"Overeating often serves as a reliable way to manage intolerable feelings when we never learned how to simply be with discomfort. The food isn't the problem. It's the solution to a problem we haven't named yet."
If this resonates with you, what follows may help you see something about yourself.
Seeker
I know exactly what I’m doing when I overeat. I’m not hungry. I don’t even enjoy it past the first few bites. But I keep going back to the kitchen, keep ordering more food, keep eating past full. It’s like I’m trying to stuff something down or fill something up, but I have no idea what.
Companion
Yeah, I know that kitchen loop. That automatic walk to the fridge when you’re not even hungry. When does it usually hit you?
Seeker
Evenings mostly. After work. Weekends when I don’t have plans. Actually… it’s whenever I stop moving. Whenever there’s quiet.
Companion
The quiet. Say more about that.
Seeker
I don’t know. It’s just… when everything stops, when there’s nothing I have to do next, it’s like this feeling rises up. Not quite anxiety. More like… emptiness? But an unbearable kind. Like I’ll disappear if I don’t fill it with something.
Companion
Unbearable emptiness. That’s a precise way to put it. What makes it unbearable?
Seeker
I can’t explain it. It’s like staring into a void. Like if I don’t act immediately, something terrible will happen. But nothing ever happens. I just eat instead.
Companion
So the eating works. In a way. It stops you from having to find out what happens if you stay in that emptiness.
Seeker
God. Yeah. I never thought of it like that. I’m not even solving anything, I’m just preventing myself from experiencing whatever that is.
Companion
What do you imagine would happen if you just sat there with it? Didn’t go to the kitchen?
Seeker
I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe I’d just feel horrible. Maybe I’d realize something I don’t want to know.
Companion
That last part caught my attention. What might you realize?
Seeker
I don’t know. That I’m… that there’s nothing there? That I’m just empty? That sounds dramatic but it’s what it feels like. Like I’ll discover I’m hollow.
Companion
Hollow. Like there should be something there that isn’t.
Seeker
Yes. Exactly. And the food… it’s like trying to prove there’s substance. Mass. Something real and solid.
Companion
I’ve felt versions of that. That panic about being insubstantial. Or falling apart. But here’s what strikes me: You’re so quick to fill that space, you never get to find out what it’s actually for. What if the emptiness isn’t hollow? What if it’s just simply space?
Seeker
Space for what?
Companion
I don’t know. That’s what I’m curious about. But you’d have to sit with it unfilled to find out.
Seeker
That’s terrifying. The idea of just sitting there. Letting it be empty. Not doing anything about it.
Companion
Yes, it is terrifying. The eating makes complete sense when the alternative feels like disappearing.
Seeker
But I’m not actually disappearing, am I? I’m just afraid I will. And I eat to avoid finding out that I won’t.
Companion
Or to avoid finding out what that space is actually asking for. Because I doubt it’s asking for food.
Seeker
I doubt that too. The food just shuts it up for a while. But it always comes back. The emptiness always comes back.
Companion
Because maybe it’s supposed to be there. Maybe it’s not pathological. Maybe it’s a space that has a purpose, and you just haven’t learned how to be with it yet.
Seeker
Fuck. I’ve been treating it like an emergency when maybe it’s just what happens when you stop. When you’re quiet. When there’s room for whatever needs room.
Companion
And you won’t know what needs that room until you stop filling it immediately.
Seeker
Yeah. Yeah, I get it. I just I don’t know if I can do it. Be with it, I mean. Without the food.
Companion
You might not be able to right away. That’s a lot of years of using food to regulate something that feels like an emergency. But now at least you know what you’re actually doing. That’s not nothing.
Seeker
No. It’s not nothing. It’s fucking uncomfortable is what it is. Knowing that I’m avoiding something. Knowing that the eating is just postponing whatever that emptiness wants to show me.
Companion
Yes. It’s really uncomfortable to see it clearly.
Seeker
Yes.
What would happen if you treated emptiness as information rather than emergency?
If you want to sit with this question, SelfChatter's journal is built for exactly this kind of inner work.