When Holiday Leftovers Feel Like a Threat
For many of you, this holiday week might have been really hard. Surrounded by family, arguments, familial patterns, working on staying connected, trying to enact different patterns with food, and feeling overwhelmed and dysregulated. And for others of you, this week may have included huge wins. You noticed yourself regulating your nervous system, staying connected, choosing other options besides food to connect with yourself, and you got to witness just how far you've come in your food recovery.
But today, three days after the actual holiday, it may feel like food is even more of a struggle than it was a few days ago. The experience of joy, connection, stress, exhaustion, social pressure, and emotional intensity of the day may be over, but the food is still here.
Maybe you had a plan leading up to the holiday. You had your friends on stand by via text, you had your somatic practices you've learned here or in a session, you showed up for yourself, you tried to stay connected, and so now you may feel utterly confused that you got through the holiday just fine, but want to binge on every holiday leftover food you can find.
You may find yourself circling the kitchen. Standing at the fridge. Picking through containers. Maybe telling yourself, “I was fine yesterday. Why can’t I handle it today? What’s wrong with me? Why do I lose control? Why can’t I trust myself with leftovers?”
Please know that you are not feeling the urge to binge because you're weak, lack willpower, have lost control, are addicted to sugar, are broken, hopeless, or a failure.
Feeling like you want to binge all your holiday leftovers is a message from your nervous system, your body, and your history.
First, I want to reframe that the urge to binge on leftovers doesn't have to do with the food. Even feeling fine eating the pie or stuffing or holiday cookies or casserole or whatever holiday food you ate this past week also didn't have to do with the food either.
You felt fine because of how you prepped your nervous system to not experience the food as a threat.
You perhaps gave full allowance to eat what you wanted to eat and your body received a cue of safety from that allowance that it activated your parasympathetic, rest and digest and safety and connection state. You perceive foods as safe or dangerous based on what nervous system state you're in, not necessarily because of the food (unless you have a food allergy that would actually put your body in danger).
When you consume something like sugar in the parasympathetic nervous system, your digestion is optimized, where you will utilize that sugar differently than if you ate it in a sympathetic response. This will not cause you to want to eat more and more of it. This is another example of how you aren't addicted to sugar or can't control yourself around it, but the state that you may typically go into eating something with sugar in it may be a sympathetic state that wants more and more for glucose and energy to fight or flee from danger.
From a top down perspective, the cognitive, psychological acceptance of eating holiday foods told your nervous system a different story that you are safe and that sense of safety decreased any thoughts of needing to eat more and more food. Additionally, we're in the time of year with the least amount of sunlight, which helps to stimulate the production of serotonin. If you struggle with seasonal affective disorder or just a lack of circulating serotonin, you will be more drawn to eating carbohydrates because it also helps to boost serotonin.Your body is truly brilliant in all the ways it supports you in finding homeostasis.
Anyways, you arrive at the next day after the holiday, and now your sympathetic nervous system is on high processing all the people you were around and the ways you may have felt unseen, unheard, and misunderstood. The urge to binge on holiday leftovers can have to do with what is emotionally left over from navigating internal dysregulation. You got through the day, but now your body needs to find a way to stabilize. And, when food is experienced as a threat and food has become your sole coregulator (quite a confusing experience of both safety and danger), leftovers need to be gotten rid of as fast as possible.
It feels like it is about the food.
I mean, of course it does. All you can think about is that half a pie in the fridge. It feels incessant. So eventually, you go ahead and eat with the logical sense that if you're thinking about food, this must be about food, and if you eat the food then maybe you can finally stop obsessing about the leftover cookies. But, at this point, you're not operating from the part of your brain that thinks logically. You're responding to the part of your brain that is in survival and is offering a solution to your discomfort, which is to eat. Your nervous system has moved into protection and is trying to make sure you will be alright.
It can feel like if the food disappears then the discomfort will go away. If you eat everything that is around, you can stop thinking about food. If it's gone, you won't feel anxious anymore. This is why I'm so passionate that self sabotage doesn't exist. You don't do things to actively not help yourself out. You're always doing something to try to support yourself, even if it doesn't lead to that experience long term. Food has become wired to your survival in so many ways.
So leftovers aren't about the food, but they also can hold the emotional remains of what is left over from the day before.
The conversations that didn’t feel good.
The tension in your body that you didn’t have space to digest.
The family dynamics reminding you of what it was like to grow up in that environment.
The grief.
The loneliness.
The overstimulation.
The part of you that smiled through discomfort.
The part of you that held it all together.
When the day is over, those experiences don’t just vanish.
Your nervous system wakes up the next day still holding all of these emotional experiences. You're not binge eating on leftovers. You're trying to metabolize what hasn't been emotionally processed.
So you need to shift from “What’s wrong with me?” to…
“What is my nervous system protecting me from?”
“What still feels threatening?”
“What didn’t get processed from yesterday?”
"How old do I feel today?"
"My body is protecting me."
"I don't need to understand why I want food, but it is a sign that my body doesn't feel safe."
"Of course, I'm feeling the way I do today. Yesterday was a lot."
Your body doesn't need more control or ridicule or food rules or punishment.
The deeper somatic work that is needed is to connect with yourself in the discomfort, show your body that you are safe, and update your body that food is safe. And that is work that, to be honest, is best done with a practitioner or in a group so you're held and guided through experiencing safe amounts of discomfort while not overwhelming yourself.
But, for these days after a holiday, digesting your holiday experience while not stuffing down your emotions and sensations with food, this might look like crying, shaking, dancing, singing, and journaling. Find some way to mobilize and to get into movement. If you think about binge eating, there is a lot of mobilization to it. You have to find the food, you have to reach for the food, you have to bring the food rapidly into your body again and again. You get to find ways to match the intensity in your body and give it some expression.
And please know, if you have already binged on holiday leftovers, you are not weak, you are not a failure, and this has nothing to do with who you are. Your body is doing the best it can to feel safe again and safety isn't built through shame. It is created through curiosity, compassion, and connection.
I hope this was a helpful reminder and you might take a deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth right now and remind yourself that your body is your ally.
Wishing you all a relaxing week and a safety producing and satiating rest of your day. Bye!