Compulsive Eating

One of the main causes behind compulsive eating is low self-esteem. When you don’t feel confident or secure about how you look or you place in the world, you start to look for comfort elsewhere. Some people engage in self-destructive activities, meaningless sex, drugs, excessive drinking – or binge eating. While the mainstream world tends to view people who overeat as merely lacking willpower, the fact is that binge eating has a deep seated emotional component and is as destructive a behavior as any of the more commonly accepted ones.

Compulsive eating is a form of self-abuse. Stuffing your body full of food that it is not ready for is abusive. Food that it does not need. Food that doesn’t taste good. People, especially women, who are so willing to do this come from a background of being told constantly that they don’t measure up, that their bodies are not good enough, they are too fat, or too broad-shouldered, or too wide-hipped or too old or too lumpy or a dozen other things that make them think that they are not good enough. They are told that they don’t have any self-control, how many times do we have to hear that we are not adequate before we start to believe it?

And when we do start to believe it, we start to treat ourselves like garbage. We start to put things in our mouth that are no good for us, that we are not hungry for, that offend our senses, but we do it anyway because we don’t know any other way to dull the pain. We dull that pain with food and since our bodies don’t deserve to be treated any better than they are being treated, we abuse them with food.

I can’t even count all the times I came home from a disappointing night out and ate. From a blind date that went bad or a night of being the third wheel and ate. Or a night of watching my best friend get all the attention. And the first place I headed was to the kitchen, where I stuffed myself full until I was numb, until I couldn’t tell anymore that I was in pain.

Now in my case it didn’t help that my mother made eating into a forbidden activity in our house. Since I was, in her estimation, a little chubby right from the start, she tried to regulate my eating as soon as she could. The side-effect of doing that was that eating became an even more forbidden, hidden activity for me. It became the thing I did in secret, so when I was able to do it, when I was able to sneak away and have the run of the kitchen, like when she was sleeping, I would gorge myself. I would treat myself like a trash can because that was the only way that I knew of to compensate for all the disappointment – from my mother, from my peers, from the boys my age, from myself for being such a failure at getting and staying thin. And no matter what starvation diet I went on or crazy new plan I tried, it would end and the failure was multiplied 1000 times.

And that bad habit only grew as I got older and only became more intense as I got out on my own and there was nobody watching me. Because if I actually looked at how much I weighed when all these habits started to form, I wasn’t fat! I was normal, but it certainly didn’t feel like that.

All the years that we, as mostly women, have taken second place and listened to the voices inside of our heads that denigrate and belittle us and every little flaw we have, the harshness with which we judge ourselves, all of that year after year after year builds itself up and makes us into virtual trash cans. Our bodies become the receptacles of all those bad feelings and the way we act it out is to fill ourselves with all that junk. Eating when we are not hungry. Stuffing ourselves until we feel uncomfortable, not taking care of ourselves, we do all of that because of not feeling like we measure up.

And what makes it more difficult is that the food helps to deaden the pain. So we keep stuffing it in, and then we feel even worse about ourselves and the vicious cycle continues day after day, year after year.