A pregnant woman relaxing on a bed with pillows This represents how Maple Canyon Therapy provides eating disorder therapy, body image therapy, anxiety treatment, and birth trauma therapy.

 You feel so much shame for the way you eat. You would die if people found out about your behaviors. It always starts out the same way for you. Every morning your alarm goes off, and you roll out of bed, making a pact with yourself that you won’t eat very much that day. Maybe you start out skipping breakfast or eating just a little but by night time you are in a full-blown binge. Afterward, you feel gross and uncomfortable and can’t believe you don’t have enough self-control. Why do you keep doing this night after night? You feel so embarrassed, and there’s no way you could tell anyone about your binge eating. You throw out all your binge foods because you know that's the problem. If you don’t have access to them, you should be fine, but you find yourself digging them out of the trash or buying more. You feel completely out of control. 

No matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to stop this cycle from happening. You are convinced something is wrong with you, and you’re the only one that struggles like this. You are completely overwhelmed with knowing how to stop binging from happening. 

Symptoms of Binge Eating Disorder 

  • Eating large amounts of food secretly in a relatively short period of time

  • Feeling a lack of control around food 

  • Embarrassment about how you are eating 

  • Feelings of embarrassment and guilt after eating episodes of eating

  • Eating large amounts of food when you don’t feel hungry

  • Rapidly and quickly eating large amounts of food

Stop the binge Restrict Cycle

Whether you struggling with binge eating disorder or if you binge more than you want to, I know you are desperate to stop binging every single night. You’re tired of doing this to yourself. You feel like a failure, and you can’t think of anything good about yourself when it happens. You feel like you’re the only one that struggles like this. Maybe you noticed that binging has caused you to gain weight and in turn, it feels like everyone can see you’re struggles, imperfections, and flaws. You want to hide so nobody can see your body.

I want you to know that you can stop binging but it also means you have to stop restricting yourself too. It’s possible to let go of both and have a healthier relationship with food. I totally understand that weight gain is frustrating. It sometimes is unbearable when we live in a world where it seems like there is so much pressure to look a certain way or be a certain size. Unlike your other experiences with dieting or seeing healthcare providers, I’m not here to help you lose weight or to encourage you to diet. I know how much damage this does. I want to help you do the deeper work and hold kindness and compassion for you because I know you deserve it. I am here to help you see why you turn to food to cope in the first place without making you feel worse about yourself. There are probably so many important reasons why you’ve learned to use food, and you deserve kindness and understanding for that. I’m not here to make demands of you or your body.

ADHD and Binge Eating

Sometimes the women I work with who binge also have traits of undiagnosed ADHD. Through therapy, they realize that binging has become a way of masking their ADHD or being able to cope with the symptoms. Binging sometimes feels like their medicine to be able to keep achieving the things they want to. Women with ADHD are more likely to engage in binge eating than those who don’t. Just because you struggle with binging does not in any way mean that you absolutely have ADHD. It means that SOME people who binge might also have ADHD and might not know it. Women with ADHD might be more prone to binging because of their struggle with impulsivity, their need for stimulation, and sensory satisfaction.

you can overcome binge eating 

I understand your embarrassment even thinking about telling someone about your binge eating. I have worked with many women who feel exactly the same way you do. They’re convinced they are the only ones in the world who binge. Through therapy, these women have been able to start feeling more in control around food and have been able to recover from binge eating. They gain confidence in themselves, in their bodies, and in food. 

Binge eating disorder treatment can lessen the shame

As an eating disorder therapist, I want you to be able to make peace with food and your body. My goal is to help you stop dieting and restricting food that inevitably results in binge eating. My approach to help you with binge eating disorder is to respect your body for what it is, and I use a Health At Every Size approach to help you get there. Dieting, restricting, and binging are behaviors I will work with you to help you decrease, but I like to dig even deeper than that. An important aspect of therapy is focusing on your emotions, beliefs about yourself, and your past experiences will help you understand yourself more fully and ditch binge eating for good. 

What’s holding you back from beginning Binge Eating Disorder Treatment?

Many women put off coming to therapy because they worry they’ll be judged for their binging, and this feels unbearable because they are already judging themselves. I cross my heart and hope to die that I’m not here to judge you. I want to take care of you and give you compassion for what you’re going through. My number one priority is to help you stop the cycle of binging and for you to find better ways of dealing with your emotions. I’ll never make you confess to me how much you ate or anything weird. We will talk more about your emotions and beliefs than about food. I can also understand some hesitancy because you don’t know what to expect from binge eating disorder treatment.

Some women don’t feel they can take time out of their busy schedules to attend weekly therapy. I wish I could give you the gift of time, but I’m just a therapist, not a magician. I can, however, provide you with some level of convenience. I offer online therapy in Utah and a face-to-face video chat, where you don’t have to leave home at all.

Online therapy also means that if you are located in St. George, Cedar City, Cedar City, or Logan, I can work with you and help you overcome binge eating disorder. 

Start working with a Binge eating disorder therapist in utah

A black woman sitting on a beach smiling. This represents how Maple Canyon Therapy helps women in eating disorder recovery by providing eating disorder therapy.

You don’t have to feel out of control with food anymore. Counseling can help you stop the cycle of binging one and for all. This Utah Counseling Clinic has an eating disorder therapist specializing in binge eating disorder. Follow these steps to begin binge eating disorder treatment: 

  1. Schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation

  2. Meet with an eating disorder therapist in Utah

  3. Begin binge eating disorder treatment

Other Mental health Services at Maple Canyon Therapy

Binge eating disorder treatment isn’t the only service I offer at this Utah Counseling Center. Other mental health services at Maple Canyon Therapy Services include anxiety therapy, EMDR, and Trauma Therapy, including birth trauma, body image therapy, and eating disorder therapy in Utah.

How is binge eating treated?

Binging eating is treated individually depending on your needs. Some people need the support of a dietitian along with a binge eating disorder therapist to help them improve their relationship with food. I recommend all of my clients read the book “Intuitive Eating” and consider learning to be more in touch and in tune with their own bodies. Therapy sessions focus on understanding your history with binging and where it started. Truthfully I don’t talk with my clients a ton about their binging behaviors but more so focus on understanding your emotions, developing skills to cope, and being able to heal from the experiences that may have led you to trust food more than you trust yourself.

What causes binge eating disorder?

There is no easy way to answer this, and it’s not that simple. Many of the women I work with learned to binge eat as a way of taking care of themselves because that’s the only way they knew how. They learned to binge because it helped them get through painful emotions when they didn’t have anyone else they could turn to. Binge eating could have been modeled to you by someone you were close to and you learned to use it as a way of coping. Sometimes the women I have worked with have had undiagnosed ADHD and learned to binge for a hit of dopamine and didn’t realize this was why.

Is there a link between ADHD and Binge Eating?

Yes, there has been a researched link between ADHD and binge eating. It doesn’t mean that everyone who has ADHD binge eats, and it doesn’t mean that if you binge you automatically have ADHD. A symptom of ADHD is struggling with controlling impulses and being able to cope with strong emotions, which might lead to binge eating more often than those who don’t have ADHD. Having ADHD also means struggling with dopamine levels, which brings pleasure and reward. As a way of getting more of a dopamine hit, people with ADHD might binge eat. It’s important to get proper testing by a trained professional to find out if you meet the criteria for ADHD. Tiktok doesn’t count :).

Is overeating the same as binging?

Overeating and binging might seem similar, but they're a bit different. Overeating is eating past your fullness levels at a particular time. Maybe it’s having a bigger portion than usual during a meal and being more full than usual. Binging, on the other hand, is when you eat a lot of food very quickly, in secret, and often it feels like you can't control it. Binging also happens in a short period of time. So, while both involve eating more food, binging usually feels more intense.

Why do I want to binge late at night?

There may be a few reasons why you are prone to binge at night. A common theme I see with the women I work with is that nighttime is the time when they can be alone. When they binge they don’t want to be judged by other people and feel so much shame about what they do that they wait until everyone else has gone to bed. Another reason why people binge late at night is because they’ve tried to restrict food all day. Maybe because they binged the night before and are trying hard to compensate for it by not eating. This leads to being overly hungry which makes you more vulnerable to binge. The biggest predictor of a binge is restriction.