It’s 10:47pm and I’m standing at the kitchen counter binge eating peanut butter straight from the jar.
The jar is already half empty and I’m still going. My mind is telling me to stop, that I’ll regret it later and there’s the haze of shame surrounding me like a cloud but I can’t get myself to put it down.
I was so good all day too: I ate healthy meals, only ate whole foods, followed the calorie count the app predetermined for me and I white-knuckled through the afternoon cravings.
And now I’m here, at almost 11pm, in a trance that feels like I’m in a simulation, or like a puppet where someone else is controlling the strings and I don’t have free will.
This is the part that baffled me most: there was no amount of “just don’t do it” that could prevent me from being here… for what felt like the 947th time.
The binge wasn’t a choice. It was a takeover.
Binge eating peanut butter (especially at night after a day of “being good”) is almost always a physiological and neurological response to restriction. More on that in a bit.
What nobody tells you about trying to control your eating when you embark on the dieting journey is how much of your life it consumes. Not just the food part but everything around it.
I woke up thinking about my diet. I was constantly assessing how much I could eat, what counted, what didn’t, how I’d balance lunch if dinner was going to be a thing. I’d have to consult my app to know if I could “afford” to eat more that day, or would proactively try to decide how I would handle the social event I was going to attend. When I was at the social event, instead of being fully present for it, I was in my head about my body, about the food on the table, about how virtuous I was for not eating it, or the massive shame I felt if I did eat it (which sometimes would then lead me to binge when I got home). I planned tomorrow’s exercise to compensate for it, sometimes setting my alarm earlier so I could run in the morning in addition to the workout planned for later that day.
It was a part-time job. A never-clocked-out, relentless, genuinely exhausting second job that I never got paid for and could never quit. I didn’t actually want to quit though because I didn’t want to go back “there”: to the person who was lazy, undisciplined, overweight. The mental load seeped into everything: dates, hanging out with friends and work were all infused with this “thing” hanging over me.
And I had been “successful” at it. I was disciplined and meticulous. I lost 20 pounds. I got compliments. I felt proud of myself. It even catalyzed a genuine interest in nutrition and health psychology that led me to get my master’s in nutrition and change careers.
What I didn’t understand yet was that “being good” at it was making the binges inevitable.
There’s a perceived virtue in controlling your appetite that I don’t think we talk about honestly enough.
Culture teaches women this early — that discipline over hunger means willpower, and willpower means being a good, admirable, worthy person. The restriction isn’t just about weight. It’s about identity. It’s about being the kind of person who doesn’t give in. Every time I said no to those desires to eat, it felt like proof that I had my life together. Every hunger pang I overrode felt like a small win. The results of which (looking in the mirror and seeing abs where there used to be flab) also confirmed that I was finally worthy.
So when the binge happened — when I found myself at the counter with half a jar of peanut butter at 11pm — yet again — it didn’t just feel like losing a food battle. It felt like a moral failure and a fear of going back to the person I was that I didn’t like.
What I wouldn’t understand until years later, though, is that it wasn’t a moral failure that I just needed to try harder to overcome.
What was happening was neurological (AND physiological way beyond just “body is trying to keep weight on” – but that’s for another post).
This wasn’t fully a surprise as I suspected I had created some dopamine response in my brain that was akin to any addiction.
While issues with these intense urges that can be part “nervous system survival mechanism” and part “reward centers needing their dopamine hit” can feel insurmountable when you’re experiencing them, and like there’s no way out — the good news is that if you trained your brain to have that default urge to begin with, you can train it not to.
Research shows that rigid, perfectionistic restriction is a strong predictor of disordered eating behaviors — the kind where one “bad” food choice unravels the whole day.
Two things are happening at once.
Psychologically, the more you tell yourself you can’t or shouldn’t have something, the more you want it. The harder you try to limit how much of said food, the more likely you are to eat past the point you intended. Paradoxically — and this is the part that surprises people — when you give yourself genuine permission and flexibility, you end up eating less, or the “right” amount for you at that moment.
Neurologically, every time food delivers relief to a deprived, stressed system, or is THE mechanism to deal with emotions you don’t want to feel and haven’t yet learned how to feel— the reward center learns: this “works”. Like a stray cat that gets fed at your door once and shows up louder every night after that. The craving was a trained response.
This is what food noise actually is — not weak willpower, but neurological and physiological signals that have been amplified past the point of reason. You can’t just “think your way through it”.
I tried everything the internet suggested. Find a replacement behavior: take a bath, call a friend, go for a walk. Journal about the underlying emotion you’re numbing and address THAT instead.
You know what happens when you need a food fix and you go for a walk? You go for a walk and think about food the entire time. Then you come home and eat. The urge doesn’t care about your bath. It’s not interested in your distraction strategy. It has one job and it will do that job until it’s done.
That advice to address the emotion instead of “eating your feelings” is helpful advice, but requires skill in actually being able to know how to do that. Otherwise it’s like telling someone to do a choreographed dance they were never taught. It’ll be a lot of flailing around and trying, but not actually succeeding. Not to mention the post binge numb-ness is way more tolerable than that emotion, so you keep doing it.
What actually worked was the thing nobody told me to try: I stopped fighting.
Not in a giving-up way but in a listening way.
My master’s research was on mindfulness and eating behaviors — a peer-reviewed study that I went on to publish after I graduated. I spent years deep in the neuroscience of mindfulness and started practicing and conditioning what I was studying.
What mindfulness training gave me was the version of “control” that clients tell me they want when we start working together, although this version of control isn’t the “put yourself in a straitjacket and white-knuckle through” kind. It’s the TRUE version of being empowered around food. Making choices with ease, peace, and an inner knowing of “this is correct for ME”. An ability to say “no” to food because you truly don’t want it, not because your app told you it’d blow your calorie count for the day.
It gave me more connection to my own body and an ability not just to listen to it, but to truly understand and trust its messages.
The binge eating era of my life also coincided with getting (mis)diagnosed with PCOS, going to a bunch of different doctors for issues with irregular menstrual cycles, PMDD, digestion, anxiety, severe acne, brain fog. In some ways, binge eating caused some of this through disrupting my gut ecosystem which had downstream and systemic impacts…and causing extra havoc on my stress response… which fueled more binges. In some ways, those physiological imbalances were prompting the urges to binge in the first place (but I had no idea of that at the time).
One piece of the puzzle with bingeing peanut butter specifically was that I had only been allowing myself to have a small amount of healthy fats with each meal, but my body needed more than what the tracking app had allotted me. When I started honoring my body’s requests and incorporating more fat into my meals and days, my body didn’t need to force me to eat more fat against my own will through compulsive bingeing episodes. It was getting what it needed to support hormone regulation and gave me necessary brain fuel (which is needed during intense periods of mental work like grad school). The urges for peanut butter weren’t to make me gain the weight back — my body was utilizing it in important ways.
This is a small example of what happens when we allow our body to be wiser than the apps or our intellectualizing brain.
From there: neuroplasticity. The brain isn’t fixed; the pathways that drive compulsive behavior can be literally rewired.
I started daily practices that built mindfulness and then used the mindfulness muscle to implement tools around food, triggers, food noise, stress, emotions, etc. This resulted in a differently operating baseline that was calmer and more grounded, more mental space, more ease and a different relationship to discomfort and stress.
It’s been ten years since my last binge. There’s a message people share that binges or food addiction are something you’ll have to manage forever, or medicate — but that is not true for me: I haven’t had an urge to binge so there’s nothing to manage. The conditions that created them don’t exist anymore.
I now have peanut butter whenever I want it — one or two spoonfuls, occasionally four or five. It’s completely fine either way because my body’s asking for a reason, and I trust it.
I have chocolate in my purse or cabinet and forget it’s there.
I still eat balanced, nutrient-dense meals because that’s what my body requests and is genuinely what I want.
The food noise is gone.
I can be at a social event or restaurant and be completely present for it and have peace around what I choose to eat or not eat.
If I ever overeat, it’s easy to forgive myself and trust my body will utilize the energy and alert me when it needs fuel again. But for the most part, it’s easy to eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m satisfied but more importantly, to be tuned into those biological signals for what they are meant to be: signals. A way for your body to communicate it’s needs.
That’s available for you too.
It just doesn’t come from control. It comes from the opposite direction entirely.
If any of this sounds like the inside of your head: mental accounting, the trance, the exhausting second job of trying to manage something that keeps managing you — take the quiz. It’ll help clarify what’s actually driving your patterns and what it could look like to address them at the root.
I promise you the cycle isn’t permanent. Even when it really, really feels like it is.
