"Emotional Eating" Reconsidered

We need better paradigms.

I started down this path with my “Wailing Woman” talk, which was inspired by and addressed to all of my very smart, very conscientious, and often *ahem* emotional female friends and clients who are caught in deeply distressing feedback loops of food use/abuse and intense, even debilitating self-criticism. So here’s a bit of a Wailing Woman addendum, as I continue to think through things, and also how those themes intersect more explicitly with our relationship with food. This post is rated PG-13 for suggestive psychodynamic content, so consider yourself warned.

It seems very clear that there are multiple paths that might lead any given individual to eat “emotionally,” or even to develop a full-fledged eating disorder of some type. One person’s binge eating could very well be driven by a very different set of personality characteristics and environmental opportunities than someone else’s, let alone another person’s bulimia or anorexia. Indeed, it seems obvious that even the same person can engage in “disordered” eating at different times for completely different reasons. The pleasure trap is ever-present, and seizes any opportunity. Boredom. Habit. Social pressure. Mate pressure. But it seems to me that there’s a real and substantive difference between a situation where, for example, you polish off the ice cream your roommate left unattended in the freezer and a genuinely out-of-control, even multiple-day binge, where one eats to the point of intense physical discomfort, and almost any food-like item will do. Your internal audience is obviously not going to be very impressed if you clear out all of the granola or tortilla chips in the pantry one night, but that’s distinct, I think, from a real rager: the kind of binge that borders or even crosses fully into self-harm, where some people are triggered to purge, and others are in so much pain that they start googling “can stomachs burst from too much food” (an admission I’ve heard from clients many times.)

One of my own earliest episodes of this more alarming type was when I found myself left alone and slightly manic with feelings of isolation and rejection as a 17 year old exchange student in Europe. Once I had worked my way through everything in the kitchen that was more traditionally binge-worthy (chips, cookies, frozen pizzas, God knows what else) I resorted to baking a sheet pan full of “biscuits” out of flour and water only and eating them—rather frantically, as I recall—plain out of the oven. I am pretty sure I didn’t even let it bake all the way. I certainly wasn’t hungry—to the contrary, I was painfully uncomfortable. Didn’t matter. That just seemed to ramp up the urgency of continuing the quest for more. Flour and water wasn’t (exactly) typical pleasure trap food. I was quelling, or attempting to quell, an intense fear or dread that didn’t quite have a name. (A few years later of course I ultimately found liquid, fermented bread a much more effective way of delivering the same effect.)

The fundamental nature of a real, unhinged, full-tilt binge has always baffled and frightened me, as someone susceptible to them since the age of at least 10. It is completely unsatisfying intellectually and existentially to think of a binge of that nature as simply an artifact of caloric density and the pleasure trap. It is true that I don’t believe I’ve ever binged on anything less calorically dense than about 400 calories per pound—no disinhibited fugue states around kale or even carrots have ever occurred on my watch, at least not that I can recall. (#carrotblackout) But 400 and above—absolutely. In addition to plain flour and water, I’ve systematically eaten every potato in the house, devoured enormous bowls of plain rice, plain oatmeal, or plain pasta (even, as a kid, packages of raw pasta), and plenty of other weird things. And I hear the same reports—and weirder—all the time from people I talk to. There is an unmistakable numbing and subduing effect of stuffing one’s face with even tasteless, reassuringly bland starchy mush that gives the idea of “comfort” food an extra layer of meaning, and those of us who have done it all know exactly what that effect feels like. And that is precisely the effect we are seeking by engaging the behavior.

Is it just the sweet, sweet dopamine of caloric density, reassuring us of our survival prospects in a big scary world full of mean people who are harboring uncharitable thoughts about us? Sure. Of course. But why do some of us seek the escape from that scary world so relentlessly and self-defeatingly? And why do we continue to do it even as it again and again produces serious and predictable consequences—weight gain and destroyed self-esteem foremost among them? We know that if we exhibit consistently self-defeating behavior, the cost/benefit analysis tilts in only one direction. So it must be the case that while the cost is indeed high, the benefit is higher still. But why is the benefit of the binge so much higher for us than it seems to be for other people? Because clearly, it is. I discovered it all by myself by age 10, and so did every client I’ve ever talked to, if not much younger than that. Does the food just taste better? Do we get a bigger rush from it? Do we just have defective self-control circuitry (our preferred, self-loathing confirming hypothesis)? All of the above?

There’s an old and continuous literature that we’ve been broadly dismissive of as “psychodynamic” that argues more women who self-report binge behavior also self-report “perfectionist” type personalities, accompanied by higher-than-average social anxiety, particularly “social appearance” anxiety (ie, how they believe other people will judge their physical appearance). High C, high N, in other words. If that is true, and it anecdotally certainly seems to me that it is and many of these studies have made reasonable prospective efforts to establish and test as much, then we have a real paradox and problem. Our working hypotheses would suggest the opposite: higher conscientiousness would predict more self-control and self-restraint around food, and higher social anxiety and impression stress would generally predict more of the same. We have done some hand-waving around how higher N can account for some self-soothing with food, but the implication is usually that high C keeps that in check. I think we have seriously underestimated the first pathway and overestimated the second.

Binge behavior is indeed a method of self-soothing, an “escape,” according to these authors, for precisely the most innately self-critical members of the population. The mechanism is a narrowing of attention to the immediate stimulus of seeking and consuming food and away from the overwhelming/unpleasant barrage of self-criticism and anticipatory social cost. The argument is that this (can and usually does) produces a feedback effect, where binging temporarily produces the desired relief only to worsen the very self-criticism and anxiety of social judgment that provoked the behavior. And so the hamster wheel of a lifelong binge/restrict cycle begins. And that cycle is sustained and amplified by the mechanics of the pleasure trap and the nature of the modern food environment, to be sure. It doesn’t necessarily begin in addiction, just like you don’t instantly become an alcoholic with your first drink. But the addictive aspects of pleasure trap food perpetuates the cycle beyond any one self medication-seeking “rough patch” and gives the whole process an incredibly self-defeating quality that, after hanging over our lives like a dark cloud for decades, has a way of making women feel like complete and total losers and frauds who don’t deserve to exist. As one woman reported to me recently, someone recently mocked her with “If you’re so smart, how come you haven’t figured this out by now?” Who among us hasn’t said that to ourselves, a million times, and even more harshly? Any time I dare go out in public having experienced any weight fluctuation whatsoever after losing over 100 pounds for god’s sake, I can look happily forward to the lovely social media comments from people I’ve never met about how I must not know anything about the pleasure trap after all and should do us all a favor and trudge back to obscurity like the embarrassing failure that I am. But no worries—I’ve heard it all before and far worse, in my own head.

After a while (like a lifetime) this all creates an inescapable shroud of failure that haunts your every waking moment. Not only are you (probably) triaging external esteem hits thanks to unwanted extra weight, but you’re playing esteem chess at a higher level than that too. The internal dialogue sounds something like: “So we’ve established that you don’t find me attractive, that’s fine, I’m used to that, I can live with that. But how low in conscientiousness must you be inferring that I am, too? How can I signal to you that I’m not the loser you must think that I am?” God forbid you have a sucker triad personality, because now you’re absolutely hosed. In my own life, so often this has meant that I wind up overcommitting—in an effort to preempt the harsh inferences I know others are surely making about me, I seek to become The Most Valuable Girl Ever Who Would Never Let You Down. Then, as I face down the prospect of their criticism and displeasure should I disappoint the overly-high expectations of me that I myself idiotically insisted they adopt, the self-loathing, the overwhelm, the terror of their disappointment and ultimate rejection all begins again and lo, relief can always be found (for one brief shining moment) in a binge. Alcohol works even better than food, of course, but food will do just fine too, if that’s all you’ve got. And that is a cycle that has been happening since I was ten years old. I suspect this might sound a teeny tiny bit familiar to a lot of you.

Would all of this be so terrible and debilitating and life-destroying if not for the modern food environment? No, it would not. The opportunities would be extremely scarce and the costs relatively low. We would find other ways to “escape,” or just stoically stew in our own misery or collapse dramatically into a brook like our ancestral betters. But for better or worse we are stuck living in this modern food environment, and also a modern socioeconomic environment that affords us a great deal more leisure and thus also this particular entrapment that promises escape. We must somehow find a way to negotiate our lives in this problematic ecology accordingly. I talked to someone a few weeks ago who was calling me from True North—and was sneaking out every day of their stay there to In-n-Out. If you can’t control your environment at True North, the environment is not the issue. “Control your environment” is a band-aid. It’s just the answer we give because we don’t have a better one. We need a better one.

I don’t have a nice, neat, pat little solution all worked out. Sorry. I’ve spent about 35 years thinking about this more than almost anything else and haven’t been able to work it out yet (I know, what a loser). But I do feel I’m closer to it than I’ve ever been. Here’s what I know the answer is not: increased focus and self-flagellating immersion into evopsych principles that assign a hyper-rational and therefore seemingly immovable and eternal framework to all of your worst fears about how people see you and what that is costing you.

We don’t have to deny those principles in order to give ourselves some meaningful relief from them. I’m not proposing health-at-every-size-ism, lest my haters get excited. But there has to be a middle path. Somewhere between the tough love, “suck it up buttercup” ethos of EP and the Oprah-fication of our entire discourse around emotional eating and subsequent abandonment of personal responsibility, there is a path, I’m certain of it. I don’t care what we call that path or what paradigm we use. I just care that we stop taking false refuge in a torturous relationship with food that ultimately causes us far greater harm than whatever it is that we are trying to avoid in the first place.