Episode 32: Emotional Eating, Bingeing & the Search for Something Food Could Never Fix

In this episode, I share a deeply personal story about emotional eating, bingeing, loneliness, shame, and the nervous system patterns underneath it all.

I take you back to my late 20s, living alone in Melbourne during a cold winter while working in a high stress banking environment that left me emotionally exhausted and completely dysregulated by the end of the day.

What looked like “food issues” on the surface was never really about the food.

It was the supermarket trips.
 The chocolate aisle.
 The searching.
 The shame.
 The rules.
 The dissociation.
 The feeling of trying to scratch an itch that food could never actually reach.

This episode explores:
 • emotional eating and binge eating from the inside
 • the nervous system patterns underneath compulsive eating
 • shame, secrecy, and food obsession
 • emotional hunger vs physical hunger
 • why control and discipline don’t heal emotional eating
 • loneliness, overwhelm, and nervous system dysregulation
 • the hidden emotional experience so many women are silently living with

If you’ve ever found yourself eating in secret, driving from store to store, promising yourself “this is the last time,” or feeling like food temporarily numbs something you can’t explain, I think this episode will make you feel deeply seen.

You are not broken.
 And this was never just about willpower.

The waitlist for Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is now open. Women who join before launch will receive founding member pricing.

Join the waitlist here:
 Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle Waitlist

Disclaimer

This episode contains discussions around emotional eating, binge eating, body image, shame, and disordered eating behaviours. Please listen with care and use your own discretion if these topics feel activating for you. This podcast is educational in nature and is not a substitute for medical, psychological, or therapeutic support.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Self-Led Woman. This is a podcast about emotional eating, the experiences that shape our relationships with food, and the path back to self-leadership. These conversations go beneath behaviour, helped with deep respect for the wisdom of the body and the ways it learned to cope, adapt, and survive. And when we can peel back those layers and meet the parts of ourselves that need care, we begin to see that food was never the problem and we can return to who we really are. I'm your host, Megan Darnell. Let's dive right in. Before we get into today's episode, if you've been listening for a while and you're ready to go deeper, I have a course coming. It's called Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle. And it's the first thing I've created that takes you through the actual psychology of why you eat the way you do. Not the food, but the parts of you underneath it. To be the first to know when doors open and get founding member pricing. The link to join the wait list is in the show notes. Okay, let's get into it. So today I want to tell you a story. In my late 20s, I was living alone in Melbourne. And if you know Melbourne Winters, you know this specific kind of gray. It feels heavy and flat. It just seems to feel like it goes on forever. And it's the kind of cold that doesn't just get into your bones, it gets into your mood if you're anything like me. And in a way that things just feel a little bit harder and a little bit heavier than they probably should. And I'm someone who has never done well in the cold. So already the season alone just does something to me. But it's more than the cold itself. So I was living on my own, which on the surface sounds fine. I had my independence and my space and my routine, and there was a part of me that really valued that. Like I loved living on my own, and I always look back on that time of my life very fondly. But there's another part of the story here, and I didn't have language for this at the time, which is that living alone when you're already someone who struggles to feel at ease in your body, it amplifies everything. There's no one to soften or co-regulate with at the end of the day. Now I'm also working in a bank. But here's the thing: when you're a human being working in a bank, people project that hate directly onto you, and you become the target for everything that they're carrying that day. And I'm doing this for eight hours a day. So for some people, you can't you can just shake that off. You can go home, you can decompress, you're fine. I am not one of those people. I am highly sensitive, I'm introverted. For those of you that follow human design, I'm in I'm a reflector. And if you're not familiar, in human design, reflectors make up about 1% of the population. And we're the only energy type that has all nine of our energy centers completely open. What that means is that I'm constantly feeling the energy of my surroundings, environments, and people around me. And this isn't conscious or a choice, I'm just literally feeling everything in the room. I'm taking it in and I'm sampling it. So I spend a whole day in a branch where people are anxious, entitled, frustrated, and sometimes outright hostile. And I'm a sponge. And I've absorbed every bit of it. And by the time I walk out of the building, I'm carrying a day's worth of energy that isn't even mine. And I haven't yet figured out how to set boundaries at this point or how to put that down. So I get in my car, and then there's something that happens, there's a switch that kind of flicks, if I could describe it that way. And I don't notice it at first, like there's no cravings for food exactly, but there's a restlessness or an irritation, this kind of feeling underneath my skin. And I can't sit in the feeling, it's just too irritating, it's too much. I need to get out of it. And in my brain, like I've learned over the years that this concept that food can temporarily interrupt this feeling. So I'm starting to think, well, what's going to scratch the edge? What will give me the hit that I need so I can feel better? So I drive down the road and then I pull into Nando's, and I want the chicken wrap and chips. I want all of it. But there's already this running shame underneath everything I do every time I eat. I'm always worried about what other people are going to think of me. So there's this low-level monitor tracking about what I'm consuming and how it looks at all times. And so I just order the chicken wrap. The sensible version. The version that won't make me feel bad about myself. And I drive away from Nando's eating the wrap as I'm driving, but the itch hasn't been scratched. Of course it hasn't. It's never going to be scratched by food, but I don't know this yet. So then I go to the next supermarket along the road on the way back to my house, and I head down the chocolate aisle. And if you've ever been in this state, you'll know exactly what I'm describing. You're not shopping, you're searching, and there's this mix of desperation and focus and low-grade shame. And here you are scanning every single thing on the shelf for the right thing, the very specific right thing, the precise thing that is going to scratch the itch to give you the relief and make this feeling stop. So I'm picking things up and I'm looking at the right labels and I'm putting them back down again. And then I walk a little bit further up and I pick something else up and I read the label and I put it back down again. And then I pick something else up and then I might carry it down the aisle with me, and then I might put it back, and then I might pick something else up and then I carry it around the supermarket, and then I think I'm gonna go to the health food section. Maybe there's something there, maybe something quote unquote good that can somehow scratch the ears, can somehow fill this hole. So I go to the health food aisle again, picking things up, reading the labels, putting them down, and then I walk back to the chocolate aisle and put that down, and then I go down the bread aisle, and then I come back and I end up picking something up again. Eventually I pick up a Kit Kat, I go to the checkout and just get one thing because of one of the rules. There are so many rules, by the way, but it's that no one can see what I'm doing. The shame of the binge means it has to be invisible, it has to look normal. So one item at each place. That's manageable, that looks fine. And if you've been in the chocolate aisle searching for something in the way I'm describing, if you do this on a weeknight, generally after about I don't know, 8:30. You walk down the chocolate aisle, and I you will see, I've watched this in real time. Many women doing the exact same thing, and if you look at their faces, they all have the same look on their faces. This searching for something that's going to scratch the itch. It's very specific, but it's quite phenomenal to observe. So now I get back in my car with my Kit Kat and I eat it really quickly, urgently, like I've been waiting for it. And for maybe a second, just one second, I feel a little bit of relief, but then it's gone, and the feeling's still there. And now this is added weight of like that did nothing. I ate that for nothing, and I still feel like this. So I start thinking next about the petrol station down the road, and this is where it stopped feeling like a craving, and it starts to feel like something else entirely, like there's something that has taken over me, and I'm there driving, going into shops, buying things, but I'm not there. It's kind of like I've left my body in a way. It's like I'm there, but I'm on autopilot. So I'm planning my route. I'm thinking, okay, there's a servo down the road next. Then there's that IGA on the corner further along. Then there's the big Woolworths near my house. And I'm mapping out stops like I'm planning a job. And there's, you know, one thing at each place. Keep it contained, keep it hidden, and don't let anyone see the whole picture. And I can't stop. So I pull into the petrol station next, I go in, I buy one thing, a protein bar, something that I can justify that it's better, a better choice. And I eat it in the car before I've even left the car park. And it doesn't even touch the irritation, the itch, the thing I'm trying to scratch. It doesn't come close because the thing I'm trying to fill isn't my stomach, it's something else entirely. And I don't have language for this yet, but I keep driving. And eventually I end up at another supermarket, but this time I've got a strategy. Okay, I'll buy actual groceries, proper things, like bread and something for dinner, and then something for breakfast, things that look intentional, maybe some vegetables, things that make this look like a normal shopping trip and not what it actually is. And tucked in amongst these normal things are other things as chips and chocolate, and maybe a thing from the bakery I grabbed on the way through. Because the shame has to be managed at every step, even here. And then I drive home, but I won't let myself eat in the car. Not now, not when there's more coming, and I can wait and eat properly in private. So I get inside and I eat everything, every single thing I bought. Quickly, almost frantically, and like I've been holding my breath all afternoon, and I can finally just take an exhale. And when I'm done, I'm sitting there in the quiet of my apartment in a Melbourne winter alone, and nothing feels different. The feeling is still there, the heaviness, and that I don't want to be here like this that started all of this hours ago. And none of it did what it needed to do, and it never does. And now there's a layer of shame laid on top of that for the binge. And then the inner critic comes in, and I'm like, what's wrong with me? Why can't I just stop this? Why am I so out of control? Why does this keep happening? Why do I still want more? I'm so full, and I still want to keep eating. And here's what I know now that I didn't know back then. There was nothing wrong with me. I wasn't weak or I wasn't someone with a food problem. I was someone with an unmet need who found the only tool that she had to try and meet it. And the food was never the point. It was never about hunger, it was never even really about the food. The food was just something I could do, something I could reach for when the feeling became too much, and a way to interrupt the noise or the discomfort, and to give my nervous system something to focus on that wasn't the weight of everything I absorbed that day, or that week, or that month, or that year. So, like cold weather alone wasn't the trigger, or living alone wasn't the trigger, or the difficult clients, or the drive home. None of that was the trigger. They were just amplifiers for what was going on underneath, and they made it harder to sit with what was already there, way harder. Which was a body that didn't feel safe being still, and a nervous system that had been running all day and had no way to come down. In a way that I never let myself name. And not necessarily lonely for people, but lonely for softness, for ease, for somewhere to put all of this. And because I didn't have that, the food became the substitute because it was there, it was reliable. And then I would counteract this with this approach of trying to discipline or control, but that never ever touched it, it never even come close. And all of those years I think about now, where I was just trying to be more controlled and more strict with myself, all that did was just add more shame to an already shame-saturated pattern, and it made me better at hiding it, but it didn't make me stop because you can't willpow your way out of a wound. You can't calorie count your way out of to feeling safe in your body, it just is not going to happen. This is why I do the work I do, and this is why I talk about this. It's like you can't just keep adding another plan or adding another rule on top of things. You have to hear what's underneath, and you've got to go deep to go there. This pattern didn't start at the supermarket or the chocolate aisle, it started way earlier than that, where being alone with myself felt unbearable. I'd learned without anyone teaching me in words that feelings need to be managed and controlled rather than felt. I'd be I'd learned that my needs were too much and that the hunger underneath, the hunger, the emotional hunger wasn't safe to acknowledge. That's what I was driving away from. And no Kit Kat was ever going to fix that. So if you're listening to this and recognizing something inner in yourself, I think some of you really will. I want you to hear me when I say there's nothing wrong with you, and you are not someone who lacks willpower or discipline or eating the right things, quote unquote, right things. You're someone who's trying to survive a feeling or trying to suppress it or control it or make it go away, and someone who learned a very human coping strategy that made sense at some point and has long since stopped serving you. And the way through it isn't to get stricter or more controlled with yourself, it's to get softer. What I mean by that is to get curious, to start asking, like, why, not like why can't I stop eating, but what is the eating trying to do for me? What does my body need right now? What do I need right now? What am I actually hungry for? This is exactly the thing that I teach around emotional eating inside my course, breaking the emotional eating cycle. It's a self-paced course that's coming soon. If this episode is landing for you, or if you've heard yourself in this story, I really want you to get on the wait list because the women who join before it launches will get founding member pricing. And the thing I'm most excited about is every week, once this course is live, I'm dedicating a section of this podcast to answering questions from people inside it. So if you're enrolled, you can submit your question and it gets answered here on the podcast. You get access to me, and your question helps every other woman listening at the same time. I genuinely love this model and I can't wait to bring it to life. So the wait list link is in the show notes, and if this resonates, please go add your name and email, and that's all you have to do for now. So thank you for being here and being a part of this conversation. No, this podcast is for education and reflection only. It is not a substitute for therapy or healthcare. If this episode brought things up for you and you need support, please reach out to a trained therapy practitioner or health professional in your area. Thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated, please follow or subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, or share it with someone who might benefit from hearing it. You can also connect with me on Instagram at Megan Darnell Therapy. If you share the episode or want to let me know what landed for you, you're always welcome to message or tag me. I love hearing from you guys. Until next time, I'm Megan Darnell, and this is the Self Led Woman.