How Binge Eating Is Actually Your Inner Advocate
No one likes to talk about binge eating. It’s embarrassing, and the least glamorous of all of the eating disorder behaviors. It’s also the least talked about, despite it being the most common. Binge eating sits in direct opposition to restriction (which holds a more coveted spot in the disordered eating space—even purging has a leg up because it at least tries to make amends) and is almost exclusively considered to be a shameful, dirty secret.
Binge eating is out of control and sloppy. Restriction is obedient and clean.
But I don’t believe in that story.
I think binge eating is misunderstood.
I believe binge eating is a radical, albeit misguided, attempt to rebel against a system that wants to keep us restricted. Bingeing is the ultimate Fuck You to a patriarchical and capitalistic culture demanding beauty, obedience, and burnout as its cost of belonging.
From the moment we are born, we are taught to embrace self-control and restriction. Don’t cry, be quiet, settle down! Women (or people socialized as women) especially have been conditioned to behave within certain parameters. We can work—we should work! But not to the degree that interrupts our call to motherhood. We can (and should!) be sexually-appealing, but not outright, and emotions might be better kept under wraps lest we become too needy or too much.
The ideal woman, as it were, is a tightly controlled one. She is fit and toned as a result of her alternating HIIT and hot yoga workouts, slender and well-dressed as a result of eating only what she needs and shopping at Nordstrom, attractive and youthful as a result of managing laugh lines with collagen supplements and Botox injections, she’s the PTA mom with an Etsy shop side hustle, she’s happy and successful and smiles a lot because goddamit, people like her! (And by the way, her pesky mental health struggles are remediated by a spa day with her besties.)
This scripted version of The Highly Capable Woman is revered and admired, despite not being allowed much in the way of eating, resting, feeling, or objecting.
Restriction, then, is The Way.
So if binge eating is the antithesis of restriction, it’s understandable that we should be embarrassed and ashamed of it. Where restriction is discipline, self-control, success, and beauty, bingeing is laziness, gluttony, failure and ugliness.
But what if binge eating isn’t the antithesis of restriction?
I work daily with people who binge eat, and despite its reputation, I have yet to meet someone who binges who is actually lazy or slothful. As it turns out, binge eaters tend to be high-achieving, highly capable, but highly repressed folks who restrict nine ways to Sunday until the dam of self-control breaks, and they rebel against the imposition.
So then what if bingeing is the response? The voice of a rising inner-advocate drawing a line in the sand, saying—Enough.
