Bertie - Binge Eating Recovery

Bertie is your evidence-based toolkit that supports recovery from binge eating. With Bertie, you can take control to break the binge cycle and find food freedom. HOW BERTIE WORKS
Because everyone’s recovery journey is different, Bertie integrates features from different psychological approaches including Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), Mindfulness, Self-compassion, and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) to provide you with a complete toolbox for recovery.

Bertie helps you overcome binge eating in 5 key ways:

1. Monitoring & Identifying patterns
Monitoring your meals/snacks provides you with important information about your eating habits and can help you identify patterns in your binge eating. Unlike monitoring you may have done in the past, you are not encouraged to count calories or limit your intake. This is about gathering information about your eating patterns in a non-judgemental way to enable you to make changes. By systematically monitoring your eating, you can gain awareness about particular patterns and triggers. Ther Bertie app provides customisable reminders to log each of your meals and snacks. The charts enable you to clearly visualise your emotional and binging patterns over time.

2. Restoring regular eating
Restoring a pattern of regular eating is the most effective approach to overcome binge eating. In accordance with CBT (the frontline treatment for binge eating), It is recommended that you eat 3 meals and 3 snacks each day. The exact time of your meals and snacks can be customised to suit your schedule (in the app settings), however try not to leave long gaps (e.g., >4 hours) between meals/snacks, as this can create psychological and physiological pressure to eat, which can result in a binge.

3. Building your mindfulness muscle
Binge-eating often involves being disconnected from one’s body and being on auto-pilot. You may find you feel like you are out of control, and have difficulty describing how you feel prior to a binge. Practicing mindfulness can help you improve your eating behaviour by increasing awareness of your bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts. This in turn can support you to respond more consciously and compassionately to situations, such as your common triggers or difficult emotions. The Bertie app has a unique meditation program tailored to support your recovery journey.

4. Effectively managing strong urges to binge
On the path to recovery, you will likely experience urges to binge. While urges can feel overwhelming and irresistible, it’s important to know that all urges will rise to a peak and then gradually decrease in intensity. The Bertie app uses a unique SOS support tool, to help you manage intense urges. In these critical moments, Bertie guide you step-by-step to get out of auto-pilot, calm your nervous system, and respond with intention.

5. Promoting social connection and community
It might feel like you are the only person struggling with binge eating, but the reality is there are millions of people going through similar experiences. We know that social support and community are two of the most important factors when recovering from binge eating, so Bertie provides an opportunity for both via our moderated social networking forum. Find your people, share information, and get support from others who’ve been through the same thing.