hello everyone welcome back to my channel there's been something that's been nagging at me for a while now it's how often i hear that dieting and losing weight is expensive that it's something you shouldn't put your money into you should just eat however much you want eat intuitively and that will save you money and your body will be doing what it wants to by eating intuitively this mentality ignores the fact that a lot of people overeat naturally their intuition tells them to overeat and that binge eating exists which is something that not a lot of people know about or talk about and also the fact that over consuming food is very expensive unfortunately there isn't a lot of data out there on how people spend their money when they are really overweight versus a normal size but luckily i have an audience full of people who have recovered from binging and have lost significant amounts of weight so i asked a bunch of my followers about their finances before and after recovering from binge eating or losing a lot of weight and a lot of the responses i got were from people who recovered while they were still children and living at home with their parents mostly teenagers so today we are going to look at some of their stories as to how their finances and their family's finances were affected by their binge eating even at a young age [Music] [Applause] this first story is from a young woman who lost about 75 pounds when she was in high school and struggled with binge eating disorder at the same time she also used to bring shopping bags full of food to school for lunch every day and that was just school food she was also still living with her parents when this happened and her family had a philosophy along the lines of if you're well fed you're well loved or we can't refuse you food because then we'd be bad parents have you noticed a change in spending on food since recovery before recovery i had pocket money it all went to food it was tragic because i'd forced myself to fit into clothes that were too tight so i didn't have to buy new ones i wanted to spend the money on more food on more sugary drinks etc i didn't have trendy clothes as a teen just a lot of hand-me-downs from family who were all bigger than me i wore the same pair of jeans for weeks at school it was the only thing i had that fit me nowadays after losing weight i spend a lot less on food i buy from a local market and produce is a lot cheaper than snacks and nuts i can stretch 10 pounds for a week and eat three square meals cooked by myself that are healthy and nutritious i also developed a taste for savory things rather than pure sugar and salt i remember my tongue had constant wounds from the sheer amount of salt i used to eat from salted nuts and chips and the pain was intense my current weekly grocery costs are about 20 pounds which is what i'd spend on just snacks and food when i was in school excluding the meals that my parents fed me for free i feel liberated in a way that food is not the only thing i think of when i have money to spare i've invested in a nicer wardrobe and even have hobbies now i'm not rich since i'm a uni student no maintenance loan either due to my immigration status it's all my hard earned money so it's so rewarding to spend my money wisely did you have any go-to foods that you spent an excessive amount of money on my ultimate addiction that i'm still struggling with to this day is nuts peanut butter i cannot have in my house now that i've moved out i used to buy expensive bags of cashews for school i'd eat two to three per day it wreaked havoc on my parents because it was so expensive to keep up with but at least i was eating yikes i'm still struggling with nuts in general some other binge foods i had were honeyed bread and honey is pricey too i could eat a loaf or two in one sitting with a jar of honey also two european sized bags of chips per day nowadays the most expensive food i probably buy is salmon and it's more of a treat have you noticed a change in spending on exercise and other discretionary health costs my parents have always been health freaks they'd get monthly blood tests done to see if i am getting diabetes since my mother developed type 2 diabetes because of her eating habits but because my sodium was super super high i was always dehydrated and i had high ish cholesterol so those were expensive to deal with monthly blood pressure tablets were also a thing also my dentist appointments which i'll detail later and exercise was none back then guess i've given a minimal amount of money now to buying myself a yoga mat and sports bra and leggings to work out at home running shoes and some weights too but they were fairly alright in terms of pricing nothing fancy running shoes and yoga mat i'd say were my best investments i use them daily have you noticed a change in spending in other aspects like clothing hygiene and travel i spend more on clothing now purely because i decided to buy a few quality pieces to last me a few years and i needed to update my wardrobe to my current weight i've maintained this weight for four years now so i always do a complete wardrobe remodel i still get new clothes sometimes but choose to buy eco-friendly such as vintage or second hand i remember how hard it was buying clothes when i was actively gaining weight i couldn't get gifts from family anymore because i kept going up in sizes all the time my relatives couldn't get me anything clothes-wise i had to get new bras new pants even new shoes due to the swelling in my feet due to my high sodium intake travel costs theoretically have gone down we go to the beach with my family once a year for a week i used to get two pizzas and a big bowl full of pasta for myself every night more than both of my parents combined my parents tried to tell me to only get one or the other the pizza or the pasta the cost of my restaurant food were double what my parents had i'd see my parents sigh as they paid both refusing to be the bad guy and withholding food from me hygiene wise my costs increased purely because i care about myself more nowadays and spend more money on moisturizers scrubs and shaving because i like looking after myself now i used to be too depressed and too focused on binging and food to really care about my appearance or my body did you or the people around you ever experience financial strain due to your food consumption health care costs or any other aspects of your size or disorder oh let me tell you about the costs of my dentist it amounted to a few thousand because of all of my cavities root extractions and fillings the four molars furthest back in my mouth are gone they're just tooth rots my gums grew over them they were eroded and shipped over the years of gastric reflux hard candy sugary drinks etc they couldn't be saved one of them was at one point kind of half there like a snaggletooth fang situation it kept biting down on my cheeks and would kept getting sore and bleeding for a while before i had the courage to tell my parents so i could get it fixed i was afraid of burdening them financially any further with the dentist trips financial strain-wise i remember clearly having to get custom-made uniform shirts and bottoms for high school the sizes they came pre-made were only up to a size extra large for girls the cost for us was quite a bit i had zero self-esteem at the time and was extremely depressed so i had to go to therapy for that and the weekly therapy appointments we had to pay for from our own pockets because they weren't covered by insurance it was costly to attend and to be honest i'm not trying to say the therapist did a bad job or mental health workers are a bad idea or to discredit therapy at all but the best thing she could have done was to straight up tell me to lose weight if i can't love myself this way she did not help me one bit i felt her words were empty when she tried to tell me that i was fine this way that i was just shapely and that boys might dig that it filled me with disgust that i had to be comforted like that because i knew i had to change but nobody wanted to tell me the truth everyone tiptoed around the fact that i was binging and miserable and overweight nobody dared say i was fat or eating too much i hated the avoidance around it i don't know why i couldn't help myself until i had the real spark to change but i wish my therapist addressed binge eating as coping from essay instead of eating my emotions because people are mean to me because i'm fat weird mental gymnastics here's what motivated me to change in the end a classmate said where's your shopping bag you're gonna starve as a joke when i did not bring my shopping bag with snacks to school it was a dagger to my heart it felt awful but the ridiculousness of eating that much just at school finally hit me that was the moment i realized it was not normal to eat like that that's when i started walking more eating healthier and eating less i gradually cut out unhealthy things like deep fried things fries etc i started working out at home with youtube videos watching nutrition videos documentaries etc made me realize i don't want to die young and want to live as long and as healthily as i can i have dreams i have yet to fulfill thanks for listening to me and i hope this helps that was a great story thank you for sending this to me and a few things i think this section right here where she's talking about her therapist not addressing binge eating and instead saying that people were mean to her for being fat i think this means that the therapist was saying that she's fat because people are mean to her and she shouldn't worry about it instead of addressing that she was binge eating to cope for other problems so basically her therapist was like you're fat because people are mean to you it's not your problem just feel better about yourself and also i had no idea that your shoe size could go up from high sodium intake that's wild to me and this line about some guys might be into bigger girls so don't worry about your size yikes how is your response as a therapist to someone saying i'm insecure about my size that oh some guys might be into your size so there's no problem with it don't worry about it this is one of those moments where the therapist should have had a lot of therapy before being able to give therapy but i'm glad you were able to recover regardless despite this highly questionable therapist next story we have another young woman from the uk maybe binge eating is better diagnosed there than it is in the united states but i got a lot of submissions from people from england she said i was in high school during the time that i struggled however i did often use my allowance and the money from my job to buy food for secret binges do you have any go-to foods that you spent excessive amounts of money on yes especially when i had my own wage i used to spend about 30 pounds a day on takeaway foods kebabs and mcdonald's mainly and then about four times a week i would buy a large packet of chili heatwave doritos and ben jerry's cookie dough ice cream and eat it in one sitting i'd also spend most days on food and then shop like snacks and that would eventually amount to five pounds per trip pretty much my entire paycheck went to food so if we add this all up she was spending 30 pounds a day on take out so that's 30 times seven binging on doritos and cookie dough ice cream four times a week we'll say that was about eight dollars so that's an extra 32 dollars and then we'll say she did these other snack trips twice a week so she was spending over 250 a week on these foods as a teenager have you noticed a change in spending on things like clothing travel and hygiene yes because of my binging and subsequent rapid weight gain i would constantly be changing clothing sizes so i'd have to replace things and buy bigger sizes every few months as things would just become too small on me very fast i wasted a lot of money on clothes during that time this is kind of gross but also due to my excess weight and generally poor diet i would have to wear extra deodorant and shower products because i ended up smelling bad from food sweat yeah that's a thing did you or the people around you ever deal with financial strain because of your disorder or size yes this was more of a problem when i was younger but i would sneak food in the middle of the night and hide the wrappers from my parents but of course then they would have to replace the food multiple times a week so i would say that my parents ended up spending quite a bit of their own money unintentionally fueling my binges imagine having to buy triple the amount of food needed because someone kept eating it all this definitely adds up junk food like branded crisps and chocolate are not cheap either and that was mostly what i binged on overall i've saved a lot of money fixing my relationship with food as i'm sure you've gathered from my lengthy response i unfortunately can't really answer the questions about medical care because i am in the uk but i used to have to get new asthma inhalers frequently i was so out of shape and unhealthy i often be out of breath from walking up the stairs yeah that's lucky that you didn't have to pay for that overall between her spending 250 a week on takeout food and all the other stuff she was snacking on with her own money and the binges that her parents were paying for and the extra clothing that she had to buy frequently i would say there was conservatively 1200 extra pounds being spent per month to fuel her binge eating so this last story is from a woman who dealt with binge eating from the time she was 12 years old to 22 and during recovery she is no longer binging and she lost 120 pounds she went from 240 pounds to 120 pounds when i was in recovery i was in college and i did work study while living at home with my parents my family provided food for me all of my binges came from holiday and birthday money have you noticed a change in spending on food since recovery i can't definitively say since i wasn't footing the bill until recently but i can say i spend money on food very differently i only shop for groceries and i eat out only once a month there's no midnight donuts or emergency doordash deliveries i can just budget for groceries without having to worry about having to spend leftover money on a binge i can save my money or buy myself something nice did you have any go-to foods that you spent an excessive amount of money on when i was deep into intuitive eating and fat liberation as a route out of binging i'd essentially given up on trying to not buy junk food my nutritionist had me buy whatever i wanted at the store whenever i went my parents didn't love this but they supported me and wanted to give it a shot i bought a lot of pre-made foods like lasagna and french toast sticks things that were extremely high in salt sugar and fat have you noticed a change in spending on exercise and other discretionary health care costs my exercise is mostly free i have an amazing gym in my apartment building and i like to take walks with my dog health care costs are way way down i used to report to my general practitioner regularly because i was pre-diabetic and i had constant aches and pains i felt like i couldn't move we couldn't figure out what was wrong with me but i guess i was just fat i feel like that shrug emoji should follow this sentence we didn't know what was wrong but now i know i was just fat now i just pop into the doctor every six months and get my vaccines have you noticed a changing in spending on other aspects like clothing hygiene and travel everything lasts so much longer my clothes couldn't keep up with my body they wore out too quickly either by the fabric giving up or developing the stink i showered every day and still my clothes developed a mysterious and terrible perma-stink it was embarrassing and unavoidable fat rolls get sweaty clothes in between those fat rolls are bound to absorb that stench and eventually they just never get clean again i do buy new clothes regularly still but it's not because i have to it's because i like dressing up did you or the people around you ever experience financial strain due to your food consumption health care costs or any other aspect of your size or disorder god yes i never got to go out with my friends i never got to buy myself new makeup or concert tickets sacrificing all my money to mcdonald's wreaked havoc on my social life and kind of robbed me of my teenage years it was difficult to bond with other kids when you can't go out and do anything when i got to the point where i was obese i voluntarily isolated myself even further i didn't want people to see me and it made it difficult to show up for work it nearly cost me my work study program which would have cost me my education my family sent me to an inpatient treatment for binge eating when i was 19.
This cost them twenty thousand dollars and we have really good health insurance by american standards the treatment center made everything worse they told me my size wasn't the problem my eating wasn't the problem it was the world's perception of my size and eating that was the problem eventually i figured it out on my own but holy [ __ ] my parents could have done so much with that twenty thousand dollars i would sue that is bullsh if they thought that society was the problem and your eating wasn't the problem they could have just said that and not charged you twenty thousand dollars that's like signing up for a course for them to teach you how to fly but then they're like oh it's actually impossible for humans to fly we don't have wings anyway thanks for the twenty thousand dollars bye so i can't account for exactly how much her disorder cost her financially but i can't say it was at least twenty thousand dollars and aside from that her social life and almost her education so that seems costly enough and i'm really glad you got out of the intuitive eating fat liberation route of trying to fix your binging because i feel like that works for a pretty small percentage of people who want to recover from binging and it can a lot of times make things way worse so good job on recovering on your own anyway that's the end of the video i have more stories i will make more videos on this i got a lot of responses from all of you uh but thank you for the submissions and let me know what you all think in the comments and i will see you in my next video
