Unveiling the Hidden Patterns
Have you ever felt like your relationship with food is more complicated than it should be? Maybe you’ve noticed some unusual eating habits creeping in, but you’re not sure if they’re really a problem. If you’re nodding along, you’re not alone. Many people struggle to recognise the signs of disordered eating, especially when they don’t fit the stereotypical image of an eating disorder.
In this blog, we’re going to explore the subtle (and not-so-subtle) signs of disordered eating from a unique perspective. We’ll dive into how these behaviours can be counterintuitive, set off your body’s alarm system, and drive you towards rather than away from food. Understanding this connection is key to breaking free from disordered eating behaviours like binge and emotional eating.
But first, let’s clear something up. When we talk about signs of disordered eating, we’re not just talking about extreme behaviours. We’re looking at a whole spectrum, from seemingly innocent diet rules to more severe patterns.
Most importantly, we’ll explore how these behaviours are often rooted in past experiences, particularly childhood trauma, and how they’re closely tied to your body’s stress response system. This trauma-informed perspective can shed light on why these patterns develop and persist, even when your biggest wish is to change them.
The Importance of Early Recognition
Now, you might be thinking, “Isn’t everyone a little weird about food sometimes?” Well, yes and no. While it’s true that most people have some quirks when it comes to eating, recognising the signs of disordered eating is crucial for several reasons:
- Early intervention: The sooner you identify problematic patterns, the easier they are to address.
- Understanding the root cause: Many disordered eating behaviours are actually attempts to cope with stress, difficult emotions and to feel safe. Understanding this, opens up opportunities for more effective solutions that address the underlying issues, not just the symptoms.
- Preventing escalation: By noticing the signs early on, you can take steps to prevent these patterns from developing into more severe eating disorders.
- Improving overall well-being: Disordered eating doesn’t just affect your relationship with food – it can impact your physical health, mental state, and social life too. Addressing it early can lead to improvements across all areas of your life.
Recognising these signs is an important step towards healing. It’s not about labelling yourself or feeling ashamed. Instead, it’s about understanding your behaviours with curiosity and compassion.
Recognising the Signs and Understanding Their Roots
Now that we understand why recognising the signs of disordered eating is so important, let’s dive into what these signs actually look like.
The Spectrum of Disordered Eating
First, it’s crucial to understand that disordered eating exists on a spectrum. On one end, we have a more intuitive approach to eating, responding to your body’s needs as they arise. On the other, we have clinically diagnosed eating disorders like anorexia, bulimia or binge eating disorder. In between, there’s a whole range of behaviours that can signal and contribute to an unhealthy relationship with food. We’re not just talking about extreme behaviours here. We’re looking at the whole spectrum, from subtle habits to more obvious patterns.
Also, it’s important to highlight that disordered eating is not solely about food. It typically reflects deeper issues related to our relationship with ourselves, our body image and our emotions. Our understanding of our place in the world. These patterns can be influenced by cultural norms, societal pressures, and personal experiences, extending far beyond just what’s on our plate.
Here are some signs to watch out for:
Food-Related Behaviours:
- Rigid Food Rules: Do you have strict rules about when, what, or how much you can eat?
- Obsessive calorie tracking: Do you find yourself counting every calorie you consume, using apps to count what you’ve eaten, strictly sticking within certain numbers?
- Avoiding food groups: Do you avoid or exclude certain foods groups from your diet with the thought that they will cause weight gain? i.e. sugar, carbs, junk food, foods high in fat
- Avoiding social situations: Do you tend to avoid social situations involving food for fear of people judging what you eat or how much you eat? For fear of losing control of choosing “healthy” options?
- Compensatory Behaviours: Do you try to “make up” for eating by exercising excessively, skipping meals, or using laxatives? OR do you allow yourself to have a cheat meal after being “good”?
- Yo-Yo Dieting: Are you constantly cycling through different diets, losing weight only to gain it back?
- Disconnection from Hunger Cues: Do you find yourself ignoring hunger pangs, pushing through even when your body is signaling for food?
- Disconnection from Fullness Cues: Do you struggle to recognise when you’re full, often eating past the point of comfortable satiety?
- Loss of Control Around Food: Do you often feel powerless around food, like you can’t say no, especially to comfort foods? Does this sometimes result in eating large amounts in a short time (binging and/or purging)?
- Emotional Eating: Do you often turn to food when you’re stressed, sad, or even happy? Do you struggle to name or express your feelings?
- Food Anxiety: Are you constantly thinking about your next meal or planning your food intake? Do you worry excessively about the food choices you’ve made and/or feel guilty after eating?
Body Image and Self-Perception:
- Body Checking and Scale Obsession: Do you frequently check your body in mirrors or weigh yourself often? Does the number on the scale dictate your mood for the day?
- Fear of Weight Gain: Are you excessively worried about gaining weight, especially after having a “cheat meal”?
- Comparison: Do you constantly compare your body and eating habits to others?
- Perfectionism: Do you hold yourself to impossibly high standards, believing you’ve ‘messed up’ your diet if you eat one ‘unhealthy’ food item or meal?
- Negative Self Talk: How do you speak to yourself? Are you kind or cruel? Are you compassionate or critical? Do you treat yourself like a friend or an enemy?
Emotional and Social Indicators:
- Feelings of Not Belonging: Do you often feel like you don’t fit in or need to change your appearance/lose weight to be accepted?
- People-Pleasing Tendencies: Do you find yourself constantly trying to please others at your own expense and/or in an effort to feel more accepted?
- Anxiety: Do you struggle to quiet your mind? Does your mind race and you’re unable to switch off your thoughts about food or negative thoughts about yourself/body-image or actions?
- Sleep Disturbances: Do you struggle to fall asleep because your mind can’t switch off or you wake-up at night worrying about what you ate or how you look or the fear of a partner leaving you because of how you look or what you weigh?
- Coping Behaviours: Do you juggle between binge eating / binge drinking / binge shopping?
- Seeking Validation Through Physical Intimacy: Do you find yourself seeking attention or connection through physical appearance or intimate encounters? This might include dressing provocatively, engaging in casual relationships, or being more open to sexual experiences than you’re truly comfortable with, all in an attempt to feel momentarily less alone or more accepted.
Having several of these signs doesn’t necessarily mean you have an eating disorder nor does it mean that you are broken or unfixable. But if you’re noticing a pattern, it might be worth taking a closer look at your relationship with food and yourself.
NB: This list is not an exhaustive list of all the signs and symptoms. It simply serves to give you an idea of what to look out for.
The Hidden Thread: How Childhood Trauma and Your Body’s Survival Response Drive Disordered Eating
So, we’ve just gone through a pretty hefty list of signs that may indicate or contribute to disordered eating. But here’s the million-dollar question: What do all these seemingly different behaviours have in common? Understanding that there is connection offers a new approach that can provide more lasting results. It can also help us understand why these behaviours can be so challenging to change.
Understanding Childhood Trauma and Your Nervous System
First, let’s talk about trauma. When we say “trauma,” we’re not just talking about big, life-threatening events. Trauma can be any experience that overwhelmed your capacity to cope at the time – and not having the skills or support to process the experience. This could, among others, include things like:
- Childhood emotional neglect
- Feeling misunderstood or invalidated
- Bullying, humiliation or social exclusion
- Witnessing domestic abuse or instability at home
These experiences, even if they seem “small,” if not properly addressed at the time, can leave a lasting impact on your nervous system. It’s like your body’s alarm system gets rewired, becoming more sensitive to potential threats. When someone who experienced childhood trauma encounters a trigger, their body may react more intensely than the situation warrants.
This heightened reaction can be overwhelming, especially if you lack the skills to cope with such intense emotions. You know that flick of a switch where one minute everything is fine. The next, you could eat a whole cake and then some? That’s your survival instinct kicking in.
Your nervous system’s primary job is to keep you safe by moving you away from pain and towards comfort. This survival instinct, while essential for our ancestors, can be problematic in modern life. When faced with emotional discomfort, your body doesn’t distinguish between physical danger and emotional stress – it just wants to find relief, fast.
Without healthier coping mechanisms in place, many turn to food as a quick and accessible way to self-soothe. Food becomes a powerful tool to numb the discomfort and create a temporary sense of safety and pleasure. Over time, this can develop into a habitual response, leading to a complex relationship with food that goes beyond simple hunger or nutrition.
Understanding this survival instinct is crucial because many behaviours associated with disordered eating actually trigger this very response, creating a cycle that’s hard to break. Let’s explore some of these behaviours and how they impact your nervous system.
1. Behaviours That Trigger Your Survival Instinct
Before we dive in, let’s quickly understand the “window of tolerance.” This is the optimal zone where you can manage stress and emotions effectively. When you’re within this window, you’re able to think clearly and make conscious decisions, including those about food.
Many behaviours we associate with disordered eating actually activate your body’s survival response, triggering the release of stress hormones like cortisol and activating your sympathetic nervous system. This puts your body in a state of heightened arousal, which over time can push you beyond your window of tolerance (in other words, the point where you lose control). Examples include:
- Setting rigid food rules, which can instill a sense of fear around eating
- Engaging in cruel self-talk, which your body interprets as a threat
- Yo-yo dieting, which stresses your body as it struggles to adapt to inconsistent nutrition
- Constant worry about food intake or weight, creating a state of anxiety (which is essentially fear)
- Perfectionism around eating, where the fear of ‘failure’ keeps you on high alert
- Excessive people-pleasing, which can create stressful situations as you overextend yourself
These behaviours can keep your body in a constant state of stress, making it more likely that you’ll exceed your window of tolerance, lose control and engage in binge eating as a way to cope.
2. Neglecting Your Body’s Basic Needs
When you don’t meet your body’s fundamental needs, it can trigger a stress response. This category includes:
- Ignoring hunger cues or restricting food intake
- Lack of proper nutrition
- Not getting enough sleep
- Feeling a lack of belonging or connection
When these basic needs aren’t met, your body may become stressed, releasing cortisol and activating the fight-or-flight response (Survival Response). This state of physiological stress can drive you towards food, as a means of self-regulating or self-soothing. It may trigger you to eat to make up for the lack of fuel or nutrients. It may also trigger you to eat as a means of providing comfort or to feel safe (self-soothing) – situations causing you to eat without any real need for food.
3. Signs of an Already Dysregulated Nervous System
First, what do we mean by a dysregulated nervous system? Simply put, it’s when your body’s stress response system is out of balance. Instead of responding appropriately to stressors and then returning to a calm state, a dysregulated system stays on high alert, making it hard to relax or feel safe (often as a result of childhood trauma).
Some symptoms/behaviours indicate that your nervous system is already in this heightened or dysregulated state. These include:
- Inability to switch off thoughts
- Loosing control around food on a regular basis
- Emotional Eating & overeating when you’re not hungry
- Feeling constantly on edge and/or riding an emotional rollercoaster
- Feeling anxious, overwhelmed, reactive and/or shutdown, demotivated, depressed
In this state, your body is essentially in the driver’s seat, making it difficult for you to make conscious choices about food and eating. When your nervous system is dysregulated, it’s like your body is stuck in “survival mode”, constantly seeking ways to self-soothe. These signs of dysregulation create a feedback loop: the more dysregulated you become, the more likely you are to engage in disordered eating behaviours, which in turn further dysregulates your nervous system. Breaking this cycle often requires addressing both the eating behaviours and the underlying nervous system dysregulation.
4. Coping Behaviours
Finally, some behaviours are attempts to cope with the uncomfortable feelings and sensations of being in a dysregulated state. These might include:
- Emotional eating
- Juggling between binge eating, binge drinking, and binge shopping
- Seeking validation through physical intimacy to overcome loneliness
These behaviours often serve as ways to avoid feeling difficult emotions, providing temporary relief but ultimately keeping you stuck in a cycle of using your choice of coping behaviours to cope with life.
Understanding these categories helps us see how many of our attempts to control our eating can actually be counterproductive, triggering the very responses we’re trying to avoid. This insight points us towards the need for a different approach – one that works with our nervous system rather than against it.
Putting It All Together
Now that we’ve explored the various aspects of disordered eating behaviours and their connection to the nervous system, let’s connect the dots:
- Childhood trauma can rewire our nervous system, making it more sensitive and easily triggered. This means that even seemingly harmless situations, that remind us of a past trauma, can push us out of our window of tolerance more easily than someone without this history.
- Engaging in disordered eating behaviours isn’t just about food—it’s often a response to emotions, stress or an attempt to feel safe. However, these behaviours themselves can create a state of chronic stress in the body, making it increasingly likely that we’ll exceed our window of tolerance & lose control around food.
- When we pair a nervous system that’s already sensitive due to childhood trauma with the stress-inducing nature of disordered eating behaviours, we’re essentially creating a perfect storm for nervous system dysregulation. This combination makes it extremely challenging to maintain a balanced relationship with food and our bodies.
- The cycle perpetuates itself: a dysregulated nervous system makes us more likely to engage in disordered eating behaviours, which in turn further dysregulates our nervous system.
Understanding this connection helps explain why simply trying to change our eating habits through mindset or willpower often doesn’t work. These behaviours, while problematic, are our body’s attempt to cope with stress and feel safe. Real, lasting change comes from addressing the underlying trauma, learning to regulate our nervous system and becoming more skilled at dealing with our emotions.
By recognising these patterns and their roots, we can approach healing with more compassion and effectiveness. It’s not about blame or shame, but about understanding and working with our bodies, rather than against them.
Dive Deeper: More Resources for Your Healing Journey
If you’ve found this information helpful and want to explore these concepts further, here are some additional resources that can deepen your understanding:
- Why Can’t I Stop Eating?: The #1 Question About Binge Eating Answered: This blog delves deeper into the connection between childhood trauma and nervous system dysregulation. If you’re curious about how past experiences might be influencing your eating habits today, this is a must-read.
- Beyond Hunger: How Your Body’s Quest for Safety Drives Binge Eating: Want to understand more about what triggers your nervous system and drives you to eat? This article explores various factors that can push your body into ‘survival mode’, leading to binge eating behaviors.
- Your Step-by-Step Roadmap: How to Stop Binge Eating for Good: Ready to take action? This blog provides practical strategies and a comprehensive plan to help you overcome binge eating. It’s the perfect next step in your healing journey.
Each of these articles builds on the concepts we’ve discussed here, offering more in-depth insights and practical tools to support your path to a healthier relationship with food and your body. Remember, knowledge is power, and the more you understand about your body and its needs, the better equipped you’ll be to make lasting changes.
Unveiling the Hidden Patterns
Have you ever felt like your relationship with food is more complicated than it should be? Maybe you’ve noticed some unusual eating habits creeping in, but you’re not sure if they’re really a problem. If you’re nodding along, you’re not alone. Many people struggle to recognise the signs of disordered eating, especially when they don’t fit the stereotypical image of an eating disorder.
In this blog, we’re going to explore the subtle (and not-so-subtle) signs of disordered eating from a unique perspective. We’ll dive into how these behaviours can be counterintuitive, set off your body’s alarm system, and drive you towards rather than away from food. Understanding this connection is key to breaking free from disordered eating behaviours like binge and emotional eating.
But first, let’s clear something up. When we talk about signs of disordered eating, we’re not just talking about extreme behaviours. We’re looking at a whole spectrum, from seemingly innocent diet rules to more severe patterns.
Most importantly, we’ll explore how these behaviours are often rooted in past experiences, particularly childhood trauma, and how they’re closely tied to your body’s stress response system. This trauma-informed perspective can shed light on why these patterns develop and persist, even when your biggest wish is to change them.
The Importance of Early Recognition
Now, you might be thinking, “Isn’t everyone a little weird about food sometimes?” Well, yes and no. While it’s true that most people have some quirks when it comes to eating, recognising the signs of disordered eating is crucial for several reasons:
- Early intervention: The sooner you identify problematic patterns, the easier they are to address.
- Understanding the root cause: Many disordered eating behaviours are actually attempts to cope with stress, difficult emotions and to feel safe. Understanding this, opens up opportunities for more effective solutions that address the underlying issues, not just the symptoms.
- Preventing escalation: By noticing the signs early on, you can take steps to prevent these patterns from developing into more severe eating disorders.
- Improving overall well-being: Disordered eating doesn’t just affect your relationship with food – it can impact your physical health, mental state, and social life too. Addressing it early can lead to improvements across all areas of your life.
Recognising these signs is an important step towards healing. It’s not about labelling yourself or feeling ashamed. Instead, it’s about understanding your behaviours with curiosity and compassion.
Recognising the Signs and Understanding Their Roots
Now that we understand why recognising the signs of disordered eating is so important, let’s dive into what these signs actually look like.
The Spectrum of Disordered Eating
First, it’s crucial to understand that disordered eating exists on a spectrum. On one end, we have a more intuitive approach to eating, responding to your body’s needs as they arise. On the other, we have clinically diagnosed eating disorders like anorexia, bulimia or binge eating disorder. In between, there’s a whole range of behaviours that can signal and contribute to an unhealthy relationship with food. We’re not just talking about extreme behaviours here. We’re looking at the whole spectrum, from subtle habits to more obvious patterns.
Also, it’s important to highlight that disordered eating is not solely about food. It typically reflects deeper issues related to our relationship with ourselves, our body image and our emotions. Our understanding of our place in the world. These patterns can be influenced by cultural norms, societal pressures, and personal experiences, extending far beyond just what’s on our plate.
Here are some signs to watch out for:
Food-Related Behaviours:
- Rigid Food Rules: Do you have strict rules about when, what, or how much you can eat?
- Obsessive calorie tracking: Do you find yourself counting every calorie you consume, using apps to count what you’ve eaten, strictly sticking within certain numbers?
- Avoiding food groups: Do you avoid or exclude certain foods groups from your diet with the thought that they will cause weight gain? i.e. sugar, carbs, junk food, foods high in fat
- Avoiding social situations: Do you tend to avoid social situations involving food for fear of people judging what you eat or how much you eat? For fear of losing control of choosing “healthy” options?
- Compensatory Behaviours: Do you try to “make up” for eating by exercising excessively, skipping meals, or using laxatives? OR do you allow yourself to have a cheat meal after being “good”?
- Yo-Yo Dieting: Are you constantly cycling through different diets, losing weight only to gain it back?
- Disconnection from Hunger Cues: Do you find yourself ignoring hunger pangs, pushing through even when your body is signaling for food?
- Disconnection from Fullness Cues: Do you struggle to recognise when you’re full, often eating past the point of comfortable satiety?
- Loss of Control Around Food: Do you often feel powerless around food, like you can’t say no, especially to comfort foods? Does this sometimes result in eating large amounts in a short time (binging and/or purging)?
- Emotional Eating: Do you often turn to food when you’re stressed, sad, or even happy? Do you struggle to name or express your feelings?
- Food Anxiety: Are you constantly thinking about your next meal or planning your food intake? Do you worry excessively about the food choices you’ve made and/or feel guilty after eating?
Body Image and Self-Perception:
- Body Checking and Scale Obsession: Do you frequently check your body in mirrors or weigh yourself often? Does the number on the scale dictate your mood for the day?
- Fear of Weight Gain: Are you excessively worried about gaining weight, especially after having a “cheat meal”?
- Comparison: Do you constantly compare your body and eating habits to others?
- Perfectionism: Do you hold yourself to impossibly high standards, believing you’ve ‘messed up’ your diet if you eat one ‘unhealthy’ food item or meal?
- Negative Self Talk: How do you speak to yourself? Are you kind or cruel? Are you compassionate or critical? Do you treat yourself like a friend or an enemy?
Emotional and Social Indicators:
- Feelings of Not Belonging: Do you often feel like you don’t fit in or need to change your appearance/lose weight to be accepted?
- People-Pleasing Tendencies: Do you find yourself constantly trying to please others at your own expense and/or in an effort to feel more accepted?
- Anxiety: Do you struggle to quiet your mind? Does your mind race and you’re unable to switch off your thoughts about food or negative thoughts about yourself/body-image or actions?
- Sleep Disturbances: Do you struggle to fall asleep because your mind can’t switch off or you wake-up at night worrying about what you ate or how you look or the fear of a partner leaving you because of how you look or what you weigh?
- Coping Behaviours: Do you juggle between binge eating / binge drinking / binge shopping?
- Seeking Validation Through Physical Intimacy: Do you find yourself seeking attention or connection through physical appearance or intimate encounters? This might include dressing provocatively, engaging in casual relationships, or being more open to sexual experiences than you’re truly comfortable with, all in an attempt to feel momentarily less alone or more accepted.
Having several of these signs doesn’t necessarily mean you have an eating disorder nor does it mean that you are broken or unfixable. But if you’re noticing a pattern, it might be worth taking a closer look at your relationship with food and yourself.
NB: This list is not an exhaustive list of all the signs and symptoms. It simply serves to give you an idea of what to look out for.
The Hidden Thread: How Childhood Trauma and Your Body’s Survival Response Drive Disordered Eating
So, we’ve just gone through a pretty hefty list of signs that may indicate or contribute to disordered eating. But here’s the million-dollar question: What do all these seemingly different behaviours have in common? Understanding that there is connection offers a new approach that can provide more lasting results. It can also help us understand why these behaviours can be so challenging to change.
Understanding Childhood Trauma and Your Nervous System
First, let’s talk about trauma. When we say “trauma,” we’re not just talking about big, life-threatening events. Trauma can be any experience that overwhelmed your capacity to cope at the time – and not having the skills or support to process the experience. This could, among others, include things like:
- Childhood emotional neglect
- Feeling misunderstood or invalidated
- Bullying, humiliation or social exclusion
- Witnessing domestic abuse or instability at home
These experiences, even if they seem “small,” if not properly addressed at the time, can leave a lasting impact on your nervous system. It’s like your body’s alarm system gets rewired, becoming more sensitive to potential threats. When someone who experienced childhood trauma encounters a trigger, their body may react more intensely than the situation warrants.
This heightened reaction can be overwhelming, especially if you lack the skills to cope with such intense emotions. You know that flick of a switch where one minute everything is fine. The next, you could eat a whole cake and then some? That’s your survival instinct kicking in.
Your nervous system’s primary job is to keep you safe by moving you away from pain and towards comfort. This survival instinct, while essential for our ancestors, can be problematic in modern life. When faced with emotional discomfort, your body doesn’t distinguish between physical danger and emotional stress – it just wants to find relief, fast.
Without healthier coping mechanisms in place, many turn to food as a quick and accessible way to self-soothe. Food becomes a powerful tool to numb the discomfort and create a temporary sense of safety and pleasure. Over time, this can develop into a habitual response, leading to a complex relationship with food that goes beyond simple hunger or nutrition.
Understanding this survival instinct is crucial because many behaviours associated with disordered eating actually trigger this very response, creating a cycle that’s hard to break. Let’s explore some of these behaviours and how they impact your nervous system.
1. Behaviours That Trigger Your Survival Instinct
Before we dive in, let’s quickly understand the “window of tolerance.” This is the optimal zone where you can manage stress and emotions effectively. When you’re within this window, you’re able to think clearly and make conscious decisions, including those about food.
Many behaviours we associate with disordered eating actually activate your body’s survival response, triggering the release of stress hormones like cortisol and activating your sympathetic nervous system. This puts your body in a state of heightened arousal, which over time can push you beyond your window of tolerance (in other words, the point where you lose control). Examples include:
- Setting rigid food rules, which can instill a sense of fear around eating
- Engaging in cruel self-talk, which your body interprets as a threat
- Yo-yo dieting, which stresses your body as it struggles to adapt to inconsistent nutrition
- Constant worry about food intake or weight, creating a state of anxiety (which is essentially fear)
- Perfectionism around eating, where the fear of ‘failure’ keeps you on high alert
- Excessive people-pleasing, which can create stressful situations as you overextend yourself
These behaviours can keep your body in a constant state of stress, making it more likely that you’ll exceed your window of tolerance, lose control and engage in binge eating as a way to cope.
2. Neglecting Your Body’s Basic Needs
When you don’t meet your body’s fundamental needs, it can trigger a stress response. This category includes:
- Ignoring hunger cues or restricting food intake
- Lack of proper nutrition
- Not getting enough sleep
- Feeling a lack of belonging or connection
When these basic needs aren’t met, your body may become stressed, releasing cortisol and activating the fight-or-flight response (Survival Response). This state of physiological stress can drive you towards food, as a means of self-regulating or self-soothing. It may trigger you to eat to make up for the lack of fuel or nutrients. It may also trigger you to eat as a means of providing comfort or to feel safe (self-soothing) – situations causing you to eat without any real need for food.
3. Signs of an Already Dysregulated Nervous System
First, what do we mean by a dysregulated nervous system? Simply put, it’s when your body’s stress response system is out of balance. Instead of responding appropriately to stressors and then returning to a calm state, a dysregulated system stays on high alert, making it hard to relax or feel safe (often as a result of childhood trauma).
Some symptoms/behaviours indicate that your nervous system is already in this heightened or dysregulated state. These include:
- Inability to switch off thoughts
- Loosing control around food on a regular basis
- Emotional Eating & overeating when you’re not hungry
- Feeling constantly on edge and/or riding an emotional rollercoaster
- Feeling anxious, overwhelmed, reactive and/or shutdown, demotivated, depressed
In this state, your body is essentially in the driver’s seat, making it difficult for you to make conscious choices about food and eating. When your nervous system is dysregulated, it’s like your body is stuck in “survival mode”, constantly seeking ways to self-soothe. These signs of dysregulation create a feedback loop: the more dysregulated you become, the more likely you are to engage in disordered eating behaviours, which in turn further dysregulates your nervous system. Breaking this cycle often requires addressing both the eating behaviours and the underlying nervous system dysregulation.
4. Coping Behaviours
Finally, some behaviours are attempts to cope with the uncomfortable feelings and sensations of being in a dysregulated state. These might include:
- Emotional eating
- Juggling between binge eating, binge drinking, and binge shopping
- Seeking validation through physical intimacy to overcome loneliness
These behaviours often serve as ways to avoid feeling difficult emotions, providing temporary relief but ultimately keeping you stuck in a cycle of using your choice of coping behaviours to cope with life.
Understanding these categories helps us see how many of our attempts to control our eating can actually be counterproductive, triggering the very responses we’re trying to avoid. This insight points us towards the need for a different approach – one that works with our nervous system rather than against it.
Putting It All Together
Now that we’ve explored the various aspects of disordered eating behaviours and their connection to the nervous system, let’s connect the dots:
- Childhood trauma can rewire our nervous system, making it more sensitive and easily triggered. This means that even seemingly harmless situations, that remind us of a past trauma, can push us out of our window of tolerance more easily than someone without this history.
- Engaging in disordered eating behaviours isn’t just about food—it’s often a response to emotions, stress or an attempt to feel safe. However, these behaviours themselves can create a state of chronic stress in the body, making it increasingly likely that we’ll exceed our window of tolerance & lose control around food.
- When we pair a nervous system that’s already sensitive due to childhood trauma with the stress-inducing nature of disordered eating behaviours, we’re essentially creating a perfect storm for nervous system dysregulation. This combination makes it extremely challenging to maintain a balanced relationship with food and our bodies.
- The cycle perpetuates itself: a dysregulated nervous system makes us more likely to engage in disordered eating behaviours, which in turn further dysregulates our nervous system.
Understanding this connection helps explain why simply trying to change our eating habits through mindset or willpower often doesn’t work. These behaviours, while problematic, are our body’s attempt to cope with stress and feel safe. Real, lasting change comes from addressing the underlying trauma, learning to regulate our nervous system and becoming more skilled at dealing with our emotions.
By recognising these patterns and their roots, we can approach healing with more compassion and effectiveness. It’s not about blame or shame, but about understanding and working with our bodies, rather than against them.
Dive Deeper: More Resources for Your Healing Journey
If you’ve found this information helpful and want to explore these concepts further, here are some additional resources that can deepen your understanding:
- Why Can’t I Stop Eating?: The #1 Question About Binge Eating Answered: This blog delves deeper into the connection between childhood trauma and nervous system dysregulation. If you’re curious about how past experiences might be influencing your eating habits today, this is a must-read.
- Beyond Hunger: How Your Body’s Quest for Safety Drives Binge Eating: Want to understand more about what triggers your nervous system and drives you to eat? This article explores various factors that can push your body into ‘survival mode’, leading to binge eating behaviors.
- Your Step-by-Step Roadmap: How to Stop Binge Eating for Good: Ready to take action? This blog provides practical strategies and a comprehensive plan to help you overcome binge eating. It’s the perfect next step in your healing journey.
Each of these articles builds on the concepts we’ve discussed here, offering more in-depth insights and practical tools to support your path to a healthier relationship with food and your body. Remember, knowledge is power, and the more you understand about your body and its needs, the better equipped you’ll be to make lasting changes.
