You Don’t Need Accountability to Heal Overeating

Stopping binge eating is not a matter of having outside accountability for your actions. It’s a matter of having inside accountability for your emotions.

"You just need accountability!" How often have you been told this when trying to heal compulsive eating? How often have you said it to yourself?

It's a common feature of programs focused on healing food addiction and a selling point for many coaches. Personally, it makes me cringe a bit.

It makes me cringe because it makes it sound like those with overeating are out of control children who need to be scolded and prodded and babysat.

Having accountability in this way is different from being honest about our addictions.

I am passionately in support of us not hiding our eating, telling trusted and loving people that we have an overeating issue. I believe in working through the misplaced shame we have about overeating through honesty and transparency about our compulsions. In fact, this is a required step for healing.

But having accountability wherein you feel someone needs to monitor you regularly, check in on you constantly, is a common band-aid approach but it will never heal the root cause of food addiction.

Accountability approaches are never going to make better choices with food stick because it focuses on the effect rather than the cause.

Binge eating is an effect; it is the last domino in a domino chain. It's the weeds that we keep mowing the tops of rather than going in by hand to dig the root out.

The root cause of all binge eating, and all types of dysfunctional eating, is emotional.

We can learn to be connected with our emotions rather than eat to avoid them. We can discover what we have been repressing, and allow its expression instead. We can learn to be accountable for our emotions.

What is it to be accountable to our emotions? It's consistently and compassionately seeking out the truth of our emotions. It's being responsible for our emotions, which means owning them rather than avoiding them. It's finding what our emotions are, and then taking the most important step of feeling them.

Rather than trying to get an outside person to help you control your behavior, focus on accountability for your emotions. If you are going to have an outside person help, have them help you be emotionally accountable.

When you have internal accountability for your emotions, binge eating will naturally fall away.

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