It Was Never the Food

I’ve been dealing with overeating and binge eating for something like thirty years. I’m not going to write much about how it started — that’s more personal than I want to put here — but I will say that for most of that time I was solving the wrong problem.

For decades I thought the problem was my weight, and that the fix was some combination of the right diet and enough willpower. I have tried a lot of diets. I’ll write about them in their own posts, because each one failed in a way that taught me something. But they all shared one assumption, and so did I: that there was a good, enjoyable thing I needed to hold myself back from, and that holding myself back was the whole game.

That assumption is wrong. And realizing it’s wrong is the only reason I’ve stopped fighting.

The problem isn’t the food

Here’s the reframe that changed everything for me: my problem is not food, and it’s not even really overeating. It’s reward eating — and reward eating is a behavior, not a food.

Let me be specific about what I mean, because the specificity is the whole point.

Reward eating, for me, is eating with my attention on the hit — the little hit of something pleasurable each bite gives — rather than on whether I’m actually hungry. And a huge part of it is speed. Each bite lands a small hit. If I take the next bite before that hit fades, it stacks a little higher. So I eat faster, chasing the next one before the last one is gone.

Notice what’s not in that description: any particular food.

This matters because every program I tried eventually drew a line between “good” foods and “bad” foods, and told me to stay on the good side of the line. But I can reward-eat just fine on “good” food. I can stack hits on something perfectly wholesome. The line was drawn in the wrong place. The problem was never the ingredient. It was the way I was eating it.

That said, I don’t want to pretend all foods are equal here, because they’re not. Some foods are highly palatable, and the reward hit from them comes on stronger and faster. But that doesn’t make them foods to avoid — it makes them foods to be more careful with. They’re not on the wrong side of a line; they just pull harder on the trigger, so the behavior is easier to slip into. Knowing which foods do that to me is useful. Treating them as forbidden is the old mistake in a new outfit.

The craving is the hangover

The second piece took me even longer to see, and it’s the one that took the fight out of this.

I always assumed the craving — that loud, insistent pull toward eating when I’m not really hungry — was just there, a permanent fact of my wiring that I had to white-knuckle my way past. It isn’t. As far as I can tell, the craving is caused by the last time I reward-ate.

The stacking behavior doesn’t just feel good in the moment. It leaves something behind: a withdrawal. After a session of reward eating I get either a continuing “fake hunger,” or a strong drive at the next meal to do it again — to get the relief of one more round. That drive is the craving. It’s not hunger. It’s the hangover from the last time.

Which means the craving isn’t something I have to endure forever. When I don’t reward-eat, the craving doesn’t get more powerful and finally break me. It fizzles out. The thing I was bracing against was being manufactured by the very behavior I thought I needed willpower to resist.

There’s an analogy I picked up — from Allen Carr, whose book I found genuinely useful and also genuinely badly written, but that’s a post for another day — about wearing shoes that are too tight. Yes, it’s a relief to take them off. But the answer isn’t to keep wearing them so you can periodically enjoy taking them off. The answer is to stop wearing them. The relief you were chasing was relief from a problem you were creating.

Why this isn’t willpower

Put those two pieces together and you get the thing that finally made this sustainable: I’m not holding myself back from something genuinely good.

The fast, hit-stacking eating is what creates the craving and the withdrawal in the first place. So declining it isn’t a sacrifice. It’s not me, jaw clenched, resisting a pleasure. It’s me stepping out of a loop that was generating the suffering I kept trying to medicate with more of the loop.

That’s why it doesn’t feel like willpower. Willpower is what you need when you’re saying no to something you want. I’m not saying no to something I want. I’m declining to start the machine that makes me want it.

The other half: eating from hunger

Stepping out of the loop tells me what to stop doing. It doesn’t tell me what to do instead. The answer to that is almost embarrassingly old-fashioned: eat from hunger.

Here’s the signal I’ve learned to watch for. The strongest sense of “enough” I have now isn’t fullness, exactly — it’s that the hunger feeling itself subsides. That’s the thing I’m checking for, bite to bite: is this still answering hunger? When the hunger quiets, I’m done, and I don’t have to argue with myself about it.

But that question has a precondition that took me a while to notice: it only works if I was hungry to begin with. If I sit down to eat when I’m not actually hungry, there’s no meaningful question to ask with each bite. There’s nothing for the food to answer. That’s most of what reward eating is — eating when the honest answer to “am I hungry?” is no.

Finding hunger again

The hardest moment is the first meal or two after a stretch of reward eating, because the hunger signal is buried. You genuinely can’t feel it clearly, so “eat from hunger” sounds like useless advice.

What’s worked for me is small and concrete:

• Pick something I can easily eat a small amount of.
• Take a bite or two.
• Then actually stop and check: am I still hungry?
• If, after one or two bites, I realize I’m not hungry at all — I stop. That’s the whole move.

It feels almost too simple, and the first time it’s genuinely hard to read the signal. But after a few meals of eating this way, hunger seems to come back. The signal re-calibrates. It was never gone; it was just drowned out.

Where I actually am

I want to be honest about something, because I’ve read too many of these stories that present a tidy before-and-after and I’ve never once believed them.

I’m not writing this from the finish line. I’m fairly early in living this way — I started, of all places, on a road trip surrounded by genuinely awful food choices. I don’t yet know how this holds up over months and years.

But here’s why I’m cautiously hopeful in a way I never was with any diet: every previous approach had failure built into it, because it ran on willpower, and willpower runs out. The question was always when I’d fall, not whether. This is the first framing where falling doesn’t feel inevitable — not because I’m being stronger, but because there’s no sustained effort to run out of. I’m not holding a door shut. I just stopped walking through it.

I’ll write more — about the diets, the medications, a surprising gut-health discovery, and the mindfulness work that all of this quietly depends on. But this is the piece I’d have wanted thirty years ago, so it goes first.