The thing about pain is you can’t heal from it unless you actually experience it. When you run from it, you become more and more intolerable to pain, which creates the space for it to continue being hurt. Over and over again. A question I often get asked by clients is why do I binge eat?
All of your life you’ve had what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain-body. This is the part of you that hosts all of the pain that you have ever experienced throughout your life. The pain-body needs to get its ‘food’ through you and does so by creating experiences in which it resonates with. It is constantly searching for its own kind of energy so that it can survive. But the only way for it to survive is through your identification with it.
In our programs here at Hungry for Happiness, and when looking for the answer to why do I binge eat? We teach what’s called identification versus observation. When you identify with your emotions and feelings, you become them. There is no separation. You allow yourself to be consumed whereas when you are in the state of being the observer, you simply allow each and every emotional state to take place while you observe what it feels like to move through those emotions.
Emotions are just energy. And just like all energy, it can be transformed and shifted into something else. Something that’s more aligned with the way that you intentionally want to feel. Emotions feed off of the experiences that you have, be it anger, violence, sadness. The pain-body uses these experiences to essentially feed itself and create further pain in whatever form is available at that moment.
Some people go their entire lives without learning about what it means to have a pain-body. But when you go about life totally unaware of it, you’re missing out on healing those parts of you. The pain-body is the part of you that needs the most compassion, support, and love so that it can heal. And that healing starts from the inside out.
When you run from your pain, you create baggage within your system and that usually manifests as binge eating, under-eating, and having a hateful relationship with our body. The act of binge eating is simply the act of refusing to acknowledge what’s actually happening inside. You eat because you want to feel better. You eat because for those few moments, you aren’t thinking about what’s wrong, you’re focused on the food. But this always comes back as grief and sadness because you’re using the act of avoiding to get over something that needs care and attention to heal.
So, why do I binge eat is a valid question, and the answer (as you’ve heard me say before), seriously lies within. We all experience pain, and that pain either leaves the body or it stays in the body. And the only way to truly heal is for you to feel the pain instead of trying to bury the pain with the food you eat.
When we have unhealed wounds inside and they all manifest in our physical reality in some way, shape, or form. That pain can manifest itself as pain, chaos, overeating, or undereating. But there is always an underlying intention.
In the past, I asked myself over and over again, why do I binge eat? Why do I binge eat? Why do I binge eat?!
I wasn’t aware that there was an underlying intention behind WHY I was doing it. I didn’t think I could control it! But there is a reason why we do everything. And when you binge eat, it’s your body telling you that something is wrong. Something is off. And it’s time to take a deeper look at what that might be.
When there are imbalances anywhere in the body, your whole alignment is off. Cause and effect are a real and true thing. All things are in effect and all things are in cause. Which means (if Albert Einstein was correct), that stress eating is caused by something internal (usually something we can’t see, but something we can feel).
Most days, you want to run away from why you stress eat. You blame it on your job. You blame it on your husband. You blame it on your kid. And you constantly ask yourself (with no answer), why do I binge eat? But here’s the real reason why you stress eat: You haven’t healed something inside of you. There is something that needs to be healed within before you can ever expect to stop stress eating.
Stress is an indicator that something is off. It’s a sign that you’re out of alignment somewhere inside. So, my invitation to you is to ask why it’s showing up. Be with it. Have compassion for it. I promise it will shift something inside of you for the better. Instead of running from the discomfort or the pain, go toward it.
One thing that I’ve found to help me manage and finally beat the battle I was in with my body and food for years is meditation. Meditation has the ability to keep you aligned with your highest self. It has helped me answer the question of why do I binge eat because I’ve been able to get deep with myself. When you are disconnected from your highest potential, you aren’t operating at your optimal vibrational level. When your vibration is lower, you experience more of the things you don’t want to. Like binge eating or over-exercising. So the way to stay connected and vibrating high is by meditating.
If you need some support in starting a meditation practice, or you’re a seasoned practitioner and want something new, check out our 21-Day Meditation Series. It’s half off if you use this link <3
