Health Conditions / Mental Health / Binge Eating Disorder

To say that the term “emotional eating” has a bad rap is an understatement. Diet culture has long gone out of its way to convince us that food is the absolute last thing we should turn to in times of stress or sadness. How many times have you read that if you feel like eating a cookie after a bad day, taking a warm bath and doing some deep breathing is a “healthier” choice? Or that if you’re stressed and feeling snack-y, you should drink a few glasses of water instead? I know I’ve seen and heard that stuff more times than I can count.And sure, sometimes a candle-lit bubble bath is a nice way to decompress. But as a dietitian who specializes in eating disorders and takes a non-diet approach to nutrition counseling, I can confidently say that relying on food for comfort isn’t inherently bad or wrong. Sure, eating gives us energy and nourishment, but it also plays a huge role in our social and emotional lives.I’m not saying that food should be the only thing you turn to when you’re having a hard time, or that eating to numb out your feelings is a great way to go through life—because avoiding emotions, whether that’s through drugs, alcohol, overexercising, or, yes, food, isn’t ideal. What I am saying is that demonizing emotional eating in all forms isn’t good for you, either.Of course food is emotional!There are a lot of people—namely fitness influencers—out there trying to convince us all that food is nothing more than fuel. (Soylent, Silicon Valley’s favorite “drinkable meal,” wouldn’t exist otherwise.) But for most of us, that will never be the case—and that’s a good thing.Food doesn’t just give your body energy; it “can also taste and smell really good, and even the texture can be extremely satisfying, resulting in pleasure and enjoyment,” Ayana Habtemariam, MSW, RDN, a dietitian based in Washington, D.C., who helps clients heal their relationship with food, tells SELF. In other words, the satisfaction you feel when eating your favorite foods isn’t just physical, it’s mental and emotional, too—and the fact that something we do several times a day can bring us a burst of happiness is pretty fantastic if you ask me.We also tend to associate food with positive emotions like connection and comfort. So many social occasions, whether it’s a traditional family gathering or a quick ice cream date with friends, involve food. This might be partly out of convenience—we all have to eat, so why not do it with others?—but the association between food and human connection goes much deeper than that.“We know how important the feeding process is for infants, and that’s obviously not just because the infant needs nourishment,” Kim Daniels, PsyD, a psychologist and emotional eating coach based in West Hartford, Connecticut, tells SELF. “That’s a time for close contact, coddling, and connecting—all of that is happening while the baby is eating.” So of course, Dr. Daniels says, a sense of comfort gets tied to food in our heads.

That’s the first traumatic memory that I ever recovered and worked through with my current therapist, four years ago now. Processing Penny’s death and the way it affected me—how it seeded deep in me fears of my own body and fate—was the breakthrough I needed to recognize the tremendous trauma that had been slowly unfolding within me over many years.Chronic illness is an under-recognized and misunderstood source of trauma. “Oftentimes in our society and our culture, we think about trauma as something that’s associated with combat or a very violent, terrifying event,” Ashwini Nadkarni, MD, a Harvard Medical School instructor and psychiatrist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who specializes in working with people living with a chronic illness, told me. “What’s not well understood is that the burden of having a chronic medical condition very much meets those criteria for a trauma experience.”The trauma of my diabetes diagnosis began to manifest in the perfect storm of adolescence. I was experiencing new stressors: my mom’s mental health struggles, and, having managed my own care for a couple years now, diabetes burnout—a term used to describe feeling emotionally fried by the around-the-clock management. Never-processed traumas billowed up into waves of anger, terror, self-loathing, and, though I couldn’t name it then, grief—for the body, the health, the easy relationship with food, the self-trust, and the potential future I had lost. At 13, for the first time, I grappled with the magnitude and permanence of my disease.I blamed myself for getting diabetes. I believed my existence was a burden on everyone, a feeling I can trace back to a specific memory from a few years earlier. On a family vacation in Utah one summer, we were trying to figure out who was going on a hike with my parents and who was staying back, and I volunteered to join. Once my parents were out of earshot, my sister hissed at me, “Don’t you think Mom and Dad want to get away from worrying about you and your diabetes for once?” The guilt crushed me, and I didn’t feel like going after all.Paralyzing fear and morbid assumptions clouded my visions of the future. These core beliefs have been the hardest for me to recognize as traumatic residue, because for many years they were simply the lens through which I saw myself and the world. Beliefs like: I will probably experience complications like going blind and kidney failure by the time I’m 30. I shouldn’t have children because they will be sick and hate me. I will die young.I was besieged not by traumatic flashbacks, but traumatic flash-forwards into a coffin of sickness and suffering. Depression and anxiety consumed me. Intrusive thoughts and a sense of impending doom kept me up at night as I googled phrases like “average life expectancy female type 1 diabetic.”I eventually started attending therapy and taking antidepressants. With a body I saw as fundamentally, irreversibly broken, I readily accepted that my brain was broken too. I started to numb out with sugar, an exceptionally self-destructive impulse for a person with type 1 diabetes. I developed a binge eating disorder—which wreaked havoc on my blood sugar—that I hid from everyone.

People with binge eating disorder do not use “compensatory behaviors,” meaning they don’t purge, use laxatives, fast, or over-exercise to try and rid themselves of the calories they’ve eaten (unlike people with anorexia or bulimia who do engage in these behaviors). While this might seem counterintuitive, people with binge eating disorder often do go through periods of food restriction and fad dieting, however. It’s just that after a binge eating episode, they do not try to directly “make up” for the calories they’ve consumed with those other behaviors.Back to topWhat are physical binge eating disorder symptoms?During a binge episode, you might not notice anything other than the drive to keep eating. But afterward, a host of physical symptoms may begin. According to a 2019 study published in the journal Nutrients,2 these can include:If the eating pattern continues, you might notice that your body’s “hunger” and “fullness” signals change, too. If you are less sensitive to those signals, it can affect your ability to stop eating during a binge episode.It’s important to know that even though weight gain is a symptom, not everyone with binge eating disorder is overweight and most people diagnosed with obesity don’t have binge eating disorder—BED can develop at any weight. Since people with BED often take great pains to hide their eating behaviors, you may not even know if a friend or loved one is struggling with this.3Back to topWhat are emotional binge eating disorder symptoms?During a binge eating episode, the main thing you feel is out of control. You might feel embarrassed or afraid to eat around other people. You might feel scared to eat certain kinds of food that are viewed as “unhealthy”, like carbs or sugar, even though they are perfectly OK to enjoy, according to the NEDA.When you have binge eating disorder, you’re also likely to be awash in feelings like anxiety, shame, guilt, disgust, and even anger. In fact, a 2020 study published in the journal Psychiatria Danubina found that behaving anxiously as a response to anger was found to be a predictor for disordered eating—including binge eating—in people with depression.4All of these feelings are part of the human experience. Everyone has them. But if you have an eating disorder, they can drive a destructive cycle. Negative emotions like anxiety and anger can trigger binge eating. Binge eating episodes then fuel more negative feelings. They may even leave you with the feeling that you hate yourself.If you have a mood disorder such as depression or anxiety, BED may be even harder on you emotionally. A 2016 study published in Obesity Research and Clinical Practice shows that roughly 20% of those with mood disorders have trouble with binge eating. And people with binge eating disorder experience more severe anxiety than others.5

I was a young woman starting to forge a career in food—though I didn’t know it yet. I was just following my passions, seeking acceptance and soaking up knowledge in a world where producers spent decades perfecting their craft, where chefs worked night after night on improving a dish, on creating culinary excitement. I had always loved food. At home, the kitchen seemed to be the heart of our family. Out in the world, sharing food meant connection. It is an integral part of our lives that offers sustenance and is often an elemental part of our identity—culture, history, comfort, joy, pride, fear, anxiety, love. For me, it was a beautiful obsession, complicated by a darker compulsion. I wanted to taste everything and learn everything about what I was tasting, the person who made that cheese, their traditions, their dreams. I was also afraid of my own appetites and learned to loathe my body in a world that taught me that there was only one punishingly narrow way for a young woman to look. My love for food was profound and profoundly complicated.One late morning, my boss summoned me out of the caves and into the office. A French cheesemaker with a tiny goatee was visiting from Alsace. He unpacked a lineup of cheeses from a rolling suitcase, poured bubbly into plastic cups, and cut hunks from his beauties. My coworkers gathered around to try his wares. Half my brain was trying to follow his heavily accented lecture on cow breeds and importing regulations. The other half—later I would recognize this as my eating-disordered brain, cruel, small-minded, tiresome, and relentless—said, If you eat this cheese, you cannot eat dinner. It said, If you eat this cheese and dinner, you pig, you cannot eat anything tomorrow.I ate the cheese.Later, the cheesemaker left his perfect wares in our little office kitchen. Everyone went back to work. I put my second sweater back on to counteract the cold that permeated the caves and tied my apron around my waist. But my stomach was grumbling, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that double crème with the subtle earthy funk. I took off my apron. I didn’t wash my hands. I snuck back to the little kitchen and sliced off a sliver. Just a sliver. It tasted obscenely good. My body vibrated with wanting. Another sliver. And another. Soon the whole wheel was gone, and then the next one, leaving only a gloppy smudge on the cutting board and a sinking feeling in my stomach: dairy and shame.I used to think my fucked-up-ness around food—the love, the fear, the compulsion—was somehow unique. It’s not. What a relief that it’s not! When I could escape my self-obsession long enough to observe those around me in my burgeoning food career, I noticed that my cheese mentor at the trendy restaurant where I worked after Artisanal was on a perpetual diet. She eschewed nightshades and carbs and downed shots of apple cider vinegar, and then switched between fasting days and days spent mainlining mac and cheese straight from quart containers that were lined up in the kitchen. At my next restaurant job, my manager took the whole nine-hour shift to eat one plastic cup of Greek yogurt, licking a scant spoonful in quiet moments, a faraway look in her eyes. It was at that same restaurant that I caught the hostess throwing up in the bathroom in the thick of a busy service.Nobody ever talked about any of this, least of all me.My anorexia diagnosis morphed into the frustratingly vague EDNOS, eating disorder not otherwise specified (thanks, DSM). Without a clear, official title, it became just an undiagnosed, embarrassing secret. I did weird things with food—restricting, bingeing, and other permutations of misery centered on using food as a drug and hating my body. It was a war I fought 24/7. I lost every battle.