Three Reasons Behind Disordered Eating and How to Begin Healing

By nature, we unfold to nourish and be nourished. But somewhere along the way, for some of us, food and other forms of nourishment become dangerous. Rather than being enjoyable and life giving, food becomes the seeds for pain, a measure of worth, a place where control feels possible. This is understandable because food is an embodied metaphor for giving and getting love. So many of us have been distanced or disconnected from love. While the reasons for love’s ruination are varied, I’ve seen three central causes that result in nourishment being made enemy. I’d like to briefly discuss those reasons and offer guidance for coming back to the nourishment that is your birthright.  

1. When Food Becomes a Shelter for Pain

For many, disordered eating takes root in the soil of old wounds. Childhood neglect, emotional abandonment, or outright harm can teach a body to armor itself. That armor can mean eating beyond satiation or not eating enough to be replenished. When emotions about experiences are too big or forbidden, food can become a companion and confidant, as well as a regulator and oppressor. Bingeing might have brought warmth when no one else was there. Restriction might have offered control when the world spun too wildly. These patterns are not character shortcomings, they are survival strategies, learned long before you knew you were doing them. These patterns made trauma more manageable; however many survival strategies become overgrown and start to become a kind of trauma in and of themselves. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. I’ve seen many clients learn new survival strategies that are more adaptable and embrace nourishment. 

2. The Oppression of Cultural Demands

We live in a culture that celebrates smallness in waistlines, in appetites, in presence because it has made the body a moral battleground. From a young age, many of us have been taught that beauty is conditional, that bodies must be shaped into ideals that shift like the wind. We’re taught that our bodies need to conform with trends in order to belong. 

Under the glare of this scrutiny, nourishment becomes fraught. You learn to distrust your hunger, to measure yourself not in joy or vitality, but in pounds and inches. What begins as a wish to be “healthy” can turn into an unending vigil to rules and restrictions, severing you from the quiet wisdom of your own body. While I want to support people navigating this cultural climate on their terms, I can’t help but feel sad. I see the damage being done by an oppressive culture rooted in selling as opposed to caring, punishment as opposed to nourishment. 

3. The Illusion of Control in an Unsteady World

Life’s unpredictability can be terrifying. Grief, illness, transitions, and global uncertainty can leave you grasping for something, anything that feels stable. Food and the rituals around it may offer that stability via our attempts to create measured order when everything else feels like chaos. At the center of my own disordered eating was the attempt to manage the unmanable, control the uncontrollable. Consciously and subconsciously I thought that if I didn’t eat this or that then I would find peace. Beneath my calorie counting and meticulous rules, lived a longing for safety and self trust. Sadly no amount of food noise and controlling behavior resulted in what I longed for because I was denying an essential truth: control is an illusion. Now that said, we have to learn ways to cope with the unreliable world we live in. That’s where hope can reenter the picture. You can learn how to live with the chaos. 

Perhaps You’re Not Broken, Perhaps You’ve Adapted to a Broken Culture

If you see and feel yourself in these words, take heart. Disordered eating is not a flaw in your character; it is the echo of how you’ve learned to endure a broken culture. We are fish who don’t understand how noxious the waters have become. You’ve done your best to survive in such waters and learned survival strategies that bought you some time. Now you can unlearn those strategies and develop new ones based on nourishment, internal safety, and self trust. 

Resources for the First Steps

• Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch
  A gentle, non-diet approach to rebuilding trust with your body.
  

• The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
  An exploration of how trauma lives in the body and the many paths toward healing.
  

• National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA)
  nationaleatingdisorders.org
  Helplines, support, and guidance for every stage of recovery.
  

• HAES® (Health at Every Size)
  asdah.org
  A framework that honors body diversity and supports holistic well-being.

Closing Thoughts

Recovery is not about mastering willpower or following the perfect plan. It is about returning, slowly and gently, to the truth that you are allowed to exist in nourishment. When you’re nourished then others can be too, shifting harmful cultural norms. Whatever brought you here, you are worthy of tenderness. You are worthy of peace. And one day, you will stand in your own kitchen, plate in hand, and feel not fear, but belonging. I’d like to show you how.