Binge Eating: Nothing To Do With Personality

Your tendency for overeating has nothing to do with your personality or your nature.

No matter how long you've done it, no matter how much it feels like you, eating issues have absolutely nothing to do with your true nature or personality.

I get why it can feel this way.

It may be that you've overeaten or been fixated on food for as young as you remember; you might not have any memories of being "normal" with food.

It may be that you see certain tendencies with your eating that also show up in other areas of your life (say, the all-or-nothing tendencies).

In any of these cases though, it still remains that the tendencies towards compulsive overeating or restriction have nothing to do with your personality or nature.

It is so vitally important to make room for this truth because without faith that you can heal, you may not emotionally get through what you need to in order to heal it.

I'd never have healed my binge eating if I didn't have some curiosity that maybe there was a real me that had none of these eating issues at all.

I am not sure anyone can heal overeating unless they consider the idea that it is not a personality feature, not part of your nature, not a disease and doesn't have to be permanent.

Sometimes we, and our families, want to believe that it is a personality thing or our nature because that way, we all get to avoid the questions of,

"Why did this addiction develop in the first place?"

"If food issues are completely separate from personality, what happened that caused me to become compulsive with overeating and/or restriction?"

"And if I discovered this has to do with ways I was treated, dynamics that were unhealthy, and dysfunctional beliefs about feeling emotions, then what?"

"What anger and grief might I feel if I had to come to terms with the fact none of this stuff with food actually had to happen at all, had I been treated differently in my childhood and adolescence?"

God did not bake into your personality and nature any self-destructive or numbing tendencies.

The truth is that your real, healed self, which you can become over time, will never want to do anything that might harm yourself, or compromise your happiness and health.

Photo by Marina Reich via Unsplash