What If Binge Eating Is Actually a Form of Self-Care?

We’ve been taught that the way we eat says something about how much we care about ourselves.

If you really cared about your body, you’d nourish it.

You’d choose the salad.

You’d stop when you were full.

You wouldn’t eat the whole packet.

You certainly wouldn’t binge.

And I think when you’ve struggled with binge eating for a long time, it’s very easy to absorb that message without ever really questioning it.

I know I did. I looked at the way I ate and saw evidence. Evidence that I lacked discipline. That I wasn’t looking after myself properly. That despite knowing what was good for me, I still couldn’t seem to do it.

There was always that underlying thought:

If I really cared about myself, why would I keep doing this to myself?

But looking back now, I think I had the question completely backwards.

We have a very particular idea of what ‘care’ should look like. We tend to imagine caring for ourselves as the things that are objectively good for us.

Nutritious food. Exercise. Sleep. Fresh air. Drinking enough water. The salad rather than the cake.

And of course, those things can be ways of caring for ourselves.

But there’s another kind of care that I think gets overlooked when we talk about binge eating.

The care we reach for when we simply need to feel better. Because in the moments when I wanted to binge, my body wasn't standing there weighing up the nutritional benefits of one choice against another.

It wasn't asking:

“What's healthiest for me?”

It was much closer to:

“What will make me feel better right now?”

And food knew how to answer that question.

Food had been taking care of me for years.

Food could comfort me.

It could give me something to look forward to.

It could change my mood.

It could distract me.

It could quieten my thoughts.

It could fill an empty evening.

It could give me relief from myself.

And it worked.

That's the part I think we sometimes miss.

We look at the consequences of binge eating and assume that because the behaviour eventually hurts us, it couldn't possibly have been trying to help us.

But both things can be true.

Something can soothe you and still have consequences.

Something can make you feel better for twenty minutes and worse afterwards. Something can begin as a way of coping and eventually become something you desperately want to escape from.

That doesn't make the relief imaginary. So perhaps the binge is the care.

I don't mean healthy care.

I don't mean care without consequences.

And I certainly don't mean that we should simply accept a behaviour that is causing distress.

I mean something much simpler.

Perhaps, somewhere along the way, your body learnt:

When I feel like this, food helps.

And it remembered.

Do that enough times, over enough years, and food isn't simply food anymore.

It becomes comfort.

Relief.

Quiet.

Escape.

Safety.

So when you're standing in the kitchen reaching for food you don't actually want, while another part of you is saying Why am I doing this again?, your body isn't betraying you. It is reaching for something it has learnt will change how you feel. And that changes the way I think we need to look at binge eating.

The salad and the binge are answering two different questions

The salad might answer:

“What would be good for my body?”

But the binge might be answering:

“What will make this feeling go away?”

And if the second question feels more urgent, knowing that the salad is technically the better choice doesn't necessarily change anything.

I think this is why so many of us can know an extraordinary amount about nutrition and still binge.

Knowledge isn't necessarily the thing that's missing.

I knew what to eat.

I knew portion sizes.

I knew calories.

I knew what I was supposed to do.

What I didn't understand for a very long time was why food had become so important to me in the first place.

For years, I essentially asked myself:

Why don't I care about myself enough to stop doing this?

There's a judgement hidden inside that question. It assumes the binge proves something about me.

My discipline.

My willpower.

My self-respect.

My worth.

But once I began to see food differently, another question appeared:

Why did food become one of the ways I learnt to care for myself?

That question feels completely different to me.

There is something softer in it.

Not an excuse.

An understanding.

And understanding gives us somewhere new to go.

Because if food has been providing comfort, relief, quiet or safety, perhaps recovery isn't simply about becoming better at saying no to food.

Perhaps it's also about understanding what we're saying yes to when we reach for it.

This is part of what Safe To Be You is really about. When I wrote Safe To Be You, I didn't want to create another way of controlling food. There are already plenty of those. I wanted to explore what sits underneath the behaviour.

Why food became relief. Why our bodies keep reaching for familiar ways of feeling better even when consciously we desperately want to stop. Why fighting ourselves can sometimes make the whole thing louder rather than quieter.

And what might begin to change when we stop treating the binge as the enemy and start becoming curious about what it has been doing for us.

Because perhaps the question was never:

“Why can't I stop eating?”

Perhaps it was:

“What have I been asking food to do for me?”

That is one of the conversations at the heart of Safe To Be You.

And I think it is a much kinder, and much more interesting place to begin.

Glenys

xx