Eating Is Complicated

What’s really going on with our eating habits?

Most of us have tried at some point to eat better. We know roughly what that means, yet something keeps getting in the way. Society tells us it is a failure of willpower, discipline, or just not wanting it badly enough. The research tells a different story.

Our relationship with food is shaped by our nervous system, our history, and the culture we grew up in. Understanding that may help us let go of shame.

Our body needs to feel safe to digest food well

When we are stressed, hurried, or hypervigilant, our body shifts into a threat response.We eat at our desks, in our cars, between meetings, while managing children, or while scrolling. Our nervous system is running in the background registering threat, and our digestion is struggling.

Slowing down before we eat, even briefly, begins to shift this. Feeling our feet on the floor, taking a few breaths, and noticing the food in front of us are small things that signal safety to our nervous system and prepare our body to receive nourishment.

Most of us carry some trauma around food

This is not unusual. It is the predictable result of growing up in a culture with a lot of shaming and control around eating, bodies, and size. We absorbed rules before we were old enough to question them. We observed the people around us criticize their bodies. We learned which foods were good and which were bad, and by extension, what it meant about us when we ate them.

A meta-analysis of over 118,000 people found that those with four or more Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) are twice as likely to be living with obesity in adulthood. Research consistently points to chronic stress as the mechanism, not weakness or a lack of willpower. Our bodies crave comfort and relief. Our nervous system trying to help us.

Shame makes things harder

When we feel shame around food and eating, we are already dysregulated before we take our first bite. Shame activates our survival responses and we seek comfort and protection. Often that comfort is food. The very thing we are ashamed of becomes the thing we reach for.

Between 80 and 95 percent of people who lose weight on a diet regain it within three to five years. Much of that is biological. Hormones shift, metabolism adjusts, and our body works to return to familiar ground. This is not failure. Being shamed for our biology keeps us stuck in a cycle that does not serve us.

The shame loop is wider than we think

Living in a larger body means receiving ongoing signals of social threat from doctors, family, strangers, and media. Our nervous system registers all of it as danger. Chronic social threat keeps our system dysregulated in the same way any other ongoing threat does.

People in thinner bodies are affected too. Body shame and food control cut across body size, gender, and age. Some of the most painful food and body shame belongs to people whose bodies would be considered normal or healthy by any external measure.

Weight stigma triggers emotional eating, sleep disturbance, substance use, and social withdrawal, responses researchers describe as coping strategies aimed at reducing the immediate emotional burden of discrimination. Weight stigma combined with sexism and racism contributes to higher rates of chronic mental and physical illness in Black women.

Many studies show that the stigma associated with body weight, rather than the body weight itself, is responsible for some adverse health consequences previously blamed on obesity, including increased mortality risk.

Where did our food rules come from?

Most of us are carrying rules we did not choose. Finish everything on your plate. Do not be greedy. Eat your vegetables or you do not get dessert. Some of these rules were practical. Some were handed down from people who were themselves ashamed and afraid.

Whose voice is behind our food rules? When did it start? Is the fear and shame actually ours?

The goal behind control is safety

Much of what looks like a food problem is a safety problem. Our nervous system is doing its best to help us feel okay. We can work with that more directly.

Coming into the present moment, feeling our body, and noticing whether we are physically hungry or reaching for comfort is helpful to notice. Put a hand on your heart and offer yourself kindness before you eat. This is complicated with deep roots.

Self-compassion is the foundation for healing

Love and kindness are the conditions that makes change possible. When our nervous system feels safe, we digest better, we feel more connected in our body, and we have more capacity for the awareness practices that actually support us over time.

We have all been shaped by a culture that uses shame as a tool. We did not choose that, and we have been doing the best we could with the nervous systems we have. Starting from there, with patience and respect for ourselves, is where this work begins.

This is part of an ongoing series on Nourishing Ourselves. Join our free Sunday community class exploring food, movement, pleasure, connection, and nature through the lens of nervous system safety. Learn more at lynnfraserstillpoint.com/sunday-community-class