as Jeffrey Schwartz states, CBT therapists “do not emphatically tell you that these brain-based messages are not representative of who you really are and that you do not have to act on them.”84 CBT gives value to the binge urges—saying that they are symptoms of perfectionism, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and so forth. Much time is spent on

why traditional therapy might not direct the changes you want to see (namely, stronger higher brain pathways that can easily veto binge urges and, eventually, the dissolution of the lower brain pathways that drive binge urges).

The aim of the two-goal recovery framework is to strengthen the higher brain pathways that inhibit binge behavior and weaken the lower brain pathways that drive the binge urges.

Your brain is functioning from the bottom up, meaning you are performing the behaviors called for by your lower brain. The goal in this book is to get you to start operating from the top down, using the higher brain to inhibit the unwanted binge behaviors.

Leading neuroplasticity researchers Jeffrey Schwartz, M.D., and Rebecca Gladding, M.D., explain this concept well in their book You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life: The mind is involved in helping you constructively focus your attention. Why is this

The higher brain, which will be covered in more detail in later chapters, contains the prefrontal cortex, which gives you the ability to choose what to focus on and which actions to take based on the information coming from the lower brain. The higher brain is often called the “mind,”71 which is the seat of our conscious awareness. To take the two

The term lower brain actually refers to all of the automatic functions of the brain over which we do not have conscious control. Most of the unconscious, lower brain processes aren’t problematic, but as we’ve discussed, some are temporarily dysfunctional in bulimia and BED. The term lower brain illustrates the fact that the processes that drive

A reward is anything we experience as pleasurable. A reward also typically serves as a reinforcer—a reward that, when presented after a behavior, causes the probability of that behavior to increase. There are countless examples of using rewards to reinforce behaviors, like giving a kid a sticker for being good or granting a dog a treat for learning

feeding hormones.36 The limbic system has three basic objectives: (1) to survive; (2) to seek pleasure; and (3) to avoid pain, both emotional and physical. In this way, the limbic system is vital to keeping us alive and safe by helping us avoid danger; but, as we will see, if poorly understood, it can work against us in bulimia and BED. The limbic