5 Things I Wish More People Knew About Binge Eating (from an eating disorder therapist)

I work part-time as a direct client support worker for an eating disorder support centre, which means I speak to dozens of people struggling with eating disorders across Canada in a given month. By far, the most common ED folks reach out for support with is binge eating disorder (BED). This isn’t surprising, since BED is 2–3 times more prevalent than anorexia or bulimia nervosa in Canada (Pedram et al., 2021). Even so, BED often feels like the black sheep of the eating disorder world.

People frequently reach out with immense shame about their binge eating struggles, feeling “out of control” with food and believing they just lack willpower—that there’s something wrong with them. Spoiler alert: it’s not about willpower at all. Here are five things I wish were better known about binge eating:

1) Most binge eating results from food restriction.
This can be a hard pill to swallow, but dieting often leads to binge eating, and this isn’t because you lack willpower. It’s because your body is trying to fight back against what it perceives as a lack of food. When your body senses scarcity (whether that’s skipping meals, rigid food rules, or telling yourself certain foods are “off-limits”), it doesn’t interpret that as discipline, it reads it as a threat (Abene et al., 2023). Biology kicks in, cravings get louder, and suddenly that “lack of willpower” looks a lot more like your nervous system doing its job.

Want to reduce “food noise”? Be sure to eat regular, sufficiently sized meals and snacks every day.

2) Thin people struggle with binge eating too.
A lot of folks assume that only people in bigger bodies struggle with BED, and that only thin people struggle with anorexia or bulimia. This is an utterly false stereotype that contributes to under-diagnosis of BED and other EDs (Garcia Moreno et al., 2025; Hughes et al., 2019). Binge eating doesn’t check your BMI before it shows up.

Plenty of people in smaller bodies are quietly struggling, but because they don’t “look the part,” their symptoms get missed, minimized, or even praised (“at least you’re not gaining weight”). The result? They’re often left dealing with the same distress, loss of control, and shame, just with less recognition and support.

Conversely, not all fat people have binge eating disorder or problematic relationships with food (Schulze & Stefan, 2024). Some people are just fat, and it doesn’t have to be a big deal.

3) Anti-fat bias can cause and worsen binge eating.
Weight stigma and anti-fat bias are rampant, so it’s no wonder that folks in bigger bodies might try to cope by attempting to be smaller, often through dieting. And what often follows dieting? Bingeing (Abene et al., 2023).

4) Body dissatisfaction is a big driver of binge eating (Yan & Li, 2022).
Body dissatisfaction has a way of quietly tightening the rules around food long before a binge ever happens. When you don’t feel okay in your body, it often turns into scanning, comparing, and compensating, sometimes without even noticing it becoming restriction in disguise.

The more “not enough” your body feels, the more tempting it is to try to control it through food rules, which tend to backfire quickly. Eventually, biology and psychology catch up.

5) Overeating is not the same as having a binge eating problem.
Most people overeat at times, and this is actually incredibly normal, not something to pathologize. Eating past fullness occasionally is part of a normal relationship with food: sometimes we’re very hungry and accidentally eat beyond fullness, and sometimes food is so delicious that we want to keep enjoying it.

Intuitive eating isn’t about idealizing our relationship with food. In fact, being overly tuned in to hunger and fullness cues can become disordered pretty quickly. Binge eating differs in that episodes are more frequent and come with a sense of loss of control. When you feel “out of control” with food and much of your mental space is taken up by thoughts of food, it points to something deeper than occasional overeating.

References

Abene, J. A., Tong, J., Minuk, J., Lindenfeldar, G., Chen, Y., & Chao, A. M. (2023). Food insecurity and binge eating: A systematic review and meta-analysis. The International Journal of Eating Disorders, 56(7), 1301–1322. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.23956

Garcia Moreno, N., Walker, D. C., Gullo, N., & O’Dea, C. J. (2025). Weight Stigma’s Effects on Misdiagnosis of Eating Disorders Among Laypeople and Healthcare Professionals. The International Journal of Eating Disorders, 58(4), 690–702. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.24374

Hughes, E. K., Kerr, J. A., Patton, G. C., Sawyer, S. M., Wake, M., Le Grange, D., & Azzopardi, P. (2019). Eating disorder symptoms across the weight spectrum in Australian adolescents. The International Journal of Eating Disorders, 52(8), 885–894. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.23118

Pedram, P., Patten, S. B., Bulloch, A. G. M., Williams, J. V. A., & Dimitropoulos, G. (2021). Self-Reported Lifetime History of Eating Disorders and Mortality in the General Population: A Canadian Population Survey with Record Linkage. Nutrients, 13(10), 3333. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13103333

Schulze, M. B., & Stefan, N. (2024). Metabolically healthy obesity: from epidemiology and mechanisms to clinical implications. Nature reviews. Endocrinology, 20(11), 633–646. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41574-024-01008-5 

Yan, J., Su, H., & Li, C. (2022). Effect of body dissatisfaction on binge eating behavior of Chinese university students: A moderated mediation model. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 995301. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.995301