Why We Want to Binge When Our Jeans Feel Tight: 6 Psychological Reasons (and How the Nervous System Is Involved)

 

A client went away for a week and spent most of it in sweatpants. When she got home, she put on jeans, and immediately felt they were tighter.

Her next thought was quick and detached: “That’s it. I’m just going to eat.” 

I’ve heard this exact sequence so many times it almost feels like a law of physics in a diet-culture world: body image hits, and then food gets louder. The part that confuses people is the logic. If feeling bigger is the problem, why does eating more show up as the solution?

The answer is that the reaction isn’t being run by the part of the brain that’s interested in long-term outcomes. It’s being run by the parts that deal with threat, urgency, protection, and internal conflict. If you’ve ever looked back the next day and thought, “What was I doing?” that’s usually the distance talking. In the moment, it made sense inside the system you were in.

This is the framework I use when I’m trying to understand this pattern—six reasons I see over and over, in clients and in myself.

 

1) Black-and-white thinking gets stronger under stress

 

When the nervous system is activated, nuance becomes harder to access. Black-and-white categories are easier for the brain to manage because they reduce the number of decisions you have to hold at once. The mental filing system gets simple: good/bad, safe/unsafe, acceptable/unacceptable.

Body image distress is the kind of stressor that pulls people into that binary fast because it’s attached to so many loaded meanings—belonging, desirability, control, health, morality, identity, social standing. When the jeans feel tight, it can register as more than “fabric feels different.” It can register as “something is wrong,” and the mind starts treating the day like it belongs on the “wrong” side of life.

There’s also mood-congruent cognition, which is a fancy way of saying your thoughts organize themselves to match your mood. If you feel fine, you can tolerate a problem without turning it into a verdict about yourself. If you feel low, the same problem becomes proof. That’s why the same body, in the same mirror, can look tolerable one day and catastrophic the next.

One of the tools I mentioned in the episode for this is what my client and I ended up calling “combining,” which is basically practicing gray-area tolerance by doing two things that don’t “match.” A client ate more than she wanted on a hard Sunday morning, felt uncomfortable, and instead of hibernating all day she went for a walk in the city. It felt weird because it broke the old rule: “If I eat too much, I must disappear.”

 

It felt strange because the emotional state and the behavior didn’t line up, but over time that strangeness becomes something you can tolerate. The nervous system learns that discomfort plus normal life is survivable. And once you can hold that, black-and-white thinking loosens its grip.

 

2) The nervous system is trying to get out of the fire

 

When body image distress crosses a certain threshold, the system stops caring about what makes sense later and focuses on reducing the pain now. It’s the same mechanism that makes you pull your hand off a hot stove before your brain narrates what’s happening.

If the emotional reaction is intense enough, your instincts go straight to escape. Food works quickly. It changes sensation. It grounds. It soothes. For some people it quiets the body. For others it discharges energy.

I talk about this a lot in terms of “blanket” and “voice” responses. Some nervous systems collapse under stress and want to hide, numb, and soften everything. Others become activated and need movement, intensity, something loud enough to match what’s happening inside. Eating can serve either one. The behavior looks similar on the outside, but the motivation inside the body can be very different.

This is why people often say afterward, “I don’t even know why I did that.” They didn’t decide. They reacted. The part of the brain that calculates consequences wasn’t in the driver’s seat.

 

3) Self-punishment can feel stabilizing

 

This one is uncomfortable because it doesn’t fit the neat recovery narrative, but it shows up often enough that it deserves to be named.

When weight and worth have been linked for a long time, eating in ways that make the body feel worse can create a strange sense of coherence. If the belief is “this body is wrong,” then hurting it reinforces the story. The system settles into the order of it. Random pain is harder to tolerate than pain that seems justified.

For people with trauma histories, this can overlap with what I sometimes call an internalized oppressor: a part of the psyche that takes over the job of making suffering make sense when the original harm had nowhere to go. Turning pain inward becomes a way of organizing the experience.

I don’t think this means people want to suffer. I think it means the nervous system prefers predictability, even when the predictable thing is harmful.

 

4) Regaining control after being caught off guard

 

There’s a specific moment many people recognize: you’re having a decent time, you feel okay in your body, and then you see a photo of yourself or catch your reflection unexpectedly. Suddenly you realize you were wrong. That you were exposed. That other people might see something you weren’t seeing.

That shock lands in the body as vulnerability. And for people who have a long history of not wanting to be caught off guard, of not wanting to be the last one to know, that moment can feel destabilizing.

Eating after that can function like control. If weight gain is going to happen, at least now you’re the one doing it. The outcome becomes intentional instead of accidental. The future becomes predictable again. The system relaxes a little because the story makes sense.

 

5) The rebel response to the emotional workload of body image

 

Body image isn’t one feeling. It’s an entire workload: health, attractiveness, aging, morality, access, clothes, social belonging, identity, memory, power. All of that can light up at once when the jeans don’t fit or the photo looks wrong.

Sometimes a part of you looks at that pile of labor and opts out. Not thoughtfully. Not strategically. Just, “I’m not carrying all of this today.”

Eating becomes the exit. It crowds out the noise. It narrows the focus. It lets the system step away from the constant internal negotiations. For some people it’s anger. For others it’s exhaustion. For others it’s a quiet refusal. The shape is different, but the move is the same.

 

6) Scarcity starts before you ever restrict

 

The moment your body feels “off,” your brain predicts what usually comes next: watching your food, tightening the rules, pulling back access, second-guessing hunger, shrinking the world a little.

Your nervous system doesn’t wait for you to actually start restricting. The thought of it is enough. Scarcity switches on. Urgency follows.

When the system believes less is coming, it reaches for more now. That isn’t weakness. It’s how survival wiring works.

 

What helps

 

All six of these patterns share one thing: urgency in the nervous system. Which means the intervention isn’t a better rule, a better plan, or a better mindset. It’s slowing the reaction down enough for the system to settle.

When body image hits and the urge to eat spikes, the most stabilizing move is often to not decide anything yet. Not about food. Not about your body. Not about tomorrow.

I use a 24-hour hold for myself. No fixing, no planning, no compensating, no arguing. Just let the reaction have space to rise and fall so that the part of you that can actually think has a chance to come back online.

That pause doesn’t solve everything. But it gives you your hands back. And from there, you can choose what happens next instead of being carried by a moment that felt bigger than you.

 

The full transcript of the Full But Not Finished Podcast (episode 14) is below:

 

So a client of mine was away at a place where she was hanging out in sweatpants. Really didn’t even get dressed up too much for the entire week that she was away. And when she came home, she put on a pair of jeans, realized that they felt a little bit tighter on her.

Immediately proceeded to think: that’s it. I’m just gonna binge.

I’ve heard this story so many times, and it has happened to me. And if binging is at all in your wheelhouse, this has probably happened to you.

Why do we feel so strongly compelled to move towards food and eat more when we feel the worst about our bodies? I want to talk about this one.

Sometimes when I sit down to plan out these podcasts or Instagram posts or Substack essays, I’m like, okay, here’s my topic. What do I think about it? And I have thought through this a number of times: what is it that drives us towards the very thing that apparently caused the thing where upset happened?

Like if I eat and gain weight, my response then when I get upset that I’ve gained weight is to eat. What is this?

But it does make sense. And I think all of the concepts that I’m about to talk about have to do with our subconscious layers, or our inner parts, or our dysregulated branches of the nervous system.

They aren’t the logical executive functioning.

And I think that when we think about any food-related dysfunction, we do have to look at those layers because usually there’s internal conflict going on. And when we look at those subconscious layers, I believe that that’s part of the process. I don’t believe it’s the whole thing. Obviously insight alone doesn’t do everything, but it is really important so we know what we’re dealing with, and we can bring up things going on within us that we otherwise don’t acknowledge and therefore can’t work with.

And so because I have six things and I only have 40 minutes, I really want to get to it.

So let’s start with number one.

So the first one maybe is the most obvious: black and white thinking. It’s actually easier for our brains to manage stress in black and white because everything has a clear category and a clear place, and you can filter information much more efficiently. In black and white, it’s either good or it’s bad, it’s safe or it’s unsafe.

We go left or we go right.

It lacks nuance on purpose because nuance invites more decision making. It adds layers of thinking to things. It requires more emotional complexity. It’s harder. So when you are in a stress state, it’s actually unfortunately easier for your brain to kind of continue going along the path that induces more stress states in terms of the behavior and in terms of what creates behavioral stress, which is typically black and white.

Because when we’re going into black and white thinking, we can really go into a side of things that ultimately doesn’t serve us. But in that moment, it makes things feel clearer. It makes things feel more orderly, at least emotionally, again, in the moment.

There’s a concept called mood congruent cognition. And this is the idea that if you find yourself in an emotional state, let’s say frustration or sadness or helplessness, your thoughts will organize themselves to match your mood. So if you try on a pair of jeans and feel upset, your thoughts will now conspire to follow that upset, to become geared more towards more upset.

This isn’t because your brain’s trying to be a jerk. It’s because it’s trying to put things in categories.

So the experience of frustration or despair, even if we know working with emotions that emotions rise and fall, in the meantime the brain’s like, we feel distress, we feel despair—what else we got here? And then the thoughts and the feelings will organize themselves around that.

Have you ever noticed that if you’re feeling in an okay mood, you might look at a problem you have in your life differently?

I remember this used to happen with my house when I moved into this house at first, and it wasn’t painted the colors I wanted and we had some work to do on it. And when I was in a tired mood or a low mood, I would look around and be like, I hate these blue walls. Like I couldn’t stand it. But when I was in an okay mood, I could look at the same exact blue color on the wall and be like, it’s fine, it’s tolerable. Like I can deal with it. I never liked it, but there were times where the same exact thing, and on one day I could look at it like a little glass half full, and on the other day I would look at it like this was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

That’s how our mood does impact our thoughts about something, or our state can impact our mood about something.

And so when you have a moment that is such a high emotional charge of these jeans don’t fit me, which is of course connected to lots of things like belonging and safety and acceptance and identity, there’s a strong emotion that’s attached to that. And then there’s an urgency to match it.

And so this is what black and white thinking does. So eating in response to feeling not good in your body matches it. It matches it. It makes things all go to the left side of the equation, which in some parts of us and in more of those subconscious layers is actually a little bit easier. It reduces some stress in a certain way. It of course creates stress in the long run, but the short-term response is what dysregulation is made of. It’s about what’s happening in the here and now and getting away from that. All the executive functioning about longer-term consequences and things like that are less significant when you’re in a dysregulated place.

Now even when you are more regulated, it still is kind of hard to hold two opposing truths. It’s a practice I think we all work on in all areas of life of like, how can I manage the internal conflict of this feeling really crappy right now and this being okay? It feels like we want that congruence.

So one of the things that is helpful to work on black and white thinking is the conscious pairing of things that don’t match up together in areas that don’t have to even do with food.

Now admittedly, the example I’m about to give does have to do with it, but I’ll try to think of some other ones too.

So I have another client who on Sundays, this was her hardest day of eating traditionally just because of her schedule on Sundays.

And she had this Sunday morning that was hard, and she ate more than she wanted to, and she ended up a little bit uncomfortably full. She also then ended up going for a walk in the city by herself because she just kind of wanted to get out.

And when she WhatsApped me later that night, she was like, this was such a weird experience because usually when I eat what I deemed to be too much, I kind of hibernate the rest of the day. She goes, but I actually went outside and went for this walk. She goes, it was kind of weird to be in a place where I felt so low, but to then do something I normally do when I’m feeling good.

And there was dissonance there, but in this case it was productive for her.

And we started calling it combining after that. This idea of taking one thing and then it’s kind of like an opposite action kind of thing. An opposite action, as a DBT concept, that takes the action that would otherwise be the white of the black and white and puts it together with the black. And now we have two incongruent things working together, because our instinct is to do it in the opposite way.

So the more things that we can practice putting together, it increases our gray area thinking. It increases our flexibility and increases our ability to tolerate that.

Because I’ve been in the positions many times where I feel like when I’m low, I don’t want to do the things that will help me. And it’s not just because I’m a glutton for punishment, although I will talk about that. It’s because it almost feels intolerable. I don’t like the way it feels to be feeling low and then to do something happy. There’s a discomfort in the body around it. But the more that you practice it, the more you can learn to tolerate that discomfort.

And I would say that I have discomfort putting black with white, but I can do it a lot more easily now because I can tolerate that discomfort because I’ve practiced it.

So let’s get to number two.

All right, so this one is a lot more about getting out of the fire that’s in front of you when body image causes enough distress that you feel the flood of a reaction. And when I say flood, that could be on a spectrum, but I typically mean it as this upsurge viscerally of “oh no,” or “I can’t believe this.” It’s a heightened response to what feels like some kind of emergency in the system.

If that’s high enough and distressing enough, your nervous system is going to be much more concerned with getting away from that right now than it is about what’s coming up later.

So almost like in the same way that you would jump off of a sinking ship into icy cold water in order to escape the more immediate threat of the ship about to go down.

The closer a threat is, the more impulsive you’re going to be to remove that immediate close threat, even if that means jumping into something else that’s also threatening, but it’s just a little bit farther away, or it’s a little bit more in the future.

In this case, the logic of it isn’t necessarily there in terms of, well, if I escape this thing, I’m still gonna run into this thing, so I might as well stay with the original threat. It’s just action. It’s the way that you pull your hand away from a burning stove so quickly because it’s the instinct of what’s right there.

So when we have distress that’s high enough, the only thing that your immediate instincts want to move towards is just getting away from it. Where you go after that is already considered worth the risk because the distress of this original thing is so high.

So the immediate gratification of being soothed in a moment like that—if you feel like you put on a pair of jeans or see yourself in a photo or reflection and feel this distress rise—what you’re gonna want to do with that distress is just get away from it. And food is a known comfort. It’s a known balm. It soothes our emotions, at least for the moment.

And I used to get really mad at myself for this. I spoke to myself in ways that I am not proud of in this kind of situation, where I would then retrospectively look at it, like the morning after a binge, and I would be like—how could you? Why would you do the thing that you’re so upset you do? Why would you do this to yourself?

And at that point I’d be thinking logically about it because I’d had some distance from the threat. And I’d be talking to myself as though I made this choice to do that.

And this is exactly the thing: we aren’t choosing logically. We’re not using executive functioning to binge in response to a body image crisis. We are simply reacting.

This makes the case for the importance of expanding our windows of tolerance so that we can tolerate more, so we’re not always reacting, and how to slow the process of reacting down. But this is a skill that people work on a lot. It’s what regulating is in the face of dysregulation.

This is what the SENSR course, by the way, teaches: how to slow down and track your body for dysregulation, and how to create capacity to work with your immediate responses and to have other tools to use.

But literally, that takes a lot of practice.

When I was dealing with postpartum anxiety back in 2014, I took an eight-week mindfulness-based course. And I remember this was a lot of what we talked about. We didn’t necessarily use somatic techniques at that time, but it was a lot of thought work and behavioral practices around trying to create this pause between the reaction and the response. And even within that coursework time, those eight weeks of going to an actual course on this, I found it really, really difficult. It was not something you just check off a list and do. It’s a capacity to build. And it takes time.

And this is where this becomes relevant in the nervous system’s capacity to tolerate distress. And if we don’t have that capacity, we will go to the closest thing that will allow us to escape it. And this is often food.

But the other piece of emotional regulation that happens when we are in this high distress is the onset of an increase of activation.

I’ve talked before about the different cohorts of people that I see with food issues. And I’ve talked about voice binges versus blanket binges.

To remind you: sometimes we have the instinct to hide and collapse and go into a freeze response when we’re stressed, and others of us have an instinct to need to put that energy somewhere.

What cohort we belong to is not a choice we make. It’s just the way our nervous systems work.

So those who might be more inclined to blanket—to want soothing, comfort, to want to hide, to want to collapse, to tune everything out when they’re in despair—would potentially use food to soothe in a moment like this.

For others who feel this heightened amount of distress and get more mobilized, more angry, more in that fight-or-flight state, there’s still a call to do something with this activation, and food can also be that thing.

Even though the response looks different, it can still end up becoming an eating episode. The motivations in the nervous system are very different. In some of us it’s a soothe. In others of us it’s a move.

And the move is where the act of eating itself is the regulation. It’s the way that we’re taking this adrenaline that’s coursing through our veins and trying to work with it. The rhythm of the crunch of the food, the sensory intensity, the speed of it—sometimes binging happens here because it’s loud and sensory and fast. It can help translate some of this high stress happening in the body as a result of the original injury to it, the original body image flood.

So when we’re looking at it through this lens, we understand that the eating response to the body image distress makes sense through the lens of how we’re looking to get away from that emotion or to downregulate that emotion.

It becomes less about the problem and more about the problem of the emotion. The emotional dysregulation is now the thing that’s so hard to tolerate, more so even than the objective truth of my clothes are tight.

So let’s now take a look at number three.

Self punishment is a concept that it’s very compelling. I know why we talk about it as self punishment, and I used to feel that I just couldn’t get behind it because I think everything that we do comes from a part of us that’s really trying to protect us.

I believe that IFS also corresponds to this idea that we all have parts of ourselves and their job is always protection somewhere.

What happens is that we have conflict between these parts. And the parts who we deem to be self-sabotaging or punishing us run in such contrast to our more conscious self, or other parts of ourselves that want good for us, that we look at that as a punishment.

The problem with looking at anything we’re doing as self punishment is that inherently we are setting up an enemy state in ourselves where there is something that we’re doing that we’re seeing as the thing to get rid of and exile. And that’s rarely helpful. It creates a rebel state. These parts continue to fight for themselves to be seen.

So not only is it not effective, but it creates this sense of there’s a part of me that is wrong, which induces shame. And we know shame doesn’t actually help us change sustainably in the long term.

On the other hand, I’ve also worked with a lot of people who have been through experiences where there’s been an internalized oppressor. It’s where the trauma somebody’s been through has become a part. And that part is working to make predictable the same punishment that once existed, or to make it make sense, or to hold self accountable to something that nobody else or nothing else can be accountable to.

In the case of injustice sometimes there isn’t accountability from any person, but sometimes there just isn’t accountability because there’s a larger systemic injustice going on. And so in order to make that more tolerable—because it’s uncomfortable to have bad things happen to us or to feel like things are unfair without a place to put it—it can be easier to take it on and say, if I’m feeling this way, at least I can make it make sense.

There’s a part of me that would feel more comfortable if I thought I deserved it than if I didn’t.

Those internalized parts are trying to make something make sense for us, but they can also be seen as the oppressor.

So for some people, I understand that calling it self punishment, or finding the parts of us that are doing something to self punish, can be a way people learn to say no and self-advocate by empowering themselves against behaviors they perceive to be damaging.

I understand everybody has a different way of looking at it.

For those people who identify with this idea of punishment, where a response of eating more—eating beyond hunger, eating in ways that make us feel uncomfortable, not just emotional eating but targeted eating behavior to overstuff the body—almost purposefully can feel like punishment.

It can be helpful to understand why we do this instead of believing we’re just broken and want to punish ourselves, because it’s very difficult to sit with a self that has a part of us that’s inherently against the self.

The rationalization is that it creates a sense of order and even control. It makes it make sense.

So if we have grown up to believe that weight gain is bad or that it makes us less worthy, and then we participate in a behavior that confirms that we’re not worthy or that we deserve to hurt, there’s congruence. It makes the original wound feel justified. It makes it feel like: yeah, that’s right, because I don’t deserve it. I’m on board with that.

I’m going to lean into that rather than hold the gray area of: I feel some kind of injustice, I feel this lack of control, I feel like I’m being wronged or I feel like I am wrong, at the same time as we hold inherent worthiness.

Kind of like if we’re at fault, then things aren’t random. There’s an order to feeling like we deserved something.

So I remember when I would see myself in a reflection or I’d see a photograph of myself from an event where I was having a good time, and then I saw the picture and I was like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe that’s me.

And I can’t believe that I was allowing myself to have this good time.

And then I would go home and binge.

There was something about it that felt like I was taking control back.

It felt like I had been caught off guard. Feeling like I was having fun and everything was okay, and then seeing a photograph and realizing in that moment that I had been wrong—this is of course how my brain was thinking about it—felt exposing.

I felt weak and vulnerable where I had let myself believe I was okay looking the way I was when I actually wasn’t. And that the objective reality was that this was the truth and everyone else could see it except me.

And now I’d seen this picture of myself.

This also happens when you walk past a mirror. Anytime you feel confronted by your own body image, there can be this feeling of: I can’t believe I wasn’t aware. I’m mad at myself for being ignorant to this.

And for those of us who have experience with feeling like I never want to be caught off guard again—where that’s a stored memory in the system—or where vulnerability is a stored memory in the system, where other people seeing things about you that you can’t, or other people knowing things about you that you don’t, this experience highlights that. It brings it to the forefront.

And when I went home and binged after an experience like that, what it felt like was: if I am eating, then I am aware that I’m going to gain weight. I’m making it happen. I’m the reason why this is happening and I know it.

I know that binging will cause weight gain for me. Therefore, that picture will make sense.

Now of course, timing doesn’t work like that, but there’s something about it makes sense. It makes sense. And I was the one in charge of it, and I was the one who controlled it.

And now if I gain weight from this binge—again, I’m talking the way we think, because in reality it doesn’t work like that—but if I gain weight, it’s like: yes, of course I did. And now I will expect to gain the weight so I won’t be taken off guard again.

And in fact, now I’m controlling the whole situation.

A lot of these things come back to black and white thinking. There’s pulling towards all-or-nothing. There’s pulling towards escape. There’s pulling towards moving away from stress.

And because bodies in this world are such a high-stakes thing, it’s not the same as holding other dichotomous concepts.

If I stub my toe and feel upset and then my daughter comes home and tells me she got a prize at school, I can reconcile them more easily because neither one scrapes at my sense of self-worth or my sense of safety.

Neither one is as high stakes to me as body image is representative of.

And this is where body image work is so important because unless you deconstruct what it means to have a body that isn’t a certain way, there will be a moral attachment to it. And that will be high stakes because body image is representative of so many core things.

I think it’s an interesting conversation too, thinking about how I’ll inevitably get comments or inquiries about: what if my body image distress isn’t about vanity, it’s not about control, it’s not even about society’s judgment. It’s about: I don’t want to exist in a body where I can’t bend down easily, or I can’t go for walks with my friends or with my partner without getting out of breath. It’s more functional.

There’s a couple things.

One is that almost everybody I’ve worked with who has that experience still also has social judgment fears attached to it. Of course they do. So remember that does come up whenever we’re in distress about body image.

And the morality piece comes up even when it’s framed as health. There’s moral implication. It’s not just about fitness, it’s about health as well.

So there is this instinct to control that. And where we’re talking here about how eating is a way to take back control, eating is still a way to take back control in terms of: I caused my health to be like this. I caused my body to be like this. And again, it makes sense then.

And number five.

This is another one I really strongly relate to. This is the rebel.

There’s something that happens when we perceive that we’ve gained weight. There’s layers of things that happen. There’s fear, there’s self-loathing, there’s anger. There’s uncertainty. There’s distress.

The amount of emotional burden it is to have to cope with this—it’s huge. I think there’s a huge amount of allostatic load. This invisible burden that goes along with weight stuff because it’s not just one thing. It’s so many things.

It can be about health. It can be about mobility. It can be about belonging. It can be about identity. It can be about practicalities like having clothes that fit. It can be about style. It can be about access. It’s linked to so many things.

And because of that, when we perceive—there’s exasperation here—that we have to cope once again with: my jeans don’t fit today, or I now have to sort through the emotions related to me seeing that photograph of myself, there’s a part of us that understands within milliseconds how much is involved here and doesn’t want any part of it.

And this is the part that comes up to be like: f everything. Like, no, I don’t want to deal with this.

I resent all the different pieces of labor that go into this. Weight psychology. Self-esteem. The whole thing.

And so eating can be a big f you.

It’s kind of like: I’m not conforming to the rigamarole that is going to now follow me around, because I know I’m part of this culture, and I do have these reactions about my body, and now I have to go through it.

Eating was this way of just crowding everything out.

I have a client who puts her hands up by her eyes. It’s kind of like a tunnel vision stance. She crowds away all those inner voices, all her parts talking to her. And just: give me the food and everything else will shut up.

And again, this is one of those things where the short-term response, the reactivity, is going to be stronger if it’s high enough than the long-term executive functioning of consequences and predicted outcomes.

It’s simply: I can’t deal with all of this. I don’t want to deal with all of this. Let me show you just how much I don’t care about this right now. I’m going to actively move towards the thing I’m not supposed to do, just to really drive home the fact that I’m not playing this game.

I don’t know if everyone will relate to this. I think there’s a certain amount of rebel anger attached to this one.

And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe if you don’t resonate with anger, you still might relate to this feeling of quieter rebellion, or maybe it’s more despairing. Or crowding out the voices just to be like: I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.

It doesn’t always have to be angry necessarily, but whether it’s looked at as a rebel who’s angry or some kind of protector that just doesn’t want to deal with all of this, I think eating is a language in our culture. It’s a way that we either comply or don’t comply.

But it’s also a sensory balm. It’s helpful to crowd other things out. To go into the zone.

And when you go into the zone, you don’t have to deal with all the bouncing around thoughts and parts trying to compete for attention in that moment.

I think it could even be compounded by recovery parts. There are parts, if you’re doing work around body image and food, that come in and try to talk you out of it. “This doesn’t matter.” “Your weight is not your worth.” “You’re not supposed to care this much.”

And then there are those layers too, and it becomes like: I can’t turn in any right direction. I can’t turn against myself here. I’m not supposed to turn against myself, but I am. But I also feel guilty about that. Food can be a way we say no.

And in that way, this behavior makes sense.

And not far from rebel sits number six.

This one might be the most obvious.

So when we put our jeans on, and they’re snug, or we see a photograph of yourself and it doesn’t look the way you want it to, or we pass a store window, and it takes you by surprise, we are programmed at moments like this when we perceive that our body is wrong or too big to fix it.

We’re programmed to fix it.

That will probably be—whether you’re aware of it or not—the first thing that you think of. Even now. I’m trying to think. Yeah, probably now I probably have that instinct come up too, and maybe I’m less aware of it because I’m not hearing it as loudly as I used to, but I have original language in me too. It’s like: oh no, fix it.

And because of that, and because we have decades upon decades of history of the voices in our heads telling us that, for many years we have been in cahoots with, your brain’s really smart and your brain is really experienced at all this, so it understands: okay, we feel upset because our jeans are tight. What happens next?

What happens next is we make a diet plan and then we go into a diet.

It knows what’s going to happen. It’s predicting the scarcity upcoming. It understands that now when you’re at dinner tonight, you are going to second-guess how much of that dinner you can have. And if you have a hankering for a sweet afterwards, you might not offer that to yourself, or you’re at least going to second-guess it because you saw that picture of yourself earlier, because those jeans didn’t fit today.

Your body is miles ahead of you on this.

It’s designed to be predictive.

So your brain is like: we know what happens next. We know the outcome here. We know the path mostly traveled. That is going to light up all sorts of scarcity signals in your body and brain.

Even as I say that, thinking about the way that feels, when I understand that I’ve gained a little weight and there’s a part of my brain that’s like: you don’t have as much room to give anymore. You have to watch now. You have to be more conscious now of your decisions around food.

That feeling is claustrophobic. It makes you feel an immediate sense of: I have less access now.

And when you feel like you have less access, you are going to respond.

So the brain is like: well, I know we’re just going to go get it. Especially at a vulnerable moment like that.

So you now have this scarcity that gets triggered off in the body, and you’re in a foul mood, and your defenses are down, and your window of tolerance is smaller. You put those things together and you’re going to go collect what’s available right now, because tomorrow things may change.

You might be more vigilant tomorrow, but right now, go for it.

This is how mental restriction works.

This is what happens when, before you’ve ever restricted a thing, you might be somebody who’s like: I think about restricting, but I don’t.

But thinking about it is scarcity. The thinking still goes into the I shouldn’t mode. Even if you don’t follow through, the I shouldn’t itself is inherently defending against enoughness.

A should is so powerful in the psychology.

So if there’s a psychology of scarcity, there will be a psychology pointing you towards abundance—to go get the thing that is going to potentially be scarce.

Now, it’s really difficult to talk about tools for scarcity in terms of a tip or a tool, because when it comes to concepts of scarcity, that’s deep roots.

There’s affirmations and things you could provide yourself with around: I will feed myself enough. I will not withdraw food from myself. I deserve to eat. I will not go on a diet. Whatever it is that you want to remind yourself of, to reinforce back to your conscious mind that there’s a part of us here that’s not working with the scarcity model.

That’s important. I think it’s important to tell your nervous system that so your nervous system understands that there is a part of you fighting for abundance.

But scarcity is deeper than consciousness.

That’s why I loathe tips. I think so much of working with food is about deprogramming old things and plugging in and growing and watering and seeding and offering sunlight and offering time to new things.

That isn’t something you do with a tip or a tool. It’s something you do over time. It’s involved in layers of beliefs. So there’s cognition, there’s nervous system, there’s somatic work, there’s behavioral changes. And all of those things need to work together over time to uproot scarcity mentality and allow access to something different.

Scarcity also is something that is wired in us. It is hardwired. So there will always be a memory of it. And so working with that includes expanding a window of tolerance and being able to tolerate emotion and insults of scarcity threats, to know how to work through that.

Anytime we talk about scarcity mentality, it’s deeper work. There’s more there. I think there’s even grief work in scarcity.

But on the surface layers, one of the most important things you can do when you feel yourself going into a scarcity place—where you feel tightened around what you’re allowed to do now because of how you perceive your body—is a slowing down in that moment.

Scarcity thrives on urgency.

So as all of these do—all six of these things are all in dysregulation. They’re all an urgent fast process without having to think, because the burden of thinking is like you’re going to want to crowd that out.

To slow the body down any time that you get triggered by your body image, I don’t think it’s about what to think next or what to do next. It’s pause. Pause. Hold. Hold.

In my body image workshop, this is literally one of a three-part series of tools for managing floods: the hold.

The hold is where we say: hold on. Hold on. I can’t think right now. I can’t make decisions right now. I don’t know what to do right now. I’m just reacting.

And in reaction, we are so vulnerable because it’s in those dysregulated reactions that we make choices that then we attach to and carry forward. And in that place we’re the least in a position to make those choices.

Holding and waiting and slowing down the body could even be distracting yourself with a different thing.

I don’t believe distraction is always suppression. Distraction is a lot of times giving space to a reaction that is unfolding in real time that doesn’t have a safe resolution yet. That needs time and space to rise and fall, or rise and a little bit fall even.

That is really important before we’re thinking because in a state like this, thinking is going to be largely biased.

I usually do a 24-hour rule.

So when I’m triggered in any way by my body image, it’s a hold for 24 hours. I don’t think about what’s next. I don’t plan anything. I don’t go into a behavior. I don’t even try to talk myself through it positively.

And I mean that. I don’t try to get into my body neutrality, body positivity voice. I just hold on.

Just wait.

Because anything I’m trying to tell myself is still coming from this place of desperation and urgency, even if it’s toxic positivity.

Now, that doesn’t mean if it works for you, you can’t use it. But if you find that you’re grasping at straws and nothing is sticking and you feel like you’re just simply dysregulated, you have to allow for that.

We need to give ourselves time to say: I’m just not in a place where I’m going to be coping with this right now. I don’t have the bandwidth.

And then when time goes by and we slow down a little bit, at some point we have what I call invitational windows back into our executive functioning, back into other parts of ourselves that have other perspectives.

And then we can have a conversation.

We can have a conversation with ourselves.

But because body image is such a high reactive stress for so many of us, the logical side of it isn’t available yet.

And so having these concepts to understand why we’re behaving the way we do, and understanding too that slowing down is a way of meeting all of them—because they’re all coming from an urgent place, from more primal brain instincts—slowing down is a way of saying: I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with this, but I don’t want to start now going into criticism about what seems like nonsensical reactive behavior when in fact it was sensical, just potentially unfortunate and inconvenient and distressing.

I mean, it is frustrating.

I find a lot of my reactions that I have great amounts of insight for them, and that’s why I have self-compassion. I’m like, yeah, I totally understand why I did that. But that doesn’t mean I’m not frustrated about it. I do get frustrated about it.

And it’s okay to get frustrated about it. A lot of our responses are very inconvenient for the whole.

But not having self-criticism and being able to understand why we do what we do is a doorway into self-compassion.

And if you’ve got a little bit of self-compassion, or at least if you don’t have self-criticism so loud in your ear, you’re 50% ahead of where you were before.

Which is why I think that insight is really important and is directly linked to self-compassion. Even if you don’t identify with a mushy gushy kind of self-compassion.

Self understanding is self-compassion.

And that is why I talk about insight things so much and why I like to explain things so much.

So I hope that’s been helpful for you.

If you are enjoying this podcast and would like to leave a rating or review, I would really appreciate it. It’s so, so helpful for me to get the podcast out there.

If you would place comments on YouTube, I really like talking to people and learning about the new community that exists on YouTube. As I am coming from Instagram with so many of you over there, there’s new people on YouTube that I’m getting to meet and get to know a little bit through messages and comments.

So I appreciate everybody listening, and I hope you have a good week.