Overeating to Make Tolerable the Intolerable

Overeating can make the intolerable in your life feel more tolerable. It can help us "cope" with things in our lives that don't feel good.

Overeating and unhealthy foods and drinks can be compulsions for us because we want to avoid feeling or taking action about things in our lives that actually don't feel healthy or loving for us.

For example, we might use overeating to make a career that is really out of line with our true passions, feel tolerable.

Or we might use food to help us tolerate an abusive partner relationship

We might be using food to tolerate dynamics that feel bad with our parents or our family.

Maybe we're tolerating sacrificing ourselves, people-pleasing, living in fear, or a religion that tells us we're not good enough.

It also could be that food is making the intolerable tolerable with smaller things, like not giving ourselves enough time to get good sleep.

We need to ask ourselves,

"What in my life would be intolerable without compulsive eating?"

"Why am I tolerating it? What false beliefs or fears or other emotions are causing me to tolerate this?"

"What was I taught in my childhood that contributed to me feeling I should tolerate this?"

This is not to say that just because something in our lives feels uncomfortable emotionally, that it is intolerable.

For example, it may not be that our relationship is definitively intolerable, but we may be avoiding tough conversations, owning our own emotions and resolving things, and if we did that, it would become tolerable.

But the question about issues that are truly not loving ways towards yourself to interact in the world or to be in the world. Ways that sacrifice self-love or who you really are and what you really love, or that aren't ethical or moral towards yourself.

We can do what we can to resolve the intolerable, but in some ways the only way to stop this kind of emotional eating is to stop tolerating the intolerable.

When we do that, we won't be compulsive with food to make it tolerable.

Photo by Leah Berman via Unsplash