How Your Body Remembers The Environments Where You've Binged

With the holidays coming up, I felt like it might be supportive to discuss what happens in your body when you're around the places and people that you used to binge around, because your body remembers the environments where you've binged, and you might be in these environments and around these people soon. 

I'm currently in the house that I grew up in. We moved into this house when I was in 3rd grade. There is a room that we call the den. It is at the opposite end of the house from where all the bedrooms are and so it always felt like this private space to hang out. This is the room where countless binges happened. This is the room where I stayed up late with friends eating and laughing and watching movies. This is the room where I would eat an entire carton of ice cream when I had a broken heart. This is the room where I watched television while I ate microwaved Weight Watchers meals after skipping lunch that day. This is the room where I would hang out when I was sick drinking ginger ale and eating toast. So many food behaviors happened in this room. 

While I have so much internal relaxation and peace being here right now, it wasn't always this way. Whenever I would return from a trip, this was the room where I would eat entire bags of Doritos. Whenever I came home from college, this was the room I would binge on takeout from my favorite restaurants. Your body remembers how you feel in specific environments and what you have utilized as a coping strategy. 

It wasn't really ever about the food, but all the memories of what had happened in this house.

Food was a way to dissociate and numb out or get myself out of collapse to mobilize. Eating beyond what my body nutritionally needed was an attempt at short term safety. And because this happened again and again and again, this was a well worn internal path of: be in this environment, feel this specific way, and do these food behaviors. 

So what changed? As you can imagine, it was somatics and the practice of embodiment that began to change these food behaviors. When I started to learn yoga and meditation, I practiced not leaving my body when I went home. When I worked with a somatic therapist, I started to practice noticing how different foods, people, and conversations felt when I was in this environment. Over and over again, I brought my attention back to my body and what it needed now and not based on conditioning or habit. Slowly, through repetition, I could be in this environment simply as myself and not in a survival state. 

Your binge eating can often happen in the same environments with the same foods.

Your brain and nervous system have marked every pattern, every occurrence, and every feeling you've had in these rooms. It has created a go to strategy for your survival and that is to eat. 

When you’re in environments, around people, smell certain scents, hear specific sounds, or notice what time of day it is, your body can time travel and be transported to a past moment that didn’t feel safe. The body primes itself to survive and protect. Binge eating occurred in the past to anchor yourself or dissociate. Your body remembers this and binge eating returns as a familiar strategy to create safety.

Going to the places where you have binged can remind you not only of the binge but the events that precipitated the binge. Your somatic memories are triggered, your amygdala turns on and sends out an alarm, stress hormones flood your body, your prefrontal cortex​, where you engage in rational thought, turns off, and you enter into a survival state.​ Your sympathetic nervous system is activated and you will feel the urge to fight, flee, freeze, or flop and food helps you to engage in these nervous system responses. 

Your food behaviors don’t make rational sense because you’re reacting, not responding.​ 

Your body and brain don’t know that you are not in that past moment where you felt unsafe. You’re reacting as if you were in that exact moment where you heard fighting, where you were hiding away in your room, where no one was checking in on you for hours, where you felt discomfort and there was no coregulation.

Certain environments hold implicit memories.​ It’s the kitchen where conflict happened. It’s a bedroom where you used to hide.​ It’s the car that was your only safe space.​ It’s a home where you felt ignored and misunderstood.​ Your body feels that history, even if your mind is not actively recalling it.

The time of day can also activate a trauma response.​ If the arguing started at 3:00 pm when a parent got home, or something always happened at 8:00 pm, or weekends when you were regularly left alone, your body associates these times of the day with danger. Your answer back then was to eat and it becomes the answer again now.

Here's an example of how this plays out. Let's say you grew up in a household where there was fighting every night at 9:00 pm. You hated the sound of the voices and the discomfort of not knowing what was going on or what was going to happen. So, you started to go to the kitchen at about 8:30 pm and grab a snack every night and go hide in your bedroom or your bathroom. 

9:00 pm rolls around and you've got headphones on listening to music while you hide under your covers eating or you're in the bathtub with the water running, drowning out the noise and having your snack. This starts to create some more ease and relaxation within the chaos. So you do it again and again and again. Now you find yourself eating, regardless of whether you need it or not, every night in the same environment at 8:30 pm. 

You get out of that house, you go off to college, or out into the world. Now, even though you are no longer living in that home anymore, every night when 8:30 pm hits, you feel this overwhelming urge to eat and go hide out in your room. You're confused as to why you keep doing this. You're not at home anymore, so why are you still reaching for food at 8:30 pm? 

Your physical body may now be in a different space, but your nervous system and your brain don't know that you're not living in that home, waiting to protect yourself from the discomfort of that environment. Additionally, you've repeated this behavior so many times, your body is now in automatic pilot mode or cruise control where it is doing what is comfortable and familiar, which does facilitate some short term safety. 

This is why you can't talk yourself out of the binge. This is why you can't use rationalization or logic. 

You miss what the body is trying to say when the “goal” is to stop the binge eating. If you keep focusing on the food behaviors, you miss attuning to what your body actually needs. Your body is sending you these food impulses because it doesn’t feel safe, and it doesn’t know that it is not living in that past experience anymore.

Your body needs support in orienting to the present. If your body knows it is safe, it won’t need to ask for food when you’re not physically hungry, as there won’t be anything to run from, numb out to, or change. Your body needs to feel the safety of where your body exists right now.

Which, let's be real, this is sometimes hard to do if you’re still in an environment that doesn’t guide you to connect with internal and external safety. I mean, look at the world right now and the increase in weight stigma. It can feel difficult to ever feel safe. So when I talk about creating more safety, that can be a unique journey for you that will look different when your cues of threat are potentially much higher from day to day. 

That being said, all of this can be updated, and your binge trauma response does not have to be the pattern you are in forever. 

While this is a somatic process, a somatic practice you can start to explore today is to orient yourself to the present. Your brain and nervous system are going to go to the past so fast because they are doing what they're meant to do when they sense you are in a potentially dangerous environment.

You will need to support your body in noticing what is actually happening right now. 

This can be done by describing your environment and what you see. You can go through your senses to notice what it is like to be in this room at this moment (not what you remember it is like to be in that room). Name what you feel like in this room right now and not how you expect yourself to feel in this room. The work is to show your body that you are not re-living the past. This moment in this room is entirely different than what it has been. 

You will be creating new memories in the spaces you used to binge in so that your nervous system and brain slowly learn that they don't need to activate your internal sirens that something is horribly wrong. An increase in safe embodiment is what can decrease food protective behaviors. 

As you update your body's memory that you can have new experiences in the same space that you once engaged in your food coping mechanisms, you may also feel compassion or grief or sadness or anger for the younger you that ever had to rely on food for safety. A piece of food recovery is sometimes feeling what was never felt in the past and realizing that you have way more capacity to feel it and move through it now. 

While I was doing sessions this past week in the same space I used to binge in, I thought, "My gosh, I'm literally taking sessions supporting others in their food patterns in the same room that I once was stuck in the binge restrict cycle."

It was kind of a profound moment to feel into just how far I've come and how much I truly believe and have experienced that full recovery is possible. 

You're not stuck. Your body is simply playing an old tape over and over again because it knows what to expect, what it is going to hear, and how it is going to feel. 

You can put in a new tape, but that will also mean you will experience some discomfort because your body needs to get used to this new input. 

It isn't time that will change this. It is repeated exposure to what is different to experience that, while this is uncomfortable, you are not in danger, and you can navigate this discomfort way more than you were able to in the past. 

If now wasn't the best time to go through the Somatic Eating® Program, I'm putting my Somatic Eating® Intensive on sale for 30% off until Tuesday, December 2nd.

In the intensive, you receive a 2.5 hour class that includes the groundwork resources of Somatic Eating®, a Somatic Eating® experience to practice your new skills, and a week of Voxer support with me. Voxer is a walkie talkie app where you can send me voice messages and I will respond back to any questions you have for a full 7 days. At $251 that is only $36 a day for the 1:1 support, plus you get the 2.5 hour class. 

If you want to get started now, the coupon code is SEI30 and you can purchase the intensive by going to stephaniemara.com/learn or click the link HERE to go directly to the check out page. If you have any questions, email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime!