My quest to beat binge eating
Update: Three years after writing this post, I’ve successfully beaten binge eating. I wrote about what I discovered here! Here, enjoy the original post, when I was going through the thick of it.
I have a problem.
I’ve kept this problem a secret, hidden under the metaphorical covers of my life, for a long time — twelve years, to be exact. Why? Because it makes me feel a deep sense of shame and self-hatred. I always hope it will magically go away, but it never does. I don’t talk about it with other people because I am afraid they’ll judge me for it.
…But those reasons aren’t good enough anymore. This problem haunts my dreams. I think about it constantly. The guilt and shame consumes me, and I avoid meditation because I‘m afraid to confront it.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve used food like a drug.
I reach for food when I’m tired, when I’m bored, when I’m sad, when I’m feeling an existential void. Basically, I reach for food every time I feel an uncomfortable feeling. And when I eat, I eat far more than I need to simply nourish myself or eliminate hunger.
Some of you might be chuckling, saying, “Relaaax, it’s just food. It’s not like you have a drug addiction or anything.”
But it is like a drug addiction. I’m not talking about a casual craving for chocolate — I’m talking about a sudden inexorable need for food. It’s the strongest urge I can think of, like I imagine the cravings of a cocaine addict (Note: Scientists have indeed confirmed that sugar is more addictive than cocaine.)
When I feel a desperate binge coming on, I tear into food like a rabid animal. Sometimes, if I don’t have any binge-worthy foods around, I’ll eat food that isn’t even mine, then frantically have to race to replace it. I feel horrendous amounts of guilt and shame about this. This paragraph was difficult to even write.
What kinds of foods do I generally binge on? While many people assume binge eating refers to junk food, I’ll binge on almost anything, especially if it has sugar, fat, or carbohydrates in it. Because I generally try to only buy healthy whole foods, my binges often involve foods like sunflower seeds, coconut flakes, whole wheat bread … foods that are healthy in moderation, but in the quantities that I eat them are decidedly not.
Binge eating severely restricts my schedule and my life. It means I can’t buy certain foods I love, because I know I’ll eat them all in one sitting. It means I can’t go to restaurants, because I know I’ll inevitably binge when I get home, so I don’t want to consume additional calories beforehand. It means I’ll often turn down invitations to potluck dinners, because I know I won’t be able to control myself around the unrestricted amounts of food. It’s downright depressing how much I’ve had to mold my life around this food addiction.
But the worst part, by far, is how it’s affected my body-image, my self-esteem, and my self-respect. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt profoundly frustrated with my body. Part of this is due to the cultural conditioning that has led so many of us women to believe we are “not enough” because we don’t line up with the media’s singular image of beauty.
But to be honest, it’s not my size itself that I find so unacceptable. It’s the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way —my natural weight is thinner, but I am the size I am because I regularly binge out of control. Outside of this addiction, I do all the “right things” to maintain a healthy weight — I move daily, I hit the gym, I eat lots of fruits and vegetables, I do yoga. But my binge eating cancels all of that out. Every single day, it makes me feel unattractive, helpless, and out of control.
Don’t think I haven’t tried to fix this monumental problem in my life. For the past twelve years, I’ve tried every food restriction mechanism on the internet. I’ve read all the binge eating articles. I’ve tried all the strategies — I’ve meditated, I’ve hidden my food, I’ve set rules for when and where I can eat. But none of it works — as soon as I’m home, I break all my rules, consume thousands of calories, and start the cycle anew.
Where does this come from? Why do I do this?
Part of the tendency to binge eat is certainly evolutionary and biological. Historically, when a large stash of calorie-dense food was available, our ancestors would load up to prevent future starvation … which, of course, is not a problem anymore. In addition, humans crave dopamine rushes, and eating mass amounts of sugar and carbs is the way my body has learned to seek out and obtain that dopamine rush.
But, like any addiction, binge eating comes from seeking dopamine in the wrong places. When I feel any kind of discomfort (or even just lack of pleasure), rather than listening to my body to see what it really needs — water? a nap? some self-love? — I quickly reach for food to make it stop sending signals at all.
But I also know that many times, the discomfort I’m avoiding is a sort of existential despair — a realization that life is meaningless, that I am alone, that everything goes away. It’s like we’re all running around, going about our lives, pretending that these days are adding up to something; I think a subconscious part of our brains knows the emptiness that’s waiting for us when we stop and really listen, and so most of us just don’t. Instead, we have something that we use to fill the void — food, alcohol, drugs, sex, “busyness”.
As I mentioned before, I’ve been fighting food addiction for twelve years now. What a pity, to spend so much time lamenting the state of my body and living in slavery to food. I look back at photos of my beautiful thirteen-year-old self and tear up, knowing that despite her youth and thin physique, she was buying sugar-free Jello and fretting every single day about her weight and relationship with food.
That’s why I’m writing this article. Twelve years is too damn long. I refuse to let this go on any longer.
Last week, I found an article titled “Overcoming food addiction: an instant escape method”, and while I’ve read countless articles on this topic, this one was different. The author posits that overcoming food addiction — nay, any kind of addiction — is actually quite simple: I must simply realize that I am already free. That the cage door is open, and I can just walk out. That I can choose to ignore my monkey-brain’s cravings when it nags me to eat something. I don’t have to listen.
I can already feel something shifting in my mind, as I regain my own power. This will be my strategy going forward. I’ve been applying it for the past few days and have already noticed a stark difference, as I tell my brain, “I don’t have to listen to you!”.
Today marks an important day: The day I begin to take back my life.
This was SO difficult to write about and scary to publicly share, but I believe it’s vitally important to share our secret problems, vices, and addictions that are often shrouded in shame. The only way to heal that shame, both personally and collectively, is to bring it out of the dark corners of our psyche and into the light. Wish me luck on my journey to heal this, and feel free to reach out if you’re going through something similar. We’re all on our way.
7/2020 Update: I wrote about the rest of my story with binge eating (including fully healing it) here!
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