Let me be frank. If you struggle with binge eating, your body is not malfunctioning. You are not weak, undisciplined, or “bad with food.” Understanding the connection between trauma and binge eating reduces guilt and shame and opens the door to more compassionate and genuine recovery.

What Is Trauma?

What is happening — more often than not — is driven by unprocessed trauma. While the word trauma can feel dramatic, many of us have experienced it. Defined as any experience that was too fast, too much, or too soon for the nervous system to process, it leaves survivors overwhelmed and unable to cope. Many of us think of shock trauma, like war or motor vehicle collisions, when we hear the word. But trauma is often developmental or attachment-based, and can occur even if we grew up in otherwise happy and loving homes if our parents didn’t know how to support us emotionally.

Being told to override your hunger, minimize your emotions, perform under pressure, or “be good” or “perfect” can all lead to trauma. Similarly, growing up in a larger body that was scrutinized since birth can lead to trauma. And living in a culture and/or family system that prioritizes thinness and beauty over all else can also lead to trauma.

How Trauma Happens

Without adequate support, this overload prevents your system from integrating the event or situation, leading to psychic fragmentation. In other words, your system has no way of knowing that the threat has passed. Trauma can lead to lasting physical, emotional, and psychological distress. Consequently, binge eating can become a way of managing. It’s not just binge eating either; all forms of disordered eating can be used this way. For many people, binge eating and trauma are deeply intertwined, even if the trauma isn’t immediately obvious.

In other words, trauma isn’t the event itself. Instead, it’s the residual activation, or stress residue, that never resolved. I liken it to a volcano: there’s the volcano itself (“the event”), and then there’s the lava. Trauma, using this analogy, is the lava. When we talk about binge eating and trauma, we’re talking about what happens when a nervous system has learned, very brilliantly, how to survive.

The Connection Between Binge Eating and Trauma

Most nutrition advice assumes that the person receiving it is calm, regulated, and embodied. This is true even of Intuitive Eating. Eat when you’re hungry! Stop when you’re full! Eat in moderation! Listen to your body! Cute idea, but deeply unhelpful if your nervous system has been stuck living in a low-grade stress response for years. If you’re a survivor of complex trauma, you may have an even more difficult time following traditional nutrition advice.

Why is this? Trauma survivors are often conditioned by their early experiences to prioritize the needs of others above their own. It was a way of maintaining relationships and safety early on. Or perhaps you can follow the advice for a while, wanting to be liked by the practitioner and a “good student,” but end up unable to put it into practice in the long term.

The nervous system changes on a cellular level due to trauma, including chronic stress, emotional neglect, medical trauma, diet culture, or growing up without emotional safety. It shifts the body into patterns of hypervigilance, fawning, freeze, and shutdown, or an oscillation between two or more of these survival states. Trauma survivors spend very little time experiencing rest, relaxation, connection, calm, and genuine safety. In these survival states, food can become something other than a source of nourishment or pleasure, and often takes on many different meanings.

Food and Meaning

In the case of binge eating, food can become a threat. The fear of weight gain and body changes, of eating “imperfectly,” or of making the “wrong choice” can all cause distress. Still, paradoxically, it can also become soothing, grounding, numbing, a way back into the body, a way to leave the body, a friend, a frenemy, a surrogate parent, and so much more. Binge eating, dear reader, is not a character flaw or moral failing.

It is a regulation strategy. While it isn’t ultimately sustainable, it is entirely understandable. And because it’s been so helpful for so many years, it’s always been there for you —many people feel ambivalent about changing it.

Why Binge Eating Often Is a Trauma Response

Here’s the part that tends to blow people’s minds (and bring a lot of relief):

If your system is stuck in high sympathetic activation — think anxiety, urgency, panic, overwhelm, racing thoughts — eating can slow things down. It can create a sense of containment. A full stomach literally presses against the vagus nerve, which can be calming. Meanwhile, if your system is frozen or shut down, numb, flat, disconnected, binge eating can stimulate sensation and bring you back online (caffeinated and effervescent beverages tend to operate similarly).

So, if you were to ask me, “Why do I binge even when I’m not hungry?” The answer is often because your body is trying to manage something other than hunger. Dieting or restricting food might seem like the answer, but food only addresses food-related problems. Binge eating is about the food in that we need a different relationship with it as part of binge eating recovery. Still, it’s also not about the food at all but rather about the emotions and sensations underneath. This is also why shame doesn’t work, and why white-knuckling your way through urges tends to backfire.

Why Diet Culture Worsens Trauma-Related Binge Eating

If you’re a trauma survivor struggling with emotional eating, binge eating, or chronic dieting cycles, it makes so much sense. Your system is seeking safety, and diet culture can offer some semblance of control. Diets often promise, however covertly, that if your food and your body “look right,” you’ll be okay… and find lasting romantic love, an incredible friend group, your dream job, everlasting energy, fantastic health and mobility, and unicorns and rainbows along the way.

For someone with a trauma history, common food rules don’t only offer a way to eat. Rules like “don’t eat after 7 pm,” “avoid sugar,” and “earn your food” become a means of managing uncomfortable or threatening emotions or sensations. Trauma survivors can also be more sensitive to sensational nutrition reporting or lines that sound logistical but are anything but.

Restriction, even subtle restriction under the guise of “wellness,” often amplifies binge eating because it adds more stress to an already overloaded nervous system. Food deprivation, whether physical or emotional, also drives binge eating. When binge eating happens, the shame cycle kicks in: What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I stop? But your body is responding exactly as it was trained to: to find safety in the face of threat.

A Trauma-Informed Approach for Binge and Emotional Eating

This is where trauma-informed nutrition — and specifically somatic work — changes the entire conversation. Rather than asking, How do I stop binge eating? How do I control myself around food? I might ask one of the following questions: What state is your nervous system in? What does your body need before we talk about food? How can we increase safety rather than perpetuate self-surveillance and hypervigilance? This isn’t about ignoring nutrition, but about sequencing our work correctly (e.g. regulation first and food second).

How Somatic Experiencing Helps Binge Eating and Trauma

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-based trauma approach developed by Dr. Peter Levine that focuses on sensation (internal content) rather than stories (external content). We’re less interested in why you binge, although this matters, and more curious about what’s happening at the level of your body right before it happens.

In somatic nutrition work, we might explore where you feel activation in your body before a binge, how to pause and change the story when you feel the impulse to binge, what sensations or other information show up when you try to stop, and what happens if we were to slow things down, even just a little.

Instead of focusing on “not binge eating” or symptom reduction, we build nervous system capacity, interoceptive awareness (the ability to feel internal cues), and more choice and agency rather than urgency and compliance. As the nervous system becomes more regulated, binge eating often becomes less necessary because your body has more options. This isn’t about fixing or eliminating, but about adding what your system was never given.

Emotional Eating Isn’t the Enemy Either

While emotional eating is often pathologized, eating for emotional reasons is not inherently a problem. Eating, I would argue, is usually emotional. Food preferences are emotional. Birthday cake is emotional. Celebrating a career promotion or wedding over a delicious meal is emotional. The issue isn’t that food offers comfort and excitement, but when food becomes the only accessible form of comfort and prevents us from processing our emotional experiences in healthy ways.

A trauma-informed, somatic approach to nutrition doesn’t eliminate emotional eating. Instead, the goal is to “widen the menu” by offering more ways to feel safe and regulated, and to provide choice in how you choose to cope. You might decide to order pizza on a Friday night because it sounds so good, or journal instead of eating when under stress. It’s not about choosing the “right” strategy, but about leaning into what makes sense for you and what truly helps.

Healing Binge Eating Is About Adding Safety, Not Control

If you take one thing from this, let it be this: Binge eating and trauma are connected not because you’re broken, but because your body is working brilliantly at taking care of you in the ways it knows how. Healing doesn’t come from more rules, more tracking, or more “trying harder.” It comes from developing a nervous system that feels safe enough to choose differently. And this happens in relationship.

If You Want Support

If you’re tired of fighting your body and ready to work with it, trauma-informed, somatic nutrition counselling can help you untangle binge eating at the root without shame or another food plan you’ll eventually rebel against. Instead of using willpower or self-discipline, we work together to learn what you know about nutrition, develop skills, identify and unwrap your binge- and emotional-eating patterns, build a new relationship with your body and body image, and support you in becoming binge-free for good. To start, head on over here and book your free call.