Dear Diet Culture Letter: Binge Eating is Not a Moral Failing

Dear Diet Culture, 

It’s me, Sunday. And guess what? Binge Eating is not a moral failing. 

You blame people for the inability to “portion control” and restrict their food, and you reward deprivation. You take any opportunity you have to promote binge eating and “overeating” as an indication that someone “lacks control” and it couldn’t be more false. 

In response to food restriction, humans experience a neurobiological reaction that involves a cascade of events that releases hormones, fires neurotransmitters, and induces a stress response to get humans to acquire and eat food. Human bodies are powerful and know how to adapt to famine (diets/food restriction) as best possible, albeit unsustainable long-term. Restricting food sets the stage for binge eating and no one can “diet” this bodily response away. We are primed for survival. Sorry not sorry diet culture.

Honestly, the research is very clear at this point and is reflective of what I observe in clinical practice: Restricting food leads to increased food obsessions, feeling out of control around food, and to binge eating.

Binge eating does not make someone a bad person, it makes them human. Any threat to not getting enough food leads us to eat more. This can be driven by restriction of foods/food groups both past and present, by not having access to food now or historically, by trauma, and by weight stigma. But I get why you would want to keep telling people that the answer to the binge eating is found in whatever the diet de jour is…(clears throat)…money!

You promote yourself as being the answer to the problem that YOU CREATED. Manipulation and trickery at it’s best. 

Diet Culture, I am committed to normalizing binge eating as a response to threat and as a way for human bodies to keep themselves safe. I’m so tired of you normalizing under-eating and demonizing binge eating.

It’s lame and fatphobic. It’s also not evidence-based.

Sincerely,

Sunday, aka your most passionate non-diet Dietitian Katherine who wants you to know that diet culture fuels binge eating through low energy diets and food restriction and then profits off of it by telling you that you are the problem and “out of control” when really they created the shit to begin with.