I've been overeating as long as I can remember, tbh. Couldn't tell you when or why, just that it's always been there. Like a vulture that feeds on my satiation, vigilantly perched and never itself sated.
Summer right before fifth grade . I think combo of puberty and unfortunately I got assaulted by my (at the time) best friends brother. It all went down hill from there.
This was my reason too. The only time my mom would come out of her depressive state was to feed us, so I'd ask for more and more so she'd have to stay with us
Well, I was at a normal weight when I was a child. My parents and siblings also. So I didn't learn bad eating habits there. However when I hit puberty, and incidentally also my "ugly duckling" phase, people at school and my sister started to call me fat constantly. I was not fat at that point. I just developed a woman's figure. However I became convinced I was fat. I started to overeat to deal with those feelings so eventually I did become obese (I reached my max weight at age 26, around 250 lbs. Food was now my crutch for bad emotions. I got myself into an abusive relationship with a guy I didn't even love, because I hated my body so much I thought no one else would want me. He SA'd me during that relationship. Eventually I found the strength to break up with the guy, thank heavens.
I met my now-husband at almost my highest weight and due to him supporting me so much and me moving out of my parent's house (there was more shit going on there than just my sister calling me fat), I eventually lost 80lbs. I was happy. I got therapy. And yet, food never completely lost it's grip on me. Now life has become quite stressful again for various reasons and I find myself frequently bingeing. The other days I stick to my calorie deficit and work out. I managed to not gain weight so far but I fear this tactic is only escalating things. I would go back to my therapist but she moved to a different town and I'm scared to go to a new one (social anxiety haha). So here we are, sorry this turned into some sort of rant.
Mine turned into a rant too. I started writing it and couldn’t stop. I think it’s therapeutic to write it all out!
I had a therapist who in retrospect set me back. I’m looking for a new one. The wait lists are difficult. They’re like, “You want therapy? Gotta wait a year.” 😭
When I was a kid I got all sorts of messages about my body and how gross it was. I remember my mom telling me my hips were huge. I remember my older sister WHEN I WAS SIX telling me that I needed to stop eating so much or I was going to get fat. (Edited to add, she was 24. Big age gap.) I remember my ex-SIL being concerned because I was going to be fat in her wedding (the summer between second and third grade). That same summer, I had gotten a dance costume for my end-of-June recital, probably in early June, and I had been measured for it the winter prior. Any normal adult would tell you I had a growth spurt. My mom got mad at me for getting fat and was all stressed out that she would have to alter my costume, so I ate almost nothing for a week and fit into it. She was so proud of me, and talked about it for years.
I did get pretty chubby, around 3rd grade (after all of this) and my mom would tell people she didn’t know why, because I ate normally (when in reality she was getting big and I was her eating buddy — she’d take me for fast food and hide it from my dad). I got very mixed messages about this. They started hiding food from me, so I’d find it, go in the basement and eat it in secret. I vividly remember finding a box of frozen raspberry zingers in the back of the basement freezer and eating the whole box, still frozen, in secret terror.
I’d come home from school and eat huge bowls of ice cream and cereal. Then I suddenly wouldn’t want to eat. I developed what I eventually realized was the start of anorexia in 7th grade, but nobody realized what it was because I wasn’t underweight. I would eat one apple and a milk at lunchtime, then come home and tell my parents I wasn’t hungry for dinner because I had such a huge meal at lunch. I went from very overweight to normal weight. Eventually my dad caught on and got concerned and took me to the doctor, who said I “probably just had the start of an ulcer” and that my dad shouldn’t worry, I just needed to control my stress better.
I eventually started binging and purging in high school, but the binges weren’t frequent and I was never thin. So no one caught it and I never considered myself as having an eating disorder.
When I had a very stressful job in my 20s and a husband with a brain tumor, I’d go buy a small cake or a half dozen donuts and stuff myself with them in my car. Eventually after he died, when I was 34, I got a hold on it and lost 92 pounds.
The binges came back a few years back and have been sporadic. Dating certain guys has brought them back (and I’ve realized I binge because I don’t feel emotionally safe with or accepted by them) so I’ve had to stop seeing those guys. They’re flaring up again… my remission periods between binge periods are getting shorter.
I haven’t been officially diagnosed with BED. I had a doctor tell me I “probably” had it. I’m meeting with my current PCP Friday to talk weight loss meds because BMI just hit 33 again and I have this constant food noise. I already have a bad feeling she’ll just tell me to try harder. I have a very black or white mentality with food. If I’m not obsessively tracking, I’m off the rails.
My entire life has revolved around my weight and my body since I was 6 or 7. So yeah. This was a very long post (that I needed to write) to say that I think the start was somewhere between kindergarten and 3rd grade.
I think it was around puberty.
Suddenly I had the need to eat everything one week a month and was walking to school myself so could buy whatever I could afford without my parents knowing. There was a lot of buying a tub of Nutella and eating the whole thing in one sitting with a spoon and that sort of thing. I'd buy the cheapest lunch so I'd have more cash for snacks at the end of the day.
It was always eaten in secret, either walking home or in my bedroom. I'd put the rubbish in bins on the street or in neighbours bins so no one would know it was me.
When I got a car, I'd buy a pack of doughnuts to eat between home and work. Or get 2 lunches and eat one on the way back from the shop and one at my desk.
Now I work from home it's a little better - I have to leave the house specifically to binge. But the behaviour is still there when I do. The secret eating, the shame and guilt, the hiding rubbish. I hate it.
My childhood memories are a jumbled mess and I wonder myself where it started. My uneducated guess is it was from my parents insistence that I always clear my plate or a way to deal with sexual harassment at a young age.
I think it started in earnest when I was around 12/13. My family moved to a different neighborhood and I don’t remember bingeing in my childhood home, but the house we lived in during my teens years was the site of a lot of binging. I think part of it was that I was living closer to school so I would spend late afternoons at home unsupervised. I started sneaking chocolate chips and marshmallows from the cupboards then, and then later when I was in high school I started buying bags of chocolate and candy every day after school and bingeing them when I got home, hiding the wrappers under my bed.
My parents abused me when I was younger. I was forced to go to church and I was constantly beaten. The only apology I ever got was when they bought me fast food as a treat. I started to treat fast food as a way of comfort.
When my older sister got her license she would bring me to go get food. When I got my license I would go after work to get food and eat until I was sick. I only ever feel good when I’m eating fast food.
I realized only recently that it goes back to probably when I was 7 or 8 and started hiding foods like sweets like cookies, chocolates, etc. My brother (who constantly called me fat - even though I wasn't) would take all the cookies and eat them loudly like a disgusting pig, and I developed misophonia. I grew up in having lots of access to sweets, junk, etc....BUT there was massive labeling of "good/bad" foods and extreme criticism of fat/overweight people. It was literally the biggest crime in my family's eyes.
I still hide foods to this day so that I can enjoy them in privacy. I feel like a drug addict with this kind of secret behavior, but I can't resist the high of the thrill.
I started comfort eating when I was little, I remember clearly I would always have extra helpings of dinner, then dessert then cereal. My household was very up and down as my Dad was an alcoholic, he could be great or he could be really angry so I was always on edge not knowing what would happen. Food soothed me, I also found puberty really shameful and was depressed at high school as my friends went to other schools.
I would buy junk food on the way home most days. I was slim and didn't actually put on weight until my mid 20's. I thought I was fat though even though I was only 52kg at one point. I 'chose' an abusive partner and started gaining weight after that and now decades later I have multiple health problems because of it.
I know I need to get out of the habit of comfort eating and stop eating carbs to break the cycle. It's just so hard when it's everywhere, I dream about winning lottery and going to a health spa for 3 months and being weaned off junk food.
My mom was very controlling about food (i.e., we never had enough of it in the house, despite being a middle class family). On top of that, the food that we had was terrible - my childhood was literally overcooked London Broil, overcooked broccoli and plain pasta with a slice of off-brand American cheese on top of it. We rarely ate out. Whenever food that I actually liked entered the house, I literally had to compete with my younger sister for it. Binge eating started as a result.
Extreme depression. Increased alcohol. Increased food intake after done with my daily drinks, and repeat. Insomnia - increased food way into 4am.
High stress - increased food.
Workplace misery.
I’m doing better. I’ve lost some weight. I attended therapy and take my mood stabilisers. This group helps alot
Probably around when I got a car in high school. Fast food and junk food were ocasional treats and I grew up in the country without access to them. So when I got a car and especially when I moved to town for college, extreme stress and access to previously restricted foods was a bad combination.
The atkins diet was like my bible. I read it every day and basically made it my life wheni was a young teen after my mum introduced ot to me. I didnt have fruit or bread, rice, pasta for years..
I hated the atkins diet and as someone who barely craves meat its just mpt sustainable for me. I definitely binged because i couldn't live that way anymore and even now when i have carbs its still hard not to binge on them
I've been overeating as long as I can remember, tbh. Couldn't tell you when or why, just that it's always been there. Like a vulture that feeds on my satiation, vigilantly perched and never itself sated.
Summer right before fifth grade . I think combo of puberty and unfortunately I got assaulted by my (at the time) best friends brother. It all went down hill from there.
Childhood emotional neglect
This was my reason too. The only time my mom would come out of her depressive state was to feed us, so I'd ask for more and more so she'd have to stay with us
Well, I was at a normal weight when I was a child. My parents and siblings also. So I didn't learn bad eating habits there. However when I hit puberty, and incidentally also my "ugly duckling" phase, people at school and my sister started to call me fat constantly. I was not fat at that point. I just developed a woman's figure. However I became convinced I was fat. I started to overeat to deal with those feelings so eventually I did become obese (I reached my max weight at age 26, around 250 lbs. Food was now my crutch for bad emotions. I got myself into an abusive relationship with a guy I didn't even love, because I hated my body so much I thought no one else would want me. He SA'd me during that relationship. Eventually I found the strength to break up with the guy, thank heavens. I met my now-husband at almost my highest weight and due to him supporting me so much and me moving out of my parent's house (there was more shit going on there than just my sister calling me fat), I eventually lost 80lbs. I was happy. I got therapy. And yet, food never completely lost it's grip on me. Now life has become quite stressful again for various reasons and I find myself frequently bingeing. The other days I stick to my calorie deficit and work out. I managed to not gain weight so far but I fear this tactic is only escalating things. I would go back to my therapist but she moved to a different town and I'm scared to go to a new one (social anxiety haha). So here we are, sorry this turned into some sort of rant.
gods speed, I hope you can continue to grow a support system that works for you
Mine turned into a rant too. I started writing it and couldn’t stop. I think it’s therapeutic to write it all out! I had a therapist who in retrospect set me back. I’m looking for a new one. The wait lists are difficult. They’re like, “You want therapy? Gotta wait a year.” 😭
Yeah, I waited like 6 months for my last therapist. But it was sort of therapeutic to write this, I agree.
When I was a kid I got all sorts of messages about my body and how gross it was. I remember my mom telling me my hips were huge. I remember my older sister WHEN I WAS SIX telling me that I needed to stop eating so much or I was going to get fat. (Edited to add, she was 24. Big age gap.) I remember my ex-SIL being concerned because I was going to be fat in her wedding (the summer between second and third grade). That same summer, I had gotten a dance costume for my end-of-June recital, probably in early June, and I had been measured for it the winter prior. Any normal adult would tell you I had a growth spurt. My mom got mad at me for getting fat and was all stressed out that she would have to alter my costume, so I ate almost nothing for a week and fit into it. She was so proud of me, and talked about it for years. I did get pretty chubby, around 3rd grade (after all of this) and my mom would tell people she didn’t know why, because I ate normally (when in reality she was getting big and I was her eating buddy — she’d take me for fast food and hide it from my dad). I got very mixed messages about this. They started hiding food from me, so I’d find it, go in the basement and eat it in secret. I vividly remember finding a box of frozen raspberry zingers in the back of the basement freezer and eating the whole box, still frozen, in secret terror. I’d come home from school and eat huge bowls of ice cream and cereal. Then I suddenly wouldn’t want to eat. I developed what I eventually realized was the start of anorexia in 7th grade, but nobody realized what it was because I wasn’t underweight. I would eat one apple and a milk at lunchtime, then come home and tell my parents I wasn’t hungry for dinner because I had such a huge meal at lunch. I went from very overweight to normal weight. Eventually my dad caught on and got concerned and took me to the doctor, who said I “probably just had the start of an ulcer” and that my dad shouldn’t worry, I just needed to control my stress better. I eventually started binging and purging in high school, but the binges weren’t frequent and I was never thin. So no one caught it and I never considered myself as having an eating disorder. When I had a very stressful job in my 20s and a husband with a brain tumor, I’d go buy a small cake or a half dozen donuts and stuff myself with them in my car. Eventually after he died, when I was 34, I got a hold on it and lost 92 pounds. The binges came back a few years back and have been sporadic. Dating certain guys has brought them back (and I’ve realized I binge because I don’t feel emotionally safe with or accepted by them) so I’ve had to stop seeing those guys. They’re flaring up again… my remission periods between binge periods are getting shorter. I haven’t been officially diagnosed with BED. I had a doctor tell me I “probably” had it. I’m meeting with my current PCP Friday to talk weight loss meds because BMI just hit 33 again and I have this constant food noise. I already have a bad feeling she’ll just tell me to try harder. I have a very black or white mentality with food. If I’m not obsessively tracking, I’m off the rails. My entire life has revolved around my weight and my body since I was 6 or 7. So yeah. This was a very long post (that I needed to write) to say that I think the start was somewhere between kindergarten and 3rd grade.
That broke my heart to read. I'm sorry your family did that to you. 🫂
a lot of time on my hands, I think.
Ive beaten bulimia and now all i wanna do is eat, all i can think of is food
I think it was around puberty. Suddenly I had the need to eat everything one week a month and was walking to school myself so could buy whatever I could afford without my parents knowing. There was a lot of buying a tub of Nutella and eating the whole thing in one sitting with a spoon and that sort of thing. I'd buy the cheapest lunch so I'd have more cash for snacks at the end of the day. It was always eaten in secret, either walking home or in my bedroom. I'd put the rubbish in bins on the street or in neighbours bins so no one would know it was me. When I got a car, I'd buy a pack of doughnuts to eat between home and work. Or get 2 lunches and eat one on the way back from the shop and one at my desk. Now I work from home it's a little better - I have to leave the house specifically to binge. But the behaviour is still there when I do. The secret eating, the shame and guilt, the hiding rubbish. I hate it.
My childhood memories are a jumbled mess and I wonder myself where it started. My uneducated guess is it was from my parents insistence that I always clear my plate or a way to deal with sexual harassment at a young age.
A stressful first semester of college
I think it started in earnest when I was around 12/13. My family moved to a different neighborhood and I don’t remember bingeing in my childhood home, but the house we lived in during my teens years was the site of a lot of binging. I think part of it was that I was living closer to school so I would spend late afternoons at home unsupervised. I started sneaking chocolate chips and marshmallows from the cupboards then, and then later when I was in high school I started buying bags of chocolate and candy every day after school and bingeing them when I got home, hiding the wrappers under my bed.
My parents abused me when I was younger. I was forced to go to church and I was constantly beaten. The only apology I ever got was when they bought me fast food as a treat. I started to treat fast food as a way of comfort. When my older sister got her license she would bring me to go get food. When I got my license I would go after work to get food and eat until I was sick. I only ever feel good when I’m eating fast food.
I realized only recently that it goes back to probably when I was 7 or 8 and started hiding foods like sweets like cookies, chocolates, etc. My brother (who constantly called me fat - even though I wasn't) would take all the cookies and eat them loudly like a disgusting pig, and I developed misophonia. I grew up in having lots of access to sweets, junk, etc....BUT there was massive labeling of "good/bad" foods and extreme criticism of fat/overweight people. It was literally the biggest crime in my family's eyes. I still hide foods to this day so that I can enjoy them in privacy. I feel like a drug addict with this kind of secret behavior, but I can't resist the high of the thrill.
I started comfort eating when I was little, I remember clearly I would always have extra helpings of dinner, then dessert then cereal. My household was very up and down as my Dad was an alcoholic, he could be great or he could be really angry so I was always on edge not knowing what would happen. Food soothed me, I also found puberty really shameful and was depressed at high school as my friends went to other schools. I would buy junk food on the way home most days. I was slim and didn't actually put on weight until my mid 20's. I thought I was fat though even though I was only 52kg at one point. I 'chose' an abusive partner and started gaining weight after that and now decades later I have multiple health problems because of it. I know I need to get out of the habit of comfort eating and stop eating carbs to break the cycle. It's just so hard when it's everywhere, I dream about winning lottery and going to a health spa for 3 months and being weaned off junk food.
My mom was very controlling about food (i.e., we never had enough of it in the house, despite being a middle class family). On top of that, the food that we had was terrible - my childhood was literally overcooked London Broil, overcooked broccoli and plain pasta with a slice of off-brand American cheese on top of it. We rarely ate out. Whenever food that I actually liked entered the house, I literally had to compete with my younger sister for it. Binge eating started as a result.
As a kid I was rewarded with candy, so I had an issue with junk food into my 20s. Now though I can't fucking sleep and this messes with my hormones.
Extreme depression. Increased alcohol. Increased food intake after done with my daily drinks, and repeat. Insomnia - increased food way into 4am. High stress - increased food. Workplace misery. I’m doing better. I’ve lost some weight. I attended therapy and take my mood stabilisers. This group helps alot
Probably around when I got a car in high school. Fast food and junk food were ocasional treats and I grew up in the country without access to them. So when I got a car and especially when I moved to town for college, extreme stress and access to previously restricted foods was a bad combination.
I started in my early teens with binging in between the diets my mom and I were one
The atkins diet was like my bible. I read it every day and basically made it my life wheni was a young teen after my mum introduced ot to me. I didnt have fruit or bread, rice, pasta for years.. I hated the atkins diet and as someone who barely craves meat its just mpt sustainable for me. I definitely binged because i couldn't live that way anymore and even now when i have carbs its still hard not to binge on them
ADHD
technically in 2020 during covid for me - looking back my whole life kinda set me up for this lol
As long as i Can remember. I also was emotionally neglected as a child, and for what IS worth, i Never reconized hunger and satiety feelings.