Do You Judge Your Overeating?

Self-judgement about our eating and weight is a learned response. In our childhood, we were taught self-judgement by others.

Many people with binge eating and eating disorders feel extreme levels of self-hatred and are absolutely brutal in their self-talk.

I was this way too: I used to call myself disgusting, pathetic, a failure, a disgrace. I used to hate myself so much for my eating behaviors and my weight that I'd want to physically hurt myself.

But what I've learned since is that this tendency is something we've actually picked up from somewhere.

And that somewhere is our childhood. Often, our parents and primary caregivers preferred us to blame ourselves for our issues -- eating, weight, or otherwise.

Why would they want that?

If we blame ourselves for our overeating, we might never realize the true root causes of our eating issues, which are all about their lack of love in the way they treated us.

Additionally, self-hatred can be modeled to us by our parents. For example, I picked up from my mom that you should emotionally rip yourself to shreds if you eat too many cookies or gain 5 pounds -- that's what she did to herself.

Placing the responsibility for the root causes of our binge eating is not necessarily living in blame.

But you cannot heal what you are in denial of, and so an essential part of healing and moving on is indeed, placing the blame for the original damage where it actually is.

Self-hatred and judgment helps us stay in denial, and aim all our fury and hurt towards ourselves instead of properly processing the reasons why we feel this way in the first place.

Photo by Irina Iriser via Pexels