hunger cues as they began to normalize, eat without any
(10:29):
restriction on what or how much I could eat, and
figuring out my identity again. In that initial year of recovery,
I had gained overse seventy pounds, and I know that
because I looked at my old annual physical way and
once I was recovered, and sometimes I didn't recognize myself.
While I did go through stages of learning to love myself,
there were sometimes that I absolutely hated myself. Once I
(10:51):
surrendered to my healing, I started to come around and
see all of the positives in my recovery, and I
faith that everything would work out for me in the end.
I started to enjoy food again, take a more intuitive
approach to movement and exercise, found energy for new hobbies,
eventually began to accept myself for who I am, and
I weight naturally began to normalize. I've been recovered for
(11:14):
almost five years, and I've never felt so free with
food and movement. While there are some days I struggle
with body acceptance, body image, and relationship with exercise, I
love a happier life now than I ever have, and
I'm continuously on a mission to be at peace. I
have a short letter to myself, Yasmin. You are worthy
and beautiful the way you are. I'm so proud of
(11:36):
your strength, courage, and growth over the last five years.
Always remember that you experience your journey for a reason,
and that you are now happier, healthier, and stronger mentally, emotionally,
and physically than you've ever been before. You are so
loved by your family and friends, and will be a
wonderful mom in the future. Love Yesamin,
I won't let my body out be outwell everything that
I'm made. DOT won't spend my life trying to change.
I'm learning to love who I am. I get I'm strong,
I feel free, I know who every part of me.
It's beautiful and then will always out way if you
(00:24):
feel it with yours in the air, she's some love
to the boom. I am there. Let's say good day
and time did you and die out? Happy Saturday? Outweigh
fam amy here. And if you've heard some of my
eating disorder story, you know that Catherine Hansen's book Brain
(00:44):
over Binge was a huge part of my recovery. And
I'm actually on her email list, so I get all
the newsletters that she sends out, and today I opened
up one that was talking about how celebrating success and
recovery is an important part of her Brain over Binge approach,
and I couldn't agree more. So I'm just gonna read
(01:06):
to you a part of what she put in this newsletter.
Here's what she said about celebrating when you generate excitement
for your accomplishments, and dismissing binge urges and eating adequately
you help new brain pathways form. Here are some ways
to celebrate success and recovery without food. Go to a
favorite place, Spend the money you would have spent on
(01:27):
binging on something else you want. Relax and watch a
show you enjoy. Treat yourself to some form of self care,
read a favorite book, or engage in a hobby, celebrate
with positive self talk, or simply notice and savor the
good feeling of success. So there you go. That's part
of Catherine's newsletter. I always enjoy getting hers in my inbox,
(01:50):
and I encourage you to maybe sign up for them
if you can, or if you have another program or
someone else you follow and they have a newsletter, having
stuff pop up in your inbox is a great reminder
and a form of encouragement to keep you going. Just
like we talked about following accounts on social media that
do the same thing, I feel like certain people that
I follow they are good for my recovery. They help
encourage me so so much. And another thing that we
(02:13):
think helps people is just hearing from others. And I
mentioned last week that we're gonna start featuring more personal
stories from other listeners just like you. So today we're
hearing from Yasmin, who sent us an email, which, by
the way, feel free to email us if you have
any questions or maybe you're interested in sharing your personal
story so that you can be there for others. You know.
(02:34):
The main thing is, we just don't want anyone to
ever feel alone. And so Yasmin emailed us again you
can too, and the email is hello at Outweigh podcast
dot com. But we opened up Yasmin's email and she
shared with us a little bit of her story and
we're like, you know what, we want you to share
it with our Outweigh fams. So here is Yasmin's eating
(02:55):
story and her letter to herself. Hey Otwei Fan, I'm Yasmin,
and I listened for Northern Virginia. I want to share
my outwag story because a life without disordered eating outways everything,
and I want to make sure people don't feel alone.
Here's my story. I grew up in the suburbs of
Northern Virginia, just out side of DC. Growing up, my
(03:17):
relationship with food, body, and exercise felt very natural and intuitive.
Because my mom is Korean and my dad is Egyptian.
I enjoyed food from both cultures. Making friends was always easy,
and I felt confident with who I was, and I
was pretty happy and carefree. While food came naturally to me.
My mom was also a very intuitive eater, any anything
(03:37):
and everything. However, there were some undertones from her to
my sister and I about standing up straight and stucking
in our stomachs. Could this be societal maybe, but I
don't think my mom meant to say these things maliciously.
I think she was just trying to make sure we
had good posture and an awareness of how he presented
ourselves to the world. My dad, on the other hand,
was always trying to lose weight. However, when my brother
(03:59):
and I would spend every other weekend with him, we
always ate fast food, which I loved, and he made
his cleaner plates, similar to how his parents raised him. Overall,
I was taught a fairly normal approach to food and
exercise for my family and friends, and my relationship with
food didn't really change for years to come. My eating
disorder began when I was in seventh grade. I had
(04:20):
been in my first year of middle school at a
huge secondary school. While I hadn't died before, I had
been conscious of my body, how it looked, and my weight.
Starting from when I was in sixth grade because of
the friend group I was hanging out with. They would
constantly talk about how they wanted to be skinnier, and naturally,
I started to question if I was skinny enough, and
(04:40):
soon it started to weigh on me even more and
more and affect my self esteem. I went from being
a care free elementary school girl to a young teen
whose body was changing through puberty and hating myself because
in my eyes, I was fat. That year in seventh grade,
I made a deeper connection. Eating less calories meant you
(05:01):
lose weight, which meant you look prettier, that you'd be popular,
boys would like you more, and that you'd be happy
come summer. With all of that information in my subconscious,
I would actually mistakenly skip meals because I was out
and about with friends at the pool, walking to different
friends houses than coming home for a bit before heading
to dance class or basketball. And soon I noticed I
(05:23):
lost a few pounds and I was so happy about it,
and of course attributed that to the fact that I
was skipping meals. This started a longing, an addiction to
skipping meals so I could see the scale go down
every single day. If I didn't weigh less every day.
That meant I would have to eat less, and this
spiraled into not eating at all. By the end of
that summer vacation, I had lost over forty pounds, not
(05:46):
once in my family saying anything, and the whole time
I was getting praised and even encouraged by my friends
about my weight loss. No one knew how unhealthy I was,
and unfortunately the encouragement and being thinner than ever, I
had felt even more worthy than I had ever before.
Looking back at pictures and remembering how I felt, I
wasn't happy at all. I looked brittle, my skin was pale,
(06:08):
I lost my period. I was never hungry, I was
always cold. I would either isolate myself from any experiences
involving food because I was scared, or I would lie
to others saying I had already eaten. Even though I
was suffering in so many ways and missing out on life,
I didn't care because I was so numb to everything
and nothing mattered more to me than seeing the number
(06:28):
on the scale get lower day after day. What's crazier
is that I didn't even know that I developed an
eating disorder and didn't realize how thin I really was.
That was until my sister came home from college after
not seeing each other for a while, and I was
shocked to see the state I was in. One night,
my mom and my sister asked me to come downstairs
and bring my scale. They made me weave myself right
(06:50):
there in front of them. I burst into tears, so
embarrassed and scared. After a long conversation, my mom took
me to my doctor, and the doctor said I was
a normal weight, nothing was wrong. While my mom did
try to help me, she didn't realize how deep my
eating disorder was. Once we got home, my mom gave
me an ultimatum to either gain weight or else I
wouldn't be able to take dance or plan my basketball
(07:13):
team anymore. Knowing that I wasn't willing to give up
my hobbies, Somehow, I was able to convince myself to
eat again, and as a result, rapidly gained weight, becoming
heavier than I was before while still under eating. I
didn't know what was going on, and I was scared
to eat. Now began seven years of restricting my food,
obsessively weighing myself and over exercising in an effort to
(07:35):
lose the weight again, but because my metabolism and hormones
were so shot, nothing worked, and I was trapped in
a body I hated a person, I hated being, and
felt like there was never going to be a light
at the end of the tunnel. Kind of senior year
of high school, I knew that I couldn't go to
college looking like I did. I still felt fat and unworthy,
and I couldn't be happy until I was thin, so
(07:57):
I decided to completely stop eating and exercise even more.
Throughout college, I became an obsessive runner, running for hours
a day and continued to deprive myself of any food
and sometimes even water. I'd do anything to keep seeing
the scale go down. I eventually lost a significant amount
of weight by the end of college and maintain my
(08:17):
weight through restriction and over exercising through my mid twenties.
Similar to my experience in middle school, my thinness still
didn't bring me any happiness. I felt worse than ever,
constantly exhausted physically and emotionally, so much that I didn't
have the energy to run anymore. I would sleep as
long as possible so that I wouldn't feel hunger and
punish myself at the scale everyone up. I even remember
(08:40):
coming home one weekend when I was living in New
York City and my mom noticing that I was missing
a patch of hair, and later learned that I developed
an autoimmune disorder called alabecia ariata. My body was completely
shutting down and even gaining weight with extremely limited food.
I felt like I couldn't bear to live in New York,
feelings so alone, tired, and numb in my body anymore,
(09:03):
and decided to move back to Northern Virginia where I
could spend more time with family and friends. After a
few months of having my very first apartment living alone,
I tried as hard as I could to continue living
the way I had been for the past thirteen plus years,
and eventually broke down one night and couldn't handle the
pain any longer. My mom was abroad, so I called
my older sister for advice on how to get out
(09:26):
of this decade plus long spiral. And my sister had
known for a long time I was restricting my food
and using exercise to control my body, but was alarmed
to hear the emotional, mental, and physical toll it had
taken on me. With her advice, I eventually found a
great eating disorder therapist and intuitive eating nutritionists who helped
me recover. Recovering from my disordered eating slash eating disorder
(09:48):
was the most difficult obstacle I'd ever faced. The hardest
part was that I was scared of be anyway, and
I didn't know if I could ever be quote unquote
normal again. In recovery, I cried almost every single day
because of the fear I had of getting fat. I
wasn't weighing myself anymore. I was starting to eat more,
my clothes were getting tighter, my body constantly felt bloated,
(10:09):
and I was losing my identity. I felt like I
no longer had control of anything. I saw my therapist
and nutritionists every week for about a year and a half,
focusing on improving my body image, accepting that this journey
would be worth it, learning ways to cope with my
body changes. We learn how to listen to my body's
hunger cues as they began to normalize, eat without any
(10:29):
restriction on what or how much I could eat, and
figuring out my identity again. In that initial year of recovery,
I had gained overse seventy pounds, and I know that
because I looked at my old annual physical way and
once I was recovered, and sometimes I didn't recognize myself.
While I did go through stages of learning to love myself,
there were sometimes that I absolutely hated myself. Once I
(10:51):
surrendered to my healing, I started to come around and
see all of the positives in my recovery, and I
faith that everything would work out for me in the end.
I started to enjoy food again, take a more intuitive
approach to movement and exercise, found energy for new hobbies,
eventually began to accept myself for who I am, and
I weight naturally began to normalize. I've been recovered for
(11:14):
almost five years, and I've never felt so free with
food and movement. While there are some days I struggle
with body acceptance, body image, and relationship with exercise, I
love a happier life now than I ever have, and
I'm continuously on a mission to be at peace. I
have a short letter to myself, Yasmin. You are worthy
and beautiful the way you are. I'm so proud of
(11:36):
your strength, courage, and growth over the last five years.
Always remember that you experience your journey for a reason,
and that you are now happier, healthier, and stronger mentally, emotionally,
and physically than you've ever been before. You are so
loved by your family and friends, and will be a
wonderful mom in the future. Love Yesamin,
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
Host
Amy Brown
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