Healing from Binge Eating: Understanding the Cycle and Finding Relief

How does one heal a lifetime of binge eating and dependency on processed sugary foods? What if you crave those processed carbs and sugar every single day?

Fortunately, I have a deep understanding of binge eating from personal experience. I struggled with compulsive overeating and emotional eating for most of my life, a habit I developed to cope with the overwhelming sensations of unprocessed childhood trauma and the anxiety and depression that came with it.

My journey with deep, unresolved stress began in my earliest years. At just seven years old, I was uprooted from everything familiar and sent to live with my grandparents in a foreign country—alone, without my parents, for over a year. The confusion, fear, and overwhelming sense of abandonment from that long year shaped the foundation of my struggles. I was too young to understand or process the emotional weight, but it left a lasting imprint that would follow me into my teenage years and adulthood.

The sensations from this intense experience took a deep hold in my body—panic, anxiety, chest pressure, a racing heart, insomnia, and more. These were the ways these events manifested in me because I never spoke about them to anyone. I kept them buried inside, dealing with them alone, which only fueled a physiology of stress.

Binge eating was the only thing that temporarily soothed and numbed those really unpleasant sensations of anxiety, so I’m going to use a little of my own experience to help explain the biochemistry of binge eating. Why we do it, why it temporarily helps, and why it harms us in the long run.

The Dual Impact of Binge Eating: How Processed Foods Activate and Suppress Your Body

The harmful aspect of binge eating is that it's almost always centered around processed foods, which leads to secondary illnesses, syndromes, and symptoms that only amplify your stress, anxiety, depression, and hopelessness.

Processed carbohydrates and heavily processed foods are interesting because they both activate and suppress our bodies. The activation happens when these carbs break down into glucose, causing a spike in blood sugar, especially when combined with refined sugars. As your blood sugar rises quickly, your body produces insulin to bring it back down.

This sudden drop in blood sugar triggers an adrenal response, as your liver needs adrenaline to convert stored glucose back into usable energy. This process tires out your body, leading to inflammation and stress. The constant ups and downs in blood sugar, along with the adrenaline rush, create a stressful chemistry in your body.

When adrenaline spikes, your adrenal glands go into overdrive, triggering stress symptoms such as an elevated heart rate, higher blood pressure, constricted blood vessels, tense muscles, and heightened energy and nerve activity. This stimulates your central nervous system. The purpose of adrenaline is to wake the body up, providing clarity and power so you can either outrun a potential threat or fight it off. This reaction is known as the fight-or-flight response.

In summary, this is how bingeing on refined carbohydrates activates the body: it triggers a glucose spike, leading to an adrenal response that creates the very stress we’re trying to relieve. Now, let's see how it suppresses the body.

How Binge Eating Suppresses Our System and Fuels Stress

When you consume a dense amount of nutrients, your body redirects blood to your stomach to process them. This redirection can temporarily ease the anxiety you feel and give you a short-lived sense of being grounded. Essentially, binge eating provides a fleeting calm by overloading your system with the heavy processing of these rich foods thus slowing down and suppressing your stress.

This grounded feeling is why we turn to food when we're stressed, even if it might increase our stress. The initial effect of eating something like a bag of potato chips can create a state of overload or exhaustion in the digestive system and we feel a brief sense of relief. However, once the food is metabolized, stress returns because of the cycle I mentioned: the spike in blood glucose, the spike in insulin, the consequent drop in blood sugar and the adrenal response. In short, the foods that temporarily soothe our stress through binge eating end up adding more stress on top of the existing stress.

Binge eating doesn’t eliminate stress; it only provides temporary relief. This short-term soothing is what makes bingeing a cycle. You experience a brief calm followed by a strong stress response, then more temporary relief, and another stress response, and so on. Your body gets stuck in a loop where food is used to momentarily relax and ground you, but it ultimately triggers more stress after it’s metabolized. So, the very thing you seek for safety and comfort ends up overstimulating and stressing you out again.

Pausing the Cycle: 3-Minute Exercise

When a strong craving hits, especially for sugar or processed carbs, try this simple 3-minute exercise to pause the craving cycle, help manage stress and assess your needs.

Prepare: Take a bath towel and tightly roll it to make it the size of a hardcover book. Here is a quick video showing a simple way to do this.

Position: Place the towel over your belly button and lie down on it. Here is a quick video showing you the proper position.

Breathe: Inhale deeply into the towel and gently squeeze your belly as you exhale. Continue breathing through your nose in this manner.

Observe: Pay attention to the craving. Notice where you feel it in your body, any tension or pressure, and any urgency.

Reflect: As you breathe, answer these questions:

What do you need, besides the craving, to address the emotional need within you?
Is this emotional place seeking joy, comfort, or something else?
Does it need a hug, a stretch, or simply acknowledgment?

Hold: Continue breathing through your nose in this position for 3 minutes.

By practicing this exercise, you’ll gain insights into your cravings and emotional needs. You may still choose to eat what you’re craving, but you’ve taken a valuable step in understanding and potentially addressing those underlying needs. Keep practicing this 3 minute pause technique to better manage your cravings and emotional responses. This is an effective way to relieve stress even if you are not craving anything and it only takes 3 minutes!

Exploring the Roots of Your Cravings: A Step Toward Healing

Pausing the craving cycle is a great first step toward understanding the unconscious roots of your habits, cravings, and binge eating, and beginning to connect with them. Those unresolved emotions, traumas, events, and needs are what the food is temporarily numbing and masking. It's like a fog that clouds the connection between your conscious thoughts and the deeper part of yourself that needs attention. Give this a try and notice where it leads you.

If you found the 3-minute exercise helpful for reducing stress, you might want to explore more ways to relax and connect with your body. This 20-minute stress relief video using a rolled-up towel offers a simple approach to ease tension and find calm. Give it a try here.

Healing from binge eating isn't just about breaking a habit; it's about understanding the emotional roots behind it and finding healthier ways to cope. Every step you take toward addressing the underlying causes of your cravings brings you closer to lasting change. Start with small steps, like the exercise above, and remember that progress comes with patience and self-compassion.