Autism and Binge Eating (Part 2)

Welcome part 2 of my series on Neurodivergence and Binge Eating! In this post, we’ll be discussing the sensory component of why autistic people struggle with overeating, the relationship between food and stimming, and how this connects to the nervous system.

In Part 1 of this series, you learned about interoception, which is the sense that helps you understand inner cues such as hunger, fullness, thirst, and temperature. Of course, there are many more senses which all originate in the nervous system. Before we dive into how the neurodivergent sensory experience can impact binge eating, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of the nervous system.

The Nervous System

The nervous system is a complex network that controls and coordinates all the activities of the body. It is composed of two main parts: the central nervous system (CNS), which includes the brain and spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system (PNS), which consists of nerves that branch out from the spinal cord and extend to all parts of the body. The nervous system is responsible for processing sensory information, regulating bodily functions, and enabling us to think, move, and interact with our environment.

Neurodivergent individuals often experience nervous system dysregulation, which refers to a condition that occurs when the nervous system is overwhelmed and out of balance. Normally, us humans have the ability to move flexibly between the different branches of the nervous system, including the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which triggers the fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which promotes rest and digestion. However, being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world can cause you to live in a constant state of fight-or-flight mode. This over-activation of your sympathetic nervous system can lead to chronic anxiety, fatigue, mood swings, difficulty concentrating, sleep disturbances, digestive issues, and pretty much all the other symptoms neurodivergent people have to deal with on the daily!

The Sensory Experience of Binge Eating

It’s no secret that food has a huge impact on our nervous system. Not only is food restriction a literal threat to your survival, which can activate fight or flight mode and then ultimately result in extreme hunger or bingeing as the body attempts to bring you back to safety, but the eating experience itself is probably one of the most sensory-rich experiences in existence. For those with restrictive eating disorders, the sensory input that accompanies eating – whether this be tastes, textures, smells, but also the internal input like feelings of fullness and the way food contributes to changes in body temperature – food avoidance can be an effective strategy to reduce sensory input and regulate oneself.

Of course, food restriction, whether this be as “short” as not eating the whole day due to interoceptive difficulties or as long as years (or even decades) of a restrictive eating disorder such as anorexia, orthorexia, ARFID, and all the other behaviors that fall on what I’ve coined as The Adaptive Eating Spectrum, the body’s main priority is survival. So if you’re in energy deficit, the body is going to do everything it can to bring you back into energy balance. This may result in bingeing later in the day if you haven’t eaten enough, or in the case of prolonged restriction, it may be more appropriate to term your overeating behaviors as extreme hunger, which I fully explain in my book How to Beat Extreme Hunger: Find Food Freedom Without Losing Control.

On the other end of this spectrum are the sensory-seekers. Those of us who are constantly seeking stimulation and who may use food and eating as a form of stimming or grounding. And here’s where my personal story shifts a bit...

Autism and Eating Past Fullness

As I shared in Part 1, I had a huuuge appetite as a kid. Honestly, I still do! I could eat so much and wouldn’t know I was full until I was so stuffed and nauseous that all I could do was feel miserable. While I do remember knowing that I didn’t quite understand why my body did this, I thought that everyone felt this way. I thought that everyone ate until they were so full that they felt like they were going to explode.

It wasn’t until fifth grade health class – I was around 11 years old at the time – when I started learning about health and nutrition and food and BMI, and pretty much all the information that I now know is steeped in diet culture, that I first started questioning my food choices. If you’ve read my book Rainbow Girl, you know my autistic mind took all of the health "recommendations" literally and completely latched onto this identity of being a “perfect healthy eater.” Not only could this new identity be seen as an attempted solution to an unconscious existential crisis I was going through due to feeling misunderstood and different, but it was also a form of masking.

I believed that if I could conform to diet culture and adhere to the rules I set for myself around food and exercise, that I could finally feel a sense that I “fit in” to this world in which I felt so alienated. Well, it’s pretty obvious how that turned out for me, and if you’re reading this, I can only assume that you, too, have not gotten the results you were expecting a diet or an eating disorder to give you. And that’s because your nervous system knows danger when it sees it – or better said, experiences it – and will do everything it can to help you survive during threatening times. During my restrictive eating disorder, this looked like being very sensory avoidant. I always ate the same things at the same times because I was completely trapped in this fight-or-flight state that couldn’t cope with anything new or different. Because new and different meant unpredictable, which my body perceived as unsafe.

Shifting From Sensory Avoidant to Sensory Seeking

When I decided to recover, my nervous system was like “Hey! She’s eating! She’s resting! I guess we’re not in danger after all!” and I became much more of a sensory seeker around food. Not only did increased sensory input from food provide me with a sense of pleasure – pleasure I had deprived myself of for nearly 7 years – but it also soothed me. Eating a lot of highly palatable food allowed me to feel safe and grounded. If you have a history of restriction, and thus your nervous system has a history of knowing trauma, the fact that food is grounding and soothing and acts as a way to regulate your nervous system makes complete biological sense. Why? Because it proves you are safe.

Because the neurotypical world we live in is quite literally a threat to the survival of autistic people, we tend to have a heightened need for external signs of safety. I believe this deep need for confirmation is at the root of our need for predictability and routines and structure and sameness and all the “classic” autistic traits we’ve come to know and love. At the same time, they can also be our Achilles’ heel, in the sense that we may constantly rely on validation and input of external safety cues to stay grounded and to keep our nervous system regulated. 

I believe this is where sensory seeking tendencies of autistic people may flip into binge eating. Not only can the consumption of highly palatable foods be considered a form of stimming, which is self-stimulatory behavior, or in other words, self-regulatory behavior, but it’s also a very effective way to procrastinate the tasks that our brain is perceiving as threatening, and to temporarily escape from this reality we probably feel a bit trapped in.

Binge Eating as a Neurodivergent Form of Procrastination

For me personally, when I’m really stressed (and this is usually the case when I’m working on a big project for Liv Label Free, am in the middle of a big life transition, or just have too much on my plate – no pun intended!), I often find myself doing the opposite of what I did during my anorexia: instead of restricting and overexercising as a way to escape my reality, I will go into the kitchen. I will turn to food. And to be honest, it works every time...until I get to the point where I feel sick and I’m full and like a broken record, I’ll repeatedly ask myself “Why did you do that?!” Sound familiar?

It’s worth stressing that emotional eating isn’t always a bad thing. I sincerely believe (and honestly, hope!) that anyone who has a healthy relationship with food eats purely for comfort at least a few times a day. Like I just mentioned, I definitely do! Yes I may feel a bit sick and nauseous afterwards, and this is probably due to the fact that I have a hard time sensing fullness and always have, but the difference between once-in-a-while eating for comfort and binge-eating disorder is that with true binge-eating disorder, food becomes your only method of self-regulation. And when we’re putting all our eggs in one basket like that, well, there’s a reason it’s an expression not to do that!

The same thing goes for procrastination. In the eating disorder recovery and anti-diet spaces, there’s this common mandate that “food isn’t a reward.” And while I definitely agree that nourishment isn’t something that one must "earn" or only be deserving of after you’ve moved your body or eaten “clean” all week or anything silly like that, using food as a reward can be a really effective way to get tasks done for us Autistic folx and ADHDers.

Yes, Food CAN Be a Reward!

If I need to get my daily writing goal in or have a lot of admin tasks that I really don’t feel like doing, it does help to tell myself, “Okay, Livia, if you just focus for the next hour, you get to eat some apple pie.” Well, with that pie waiting for me, you bet my ass is gonna get her words in!

Does this mean I ONLY allow myself to eat apple pie if I accomplish a task beforehand? No. That’s what I've healed my relationship with food for. My point is that there’s a lot of nuance between what diet culture tells us is good vs what the diet culture rebels tell us is good. In the end, what works for YOU is good, and unfortunately, there’s no “how to” on how to live YOUR life! What there is, thankfully, is people on the internet sharing their lived experience and wisdom and insight :) 

To conclude this second part of my series on autism and binge eating, using food as an escape can be a very effective way to transcend into an alternate reality that doesn’t contain the demands of work or family or email or anything else that overwhelms us in this world not built for us. It temporarily numbs us from our constant state of fight or flight mode, acting as a safety blanket and helping us feel grounded. And because it can be such an effective, albeit temporary, method to stim, which always is done to self-regulate, it’s such a convenient way to procrastinate demands that we don’t want to do in that moment. In Part 3 of this series, we’re going to be talking about aspects of autistic binge eating that are closely tied to this procrastination, and those aspects are transitions and autistic inertia.