The Hidden Reason You Can’t Stop Binge Eating (bulimia), And How to Fix It
with Amber Romaniuk
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hi, I am Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. On this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metal and chemical toxicity, the health issues caused by these toxins, and more advanced topics than you’ll hear on other shows. We talk about bioenergetics, emotional trauma, and all kinds of other topics. But today we’re gonna talk about food and body freedom and how to claim that. We’re gonna talk about eating disorders, the underlying root causes of eating disorders, and some that may really, really surprise you.
We are focusing mainly on bulimia and binge eating. I tell my own story with those struggles and how I dealt with them successfully. But it is really, really interesting to know the emotional traumas and hormonal imbalances that can contribute to binge eating and bulimia. So we’re gonna talk about all that with Amber Ramaniuk. Her website is amberapproved.ca, and she’s an emotional eating, digestive, and hormone expert with 12 years of experience helping high-achieving women create a level of body confidence, intuition, and optimal health through a powerful mindset, healing, self-care, and overcoming self-sabotage with food.
She does this through addressing the key negative thoughts, patterns, and limiting beliefs that keep women in the same behaviors for years and decades that they haven’t been able to break. Her podcast, The No Sugarcoating Podcast, has 2+ million downloads, over 500 episodes, and is listened to in over 90 countries.
Amber overcame her own emotional eating after gaining and losing more than a thousand pounds and spending over $50,000 on binge foods, and spending five years balancing her hormones, digestion, et cetera. She also dismantled her deep, limiting beliefs and behaviors, keeping her stuck in that same looping pattern. She now helps others achieve the Biggest Healing Miracles of Body Freedom, which is her trademark program, so that they have the confidence and health to create amazing lives. You can learn more about her work and work with her one-on-one coaching@amberapproved.ca. Amber, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Amber Romaniuk
Thank you for having me, Wendy. I’m super excited to be with you today.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell me a little bit about how you got started working with women with eating disorders?
Amber Romaniuk
It was actually a journey that I went through myself that started at a very young age. Unconsciously, of course, that kind of melded into binge eating, food addiction, bulimia, and emotionally eating in my early twenties. A couple of key defining moments for me include when I was about five, and it was the first day taking the bus. I got on the bu,s and the older boys called me fat and ugly. And then the whole bus started making fun of me, and that really hit. It really hurt me, and I really took that deep into my body and my nervous system and took on the identity of fat and ugly for the next 20 years of my life.
So I was very shy, very insecure, and unconsciously, I think at that age, started to use food a little bit as a coping mechanism, but just didn’t know it. Food was safe, food was tasty. It tasted good. It was always there. And then growing up, I was an only child. My mom was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before I was born, and so I think a way for her to compensate in our relationship was with food. Everything we did always included food, and there was always like so much sugar and bacon and processed food, and we could eat whatever we wanted whenever we wanted.
After I healed my relationship with food, I lovingly observed that she had a food addictio. I think that was born out of her diagnosis, feeling out of control, and not having any idea of how to take care of herself. So I think that there was that whole, innocent inheritance of this lineage of lack and hoarding and food addiction that my mom and my grandmother had taken on. I think that it was innocently passed on. I don’t blame them, but it was definitely part of that whole process.
And then I started dieting in my teens. I got programmed right by Hollywood in the media that my body isn’t perfect. There’s something wrong with me. You start comparing yourself, and then they sell you the false solution, which is the diets, of course, which don’t work. And then I fell deep into binge eating and my food addiction in my early twenties after a breakup. I was so upset. I could barely eat. I lost weight really quickly. I reached the quote-unquote goal weight. However, it didn’t fix everything like the weight loss industry had tried to convince me, right? Every magazine headline said, lose the weight and finally be happy. It’s just such bs because I wasn’t happy, and it didn’t fix anything. And so then it was like this switch.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I said that too. If I just left five pounds, I’d finally be where I wanted to be.
Amber Romaniuk
Yeah, right. I know. There’s such an asphyxiation around that, though. I just need to lose five pounds. I just need to drop a size. I just need to lose that last 10 pounds. And it’s like women will almost kill themselves to try and get there because we’ve been so conditioned that our worth is so tied up in that, rather than it being a feeling that resides within you always because you are worthy, because you exist. But we are not taught that. Then the switch flipped, and I started binge eating. And for me, binge eating was not just eating a couple of things. I would eat tables full of food and eat until I was so full. I was sick, and this full loss of control came on. And so now I’m binge eating four or five, six nights a week, trying to go to the organic store to justify why it was a better choice.
When you’re eating a whole table full of food, it doesn’t matter the quantity or the quality. I gained 80 pounds in four months. That was the heaviest that I had ever been and I felt absolutely embarrassed. So much shame, so much guilt, I could not recognize myself. I had no idea why I was losing control of food. And while all of a sudden this was happening, I just had no idea. It lasted like that for a couple of years, where I started to learn a little bit about binge eating and food addiction, and went through a cycle of six months of bingeing and purging, thinking if I purge, I won’t gain weight. I won’t have to deal with the discomfort of over-consuming.
What I really realized wasthat purging was a way for me to fully take a lack of ownership or responsibility for the binge that I just participated in. In fact, I’m gaining weight more easily ’cause purging is so violent and destructive on the body. It’s just stressing everything out more. So I stopped purging, but my low point moment happened after I’d realized, okay, I’m binge eating. I’m aware this is what I’m doing, but I have no idea how to stop. And I’d always throw the food in the garbage can because if I throw it in the garbage can, I’m gonna be turned off from going and eating it, ’cause I’d be complete in my own thoughts. I’m like, I’m gonna be a complete loser if I want to eat out of my garbage can.
And so I threw the food in the garbage. I was lying on the couch in pain, crying, just thinking, I don’t think I’m gonna make 30 if I keep this up. I was about 23 at the time. I was just so destructive to myself and my body, my thoughts, my actions, everything. And then of course, an hour goes by, some of the food digests, and what I call the ego mind, the inner critic came up, was like, well, if this is the last time you’re gonna do this, you might as well eat the rest of the cookies. And so I went into my kitchen, pulled up my garbage, dug through, grabbed the cookies, ate them, then threw the cookies out in the dumpster in the back alley, went back out later, and ate them again.
I just sat on my floor and started to cry and was just kind of in shock, thinking like, who am I? I just ate in my garbage and my dumpster. I have no idea why I am at this low point, like I did not think that this was my life. I have nothing. I’m significantly compromising my health. I am broke. I have a crappy job. I have nothing. I don’t understand how this is my life, but I needed that to happen because what happens with these behaviors? As we create this comfort zone, and even though we’re suffering and we’re hurting ourselves, it is a comfort to use food to cope, to numb, shove down our emotions, avoid feeling chase the dopamine high.
Certain foods are very addictive, as we know, and so that becomes the familiar comfort zone, and thinking about changing it is very uncomfortable and unfamiliar. I have no idea where to start. It’s overwhelming, especially having 80 pounds to lose, plus trying to figure out why I am binge eating and everything else. It just felt so daunting and intimidating. And so all of that fear of the unknown and the intimidation and this comfort zone of suffering just kept me stuck here, but that low point moment crushed all my fears of the unknown, crushed all the discomfort because that moment became so uncomfortable and suffering that I could no longer stay there anymore.
And then I went on a very multidimensional healing journey where I healed physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically, and spiritually. Just coming to realize that part of myself was a very profound journey because it not only helped me heal myself and discover who I really was and reconnect me to myself, living my self-worth and my power. It helped me gain clarity of my purpose, which is to come here to eradicate these behaviors from the planet and to really help women and some men, but mostly women, take a very root cause approach to this healing instead of all the quick fixes and band-aids out there that just keep us disconnected from our healing
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I love that. I love everything you’ve said there and I wanna talk about what you think are some of the underlying root causes of bulimia and binge eating. I definitely went through that myself. I was bulimic for many, many, many years. I couldn’t figure out why I was doing this? You think, oh, it’s to lose weight, you know? I was engaging it super often, but whenever I got in my mind I wanted to lose weight, that’s when it would start. It was like a perfectionism mechanism, but also trauma. And I think parasites as well can be an impetus. But what are some of the underlying root causes of why people engage in this kind of compulsive behavior?
Amber Romaniuk
A hundred percent. So I do think that a big part of it stems from unworthiness, and I think we are kind of morphed into levels of unworthiness as children, right? Our subconscious minds are fully open and programmed from age zero to seven, and we take in so much that shapes our identity and we have defining moments, whether it was like me being bullied on the bus or someone unfortunately got abused or maybe you had to move across the country. Your parents split up. Maybe you were raised in a family where you were constantly being put on diets. People were constantly making comments about your weight, whether you’re too tall, too thin, too big, too small, or maybe it wasn’t about your weight or your body, but it was the perfection.
And your parents are going, well, oh good for you. You gotta B plus. But it would be better if you got an A plus and you noticed that if you strive for perfection, you would get more validation and love and that will create these levels of unworthiness and these all or nothing behaviors that fuel things like perfection and people pleasing, which over years and decades fuel extreme fatigue and exhaustion and burnout. You’re lost on your list. You’re putting your worth in validation and everyone else, and their opinions of you, and it’s very exhausting when we have these behaviors evolve from being a child or a teenager and. We have to keep appeasing everybody else. It leads to adrenal fatigue, thyroid issues, low progesterone in women, which all of this really impacts our mood, amplifies cravings, and throws our blood sugar off.
Obviously, our mood-boosting neurotransmitters are significantly impacted and often depleted. I see so many women with low serotonin, low dopamine, low oxytocin, and low GABA. And these all make it easier for us to wanna chase the dopamine high. We think about eating. You’re anticipating the reward. Oh, I’m going to eat that. It’s gonna be so good. And it is for a moment, but then you have to deal with all the after effects. I do think parasites and candida play a huge role as well because. One of the last things that I was working on healing, when I was healing my binge eating.
I was working at a health clinic at that time, and I did a candida test, and I was starting to learn about all of this. I had the worst case of candida that they had ever seen in their 12 years of practice. I wasn’t surprised, ’cause I’m like, I had to take a ton of antibiotics as a kid, had a ton of chronic UTIs as a child, and ate loads of sugar from childhood. I’m assuming my parents both had quite bad cases of candida and my mom probably had parasites, knowing now about her MS diagnosis that none of that was ever brought up. It can trigger so badly. Yeah, like so bad. But the problem with those protocols is that so many of them are so restrictive and restricting someone who’s binge eating or emotionally eating is the worst thing you can do.
It triggers rebellion and this desire to wanna go eat all the things you’re not allowed to have. So I was put on a very restrictive protocol, and I had no idea at the time that that could re-trigger me. And it did several times. So I had to stop the protocol, heal my relationship with food, come back to a more balanced protocol to deal with candida and things like that.
But, it resolved the cravings and it was a big part of healing my mood and gut and other things. But yeah, that’s why I say multidimensional ’cause it’s a very physical, emotional, energetic and spiritual chemical journey. It’s so many different things. And then I think that’s why so many women struggle because we’re not taught the roots. We’re not taught how to identify what’s triggering us. We’re taught to go on a diet, go ozempic, go do another quick fix. You wanna lose weight, you wanna shut off your feelings and your hunger signal. Just shut everything off so you don’t have to think about it. And that’s not gonna help us address the roots.
Dr. Wendy Myers
But that candida for me, especially eating so much sugar when you’re kind of binge eating, obviously you’re gonna develop a systemic candida as a no brainer. They set out these chemical messengers that make you want to crave more food and eat food and eat sugar. It contributes to this vicious cycle.
Amber Romaniuk
Oh yeah, I called them the yeasty beasties ’cause it literally felt like they were controlling me. And I’m like, I know I don’t want this. But the candida was so loud and you got so tired. Fatigue is a huge emotional eating trigger, partially because when you’re tired, you’re more of the, “I’m tired, I don’t care.” I’m gonna eat whatever I want. When you’re fatigued, you have an increased appetite level. And when you’re fatigued, it dulls your leptin, which is your fullness signal. It makes it easier to keep eating. Your blood sugar’s more compromised when you have candida. It all just fuels this cascade of events that just makes it so much easier to go to food.
Serotonin is produced in the gut for the most part, one of our mood stabilizing neurotransmitters. So if your gut’s compromised and your serotonin’s low, you’re far more apt to crave sugar and wanna reach for those quick highs, like it’s all so connected.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I’ve tried so many different things to stop just abstinence and that didn’t work. And then I went to an eating disorders therapist, and that didn’t work, but for me, it was only when I used bioenergetics to address emotional trauma, like using bioenergetic scanning that would pinpoint what your emotional traumas were and release them bioenergetically using frequencies, and it just stopped. Within a few months it just stopped and I’ve never had any like relapse since. So I got to that root, that underlying impetus that is causing that impulsive or compulsive behavior, which is the purging.
Amber Romaniuk
Yeah, that’s great. I think that frequencies and bioenergetics, and there’s some great modalities that help with healing because the system is just so dysregulated. Again, we’ve wired our brain to use food as a comfort coping mechanism, and everything else feels unsafe and uncomfortable. So we have to be willing to tread outside of what feels familiar and comfortable to heal this.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Why does so much of the female population struggle with self-sabotage with food?
Amber Romaniuk
How deep do you wanna go into this conversation? That’s so deep. My opinion as to why the female population struggles so much with this is because I think the female population has been heavily targeted. Women are very intuitive. Women are very intuitively gifted. You cannot deceive a woman who’s connected to her intuition. You cannot control or manipulate a woman who’s connected to her intuition. However, if a woman is insecure, fighting with her body, fighting with food, feeling a lot of guilt, shame, and really low vibration emotions. She is in more of a state of desperation, self-hatred, and self-loathing. When you’re in that state, you are easier to control and manipulate. You don’t have access to your intuition and your intuitive gifts, and it’s so much easier to become essentially like a victim to the system because when you are easy to control, manipulate, and deceive.
You give your power away to things like the diet in the weight loss industry. You become a lifetime customer of their offerings. They don’t want you to heal. They don’t want you to come back into your power. They want you trying all their gimmicks and quick fixes ’cause they make a lot of money off of you. The beauty industry, the fashion industry, they all make, in my opinion, just so much money off of women who feel this need to tie their worth up into the way that they look. I’m all for dressing nice and wanting to have, like, it’s not about that, but it’s about if you only tie your worth up into your external, the number on the scale, the kind of clothes that you wear, the number, and that is what you’re tying your worth to. You’re gonna be chasing your worth for the rest of your life.
Also, the food industry makes us addicted. They hired the same people from the tobacco industry into the food industry. So they make you addicted. The food makes you sick, and then you have to take pills and Big Pharma makes a bunch of money off of you. So I just see this as almost kind of this systematic creation, in my opinion, in my years of healing and just like being observant to the world of all these different things around us that want to try and keep you disempowered. I also think Hollywood’s been a big negative influence because everything is photoshopped and edited. It’s fake.
We’re sold a lie, and then you compare yourself to these fake images. I think there’s something wrong with you because you don’t fit the bill when really, like, who does? Everyone has a unique shape and size. Everyone’s gonna be a bit different, but this promotion of perfection that doesn’t exist is literally what we’ve been sold. I think that that’s been one of the biggest detriments to women because you look at cultures that are small, that have not been infiltrated by like social media and television and all this stuff, and fast food. Their health rates and life rates are so much bigger. They don’t end up with all these autoimmune conditions and diseases.
They don’t have eating disorders, body image, dysmorphia, like what’s the difference? They’re not consuming all of these things into their subconscious mind that are false and fake and essentially convince them to pull their worth outside of themselves. The nutrient quality of their food is a lot better. They eat slowly and mindfully in community. It’s such a different dynamic. So I do think that some of these big systems play such a role in it, and then some of it’s a lineage. Your parents, what happened to them? What happened to your grandparents? And it’s not to blame, but it’s starting to observe, what kind of relationship with food and body did your mother have?
Did your grandmother have your father, your aunt, and who was influential toward you? I think all of these things shape us. But it’s our responsibility regardless of what’s been going on externally to wanna try to do something different and to heal it. Because once you heal it and you have your power back, and I’m sure you can attest to this, like nothing externally influences me anymore. Nothing. I’m not attached to any trend, any celebrity, or the Ozempic craze right now. I’m just like, stay away from it. There are too many risks, right?
So it’s just so empowering to be in this place where I feel disconnected and detached from external influence. I trust my intuition. I do what feels right for me. I don’t let anyone else dictate that. And I think that’s such an empowering place to be ’cause you’re free. When you’re free, you can heal ’cause your system’s more regulated. So that’s kind of my thoughts. I feel like there’s so much pertaining to why women have been so targeted.
Dr. Wendy Myers
That’s so good. I also think it’s so important to develop yourself as a person. Develop your intuition. Develop a relationship with God. Develop your life purpose. Work on that so that you don’t have this focus on the outside, which is, for a young woman, for many of them, that’s what they’re focused on, ’cause they just haven’t developed themselves enough as a person and have something else to anchor them for their self-esteem.
Amber Romaniuk
It’s an epidemic. I grew up in the era just before phones and social media. I can’t imagine being a teenager or in my early twenties, like having that be all of my upbringing. I am sure they’re figuring out a way to navigate it, but I just feel for them because I feel like that adds a whole other level of influence.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about some of the most unexpected triggers of self-sabotage when it comes to eating disorders.
Amber Romaniuk
I think some of the biggest unexpected ones would be being sensitive, empathetic and very intuitive, but you don’t understand what it feels like to be able to be intuitive and empathetic and not take on the way to the world. So say you are hanging out with a friend and you’re in a great mood and then you start hanging out with your friend and they dump everything on you and they just tell you all the struggles they’re going through and how crappy they feel and all this stuff. You sit and listen and you’re all encouraging. Then you leave exhausted. You’re feeling all the stuff they’re feeling ’cause you took it on and you don’t know how to engage, but stayed attached. You get home and you’re angry, you’re upset, you’re sad, whatever, depressed, and then you’re like, I don’t feel good. I’m gonna go eat.
So not knowing how to set good energetic boundaries and being an empath is a really easy way to trigger binge and emotional eating. Also, being aware of when you’re taking on the energy of the collective ’cause the collective can be really intense, whether it’s the energy of the people in your town, your state, province, country, or the world, and learning how to again, identify like, am I feeling anxiety right now because it’s mine? Or am I actually picking up on the energy from the collective ’cause if I am, I’m giving it back and I’m not taking that on. Learning how to manage that is incredibly important. As you build your intuition, it gets a lot easier to do.
I also think that what we had already talked about, candida and parasites. I think those are really unexpected triggers that a lot of people don’t know about unless they’ve been educated on those things, because of the way they fuel the cravings and mess with your mood, your blood sugar, and your energy levels. I think that also hormone imbalances are really, really unlike just because women are not taught about their hormones and the signs and how to get testing done properly and investigate and support them.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I hope that’s changing. The black box warning has been removed for cancer. Hopefully doctors start getting trained better about that ’cause I suffered for 10 years with low progesterone. Women don’t realize that low progesterone, they’re gonna be stressed out and not sleeping. That makes them a sitting duck for binge eating and feeling more stress that they need to relieve.
Amber Romaniuk
A hundred percent.
Dr. Wendy Myers
There are coping mechanisms, you know?
Amber Romaniuk
Yeah, exactly. I think it’s gonna take some time, but this education needs to be put out there because most of them that I work with have low progesterone. I had low progesterone. I was postmenopausal at 24 because of the after effects of binge eating, bulimia, the food addiction and all of that. Obviously, that was regulated once I really healed. When you have low progesterone and you’re awake for several hours through the night and you can’t sleep. The fatigue in itself again, like I talked about earlier, increases ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone. You stay more hungry and it dulls your ability to feel full, which is your leptin signal, so it’s easier to overeat.
Also, with low progesterone comes potentially lower serotonin, dopamine, GABA, oxytocin, some of our mood-boosting neurotransmitters and oxytocin. It helps you feel connected to yourself and others. When you have low progesterone and your oxytocin isn’t circulating properly in your body, you can feel flatlined, you can feel absolutely nothing. You can just feel mad. There can be so many good things going on in your life and you’re just like, meh, I don’t really feel anything. And you can actually feel disconnected even from your loved ones, your spouse, your kids, and people around you. There may be absolutely nothing wrong but this hormone imbalance makes things feel completely different and uncomfortable.
When you’re not feeling or you’re feeling things that you’re like, why am I feeling this? I shouldn’t be feeling this. That in itself can prompt you to wanna go and numb out with food or get that dopamine high. Low GABA makes us crave sugar more easily, trouble falling asleep. And then of course, if we have low serotonin or dopamine, we’re gonna wanna feel a bit of a high. We’re gonna wanna feel some pleasure, some reward, some euphoria, because we may be lacking feeling that, or maybe we don’t have healthy ways to feel it like meditation and sunshine. There are so many great ways to build up these neurotransmitters, but if we don’t know about any of that and we know going to food, we’re gonna keep doing that.
So I see low progesterone is actually a huge binge and emotional eating trigger. Another big reason for that, like I talked about, is oxytocin. If it’s low, we’re more critical of ourselves and others. It’s hard to actually feel safe, and you don’t have the capacity to process stress when you have low progesterone. So it’s just so much easier to be like, I need something. I need to numb out. I need to check out. So getting hormones tested is incredibly important. High cortisol, more sugar, salt, carbohydrate cravings, increased appetite levels again, trouble falling asleep, fatigue, exhaustion, brain fog, and weight gain happen more easily when your cortisol’s high.
A lot of women will panic and diet and restrict, and that spikes cortisol higher. It makes it easier to put on protection and hang on, and then that fuels this vicious cycle of nothing is working, so screwed. I’m just gonna go eat whatever I want. I think that all or nothing is another big trigger. That perfection of trying to be perfect on the diet or with whatever the thing is you’re trying to be perfect with and then it is not able to be perfect. Then you go into the other end, which is now I’m gonna go eat everything I want. I’ve messed up. There’s something wrong with me. I don’t have willpower and it has nothing to do with that.
I think those have some big influence. I think that a lot of women, like I talked about earlier, are people pleasing, are overbooked, are lost on their lists, and I think that’s one of the biggest triggers because when you’re constantly overwhelmed and depleted and you are putting your worth and value into other people. You wanna say no, but you keep saying yes, you build resentment, you build shame, you build all this negative emotion in your body and that keeps you down in a lower vibration. And the more negative emotion, the more dense and heavier the vibration. It makes it easier for you to keep in what I call the looping behaviors where we feel negative emotion. We’re in a low vibration, we go into low frequency behaviors like binge eating, bulimia, and connecting with old, unhealthy relationships.
It just keeps us like in these looping cycles, right? Those behaviors make you feel more negative. Emotions keep your frequency low and you can just stay there. I think understanding the energetic part of this is so powerful because it is a big part of us. When we can understand this isn’t just an emotional journey or just a physical journey and it’s very multidimensional, we’ll look at all these pieces and work on shifting them.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Can you talk about how diets and restrictive eating styles amplify these behaviors?
Amber Romaniuk
A hundred percent. They’re a huge factor in this. I think some of the biggest reasons for it are diets and restriction. They fuel perfection mentalities. They fuel the all or nothing mindset. You’ve gotta be perfect on the diet or you won’t reach your result. None of the recommendations are sustainable. So you learn all these new rules. You inherit all these food fears. Oh, sweet potatoes are bad or protein is bad. Avocados are bad. Oh my God. I lost weight, not eating fat. So I need to try and attain that. Like good luck. You’re gonna be miserable. We inherit all these food rules and food fears because we’ve attained some kind of success following a rigid protocol but from a mentality standpoint. Again, we are convinced we have to be perfect to attain results, which isn’t achievable in my opinion.
And then of course, because a lot of these aren’t attainable, we end up having a trigger. We end up rebelling at some point. Our food temptations are around us and we don’t know how to manage or be mindful around them. And then the switch flips and we end up losing control and over-consuming also. Then we panic and go, my gosh, I messed up. Guilt, shame, anger, frustration. I’m never gonna be able to heal ’cause I can’t attain this diet. I’m never gonna lose weight ’cause I keep losing control with food. Um. I think one of the biggest problems with all these diets and restrictions is it keeps you disconnected from going within and doing the deeper work and realizing this is a self-worth journey.
This is a multidimensionally healing journey and chasing quick fixes while I know it is comfortable, ’cause you think that counting calories or controlling your food is a lot easier than going within and dealing with your stuff. I get it, but it’s gonna keep you stuck in suffering because over time diets and restrictions spike cortisol, suppress your thyroid and your metabolism, and make it a lot easier to gain weight more easily and harder to lose. And because your nervous system gets more and more dysregulated and you keep losing more hope and faith that you can succeed with something, it’s easier to self-sabotage and stay in these vicious cycles and that really hits on your worth and you lack belief in yourself and you lose the fact that you can be integral with yourself.
I think that all that really hits away at our internal state of being, and then it can make us really question if we can ever heal or do the deeper work, which we all can, but we’ve gotta be willing to admit that the diets and the quick fixes are comfortable and familiar, but they’re not actually gonna help me go within and do the deeper work. They’re just keeping me distracted and delaying my ability to heal, and they’re messing with my hunger. They’re messing with my hormones, they’re messing with my gut, my brain function, all these different things. And so I’m gonna slowly learn how to trust my body, understand what’s triggering me to self-sabotage, work on my worth, my hormones, my gut, my blood sugar, and take the right baby steps at a time.
As I do this and I learn how to trust myself and build awareness and listen to my body, what I realized is I don’t have to be chained to these external tools that are disempowering, like calorie counting, weighing and measuring my food, going for a weight loss shot, like all this stuff that some of it can have some pretty serious side effects. Instead, I can learn how to listen to my body and trust myself. And the safer I help my body feel, the more I honor what I need. The healing is gonna happen a lot more easily, but I get it. It’s uncomfortable.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
People get worried about digging up past traumas or sexual trauma and they don’t wanna deal with it, or they don’t know where it gets started. So what are some of the tools that you recommend for people to get started on their healing journey?
Amber Romaniuk
I think the first step, even before tools, is just admitting that you’re in a food addiction or bulimia or emotional eating, just acknowledge it and go, there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with you, you’re not broken. But just acknowledging it, I think, is the first step. I think then from there can you start forgiving yourself for it. You can decide, okay, do you wanna start gathering resources like podcasts and YouTube channels? Do you wanna start building more awareness around why you’re doing what you’re doing? Do you wanna reach out for support?
I think for a lot of women who’ve been struggling for years or decades, I highly encourage reaching out for some level of support. This is so much beyond your willpower and trying harder on a diet. This is beyond your nutrition knowledge. Celebrate the knowledge you have. If you truly knew everything, you would not be in this place. And so this is your opportunity to go, there’s more healing to do. There’s things I don’t know that I’m gonna learn on this journey. I think one of the first most empowering things that women should start asking themselves to build awareness is this physical hunger or emotional?
Starting to decipher the difference between the two is incredibly powerful. Before you go to food, if you don’t know the difference, well, physical hunger looks like a hunger signal, a stomach growl. You wait too long to eat and your blood sugar crashes and you feel dizzy, faint, lightheaded, or you start craving sugar and your mood drops. You look at the clock and realize you haven’t eaten in a few hours. These are all cues. It’s time to physically nourish your body and really emotional is everything else. And that’s where I think the next thing you can start to do is write down a list of your triggers, things you’re already aware of that you know, trigger you to go to food, and then even after you do self-sabotage.
This is the biggest piece. You’ve gotta start to be willing to spend some time reflecting on why you’re doing what you’re doing. Spending time for yourself, giving to yourself self care, quiet time, time and reflection. Time to regulate your nervous system. Time to build awareness and understand what you’re doing because that’s gonna help you start to catch your triggers and prevent them from happening. So even if it’s a post trigger, okay, well what triggered me? What happened the last few days that has brought all of this up? Can I forgive myself for this? What did I learn from it? I’m gonna try this thing differently again next time. If it comes up, these are incredible, powerful places to start.
This is what I started doing when I was healing. And then from there, I think there’s so many other things that we can dive into such as bio-energetics frequencies, reprogramming the subconscious mind, positive affirmations, EFT, tapping meditation, inner child healing, there’s so many things. To me, on the physical end, we’ve gotta do hormone testing right away and start supporting your adrenals and your thyroid or whatever their gut support, blood sugar support so we can start stabilizing some of these physical systems in your body, which are making it easier to give into food. The more stable your physical body, while we work on the emotional and the subconscious and the energetic pieces, the less you’ll find yourself going to food and being able to work through your triggers and give yourself what you need instead.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Everyone has emotional trauma they need to work on. Even if they maybe perceive they don’t have a lot of trauma, I think people don’t account for emotional neglect, which many people dealt with where their parents clothed them and took them to the soccer games, but they were just largely emotionally absent and disconnected from the child and they didn’t get their emotional needs met. And then we have the intergenerational trauma where you could be carrying grandmothers or 10 generations ago. There’s conventional medical research to prove that intergenerational trauma does affect us. It’s passed down to us, and so it may not even be your stuff that you’re dealing with. So there’s a lot to unpack there, but it’s the emotional trauma that is really important for people with this type of eating disorders or no matter what you’re going through, even physical health issues.
Amber Romaniuk
When you’re willing to step into all of that and dismantle it and clear it, not only do you learn amazing tools to cope if stressors or an intense phase of life comes up, you also see that you’re fully capable and that you can weather any storm. One of the most empowering things that I learned is my mom was heavily declining with her MS and I was trying to heal my relationship with food. I’ve gotta be willing to sit through the discomfort. I don’t like it. It sucks. I’m in grief. I’m mourning. I wish I could do something to help her, but I have no idea. And I’m trying to lovingly detach from her fate. Being able to do that without going to food in the end was so liberating because it did show me that I can do it, and I think it helped me build so much confidence in my ability to feel. I still don’t like being uncomfortable.
I still don’t like it when you have those moments, but I’m like, this is what it is. I’m safe. I’ll get through this discomfort. I don’t like it, but what can I do to have my back right now and to support myself through it? What tools can I use to process my emotions or release emotions and let things go? And I think that’s really the key is you start to just build this confidence that you can get through anything without hurting yourself or avoiding or numbing out, and it will help you progress through it more efficiently. That to me is just where we really attain our power.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Where can people find your website and work with you? What kind of programs do you have?
Amber Romaniuk
My website is amberapproved.ca. If you’re wondering if you’re struggling with binge or emotional eating, you can take the free quiz. The podcast is The No Sugarcoating Podcast, and it’s available on all podcast apps. On the website, you can book a 30 minute complimentary body freedom consultation, and we can explore private coaching. It’s called the Body Freedom Programs. It is a catered customized program to suit your needs and help you address your unique set of triggers, help you fully overcome whatever it is, bulimia, binge eating, food addiction, emotional eating, compulsive eating, help you identify the roots of your weight loss blocks and do the healing in a more mindful way, heal your inner child, regulate your nervous system.
We do hormone testing, gut testing, blood work, whatever we need to do to support your physical body as well and really going on a journey. Usually most women come for a year or a year and a half. Some come for six months. It just depends on what they feel called to, but the average is about 12 to 18 months. We can talk about all that in the consultation and see if it feels like a fit. I’m on social media and my name, Amber Romaniuk on Instagram and YouTube.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s so important that anyone listening to this, if you or a friend or a loved one is dealing with an eating disorder, you have to address it at some point. You can’t keep ignoring it, sweeping it under the rug and just keep with your same routine and compulsive behaviors. Some people don’t realize down at the end of the road they can lose all their teeth or most of them destroy their esophagus. They have very serious health consequences if they keep on the road that they’re on and it destroys their lives. They end up isolating, not having the relationships they want, harming familial relationships. The spiral does continue.
You continue to circle down the dream. So, I’d really urge people to get help from super knowledgeable people like yourself. That was such a good show. I’ve definitely done a couple other ones and you’re just very articulate and succinct in how you’re saying everything. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
Amber Romaniuk
I appreciate that. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. I love doing this show. I love bringing you experts from around the world to help you make those distinctions, help you just figure out and get some discernment in what you’re trying to accomplish in your life and with your health. So thanks for tuning in every week and I’ll talk to you guys soon.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
