If You Didn’t Overeat Until Adulthood

Even for those who didn’t start compulsively eating until adulthood, the root causes are still in childhood.

Not everyone starts overeating as a child; many people don't start until adulthood. So what's happening there?

While it is common for people with overeating issues to have started extremely young, it is also just as common for the overeating to not have started until a person was a teenager, an adult, or even well into adulthood.

In our society most everyone suppresses emotions, so as we get older, we accumulate more and more of a backlog of suppressed emotions.

We probably haven't dealt with issues from childhood, and we are not feeling our emotions as our life goes on and we have experiences. Therefore, we have more accumulated suppression the older we get.

When you have more accumulated suppressed emotions, you need more compulsions and addictions in order to keep it all at bay. This is where eating can come in later in life, because what you had when you were younger to suppress emotions, isn't enough anymore. Maybe when you only had 20 years of emotional backlog, you didn't need food as much. But now that you have 45 years of emotional backlog, you need more suppression ("coping") mechanisms than you did.

However, even if a person doesn't start overeating until adulthood, having never experienced it prior, the question needs to be asked, "Why have I wanted to avoid feeling my emotions over the course of my life?" "Why haven't I wanted to face issues in my life?"

The desire to avoid emotions, avoid the truth and avoid facing issues is what creates overeating.

The answer to these questions will still go back to childhood.

Who taught you emotional suppression? What in your childhood created the tendency to avoid feelings?

Why, at some point, even if you didn't realize it, did you decide that avoidance was better than feeling? How did your parents treat your emotions? Did they suppress or feel their emotions in a responsible, healthy, healing way?

So the truth is, even if you are 75 years old and you didn't start overeating until you were 55 years old, the root causes of the desire to use food compulsively do indeed go back to early adolescence.

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