Autism and Binge Eating (Part 3)

Welcome to Part 3 of my series on autism and binge eating! In Part 1 and Part 2, you learned:

• The role of interoception in sensing hunger and fullness
• The difference between extreme hunger and binge eating disorder
• The connection between the nervous system and the sensory experience of food
• How eating can be a form of stimming and how food can be used to procrastinate and escape

As promised in the last post, this post is going to be digging a little well into the procrastination aspect. More specifically, we're going to talk about how difficulty with transitions and the concept of autistic inertia can contribute to binge eating in neurodivergent people.

Autism, Transitions, and Binge Eating

If you are autistic, or are reading this because you want to better understand someone who is, you probably know that autistic people have difficulty with transitions. Especially when we’re immersed in our special interest or are hyperfocused on something that we’ve made a commitment to follow through until the end, transitioning into something else can feel like a monumental demand.

This difficulty transitioning can lead to bingeing in two different ways:

#1 Restriction and Compensation

Reason #1 relates to our earlier discussion: Restriction can lead to compensatory behaviors, like bingeing later in the day or after a prolonged period of restrictive eating. When you’re in hyperfocus mode and not wanting to transition out of what you’re doing – whether this is as short as a few hours on a given day or due to the fear of transitioning out of an eating disorder – you’re procrastinating eating. This delay can cause you to become so hungry that your body will at one point compensate by making up for all the food it’s missed.

To understand this concept, imagine you’re swimming laps in a very large swimming pool. If you’re enjoying yourself, just having some fun, just casually swimming, you’re likely going to come up for air whenever you feel like you need air. Just like how in healthy circumstances, someone eats when they feel like they need to eat. 

But here’s the kicker. Imagine you get so immersed in staying underwater that you forget to come up for air. You’re swimming swimming swimming until you finally complete your lap and only then do you realize: "Oh gosh! I really need to put my head above the water!" Well, I’m sure we can all guess what you’ll do when you finally come up: you’ll GASP for air like your life depends on it…because it does! Well that’s exactly what happens when you experience extreme hunger or binge eating after a period of not eating enough.

#2 Binge Eating as a Transition Tool

The second way difficulty with transitions can lead to binge eating is that eating itself can be a transition tool, which can then turn into autistic inertia. But first, you may be wondering, what the heck is autistic inertia? Well, from physics we know that the inertia of an object is the tendency of the object to remain at rest or, if moving, to continue its motion. Similarly, autistic inertia refers to the difficulty many autistic individuals face when it comes to starting or stopping activities. 

This can manifest as hyperfocus of our special interest and then procrastinating eating like we talked about earlier, but eating itself can also be considered a “flow state” we enter. Once we’re in motion with the food, it can be really difficult to stop eating. As I’m writing this, I’m reminded of something one of my clients said a while ago, and that is: “Once I think of a food, I have to eat it!”

“Once I think of a food, I have to eat it!”

During my own binges, I would often be eating something and eat it so fast because I was already planning the next ten things I was going to eat. In a way, I do feel this is intertwined with autistic traits because, at least for me, I’m always ten steps ahead. I’m always planning out everything wayyy in advance, and I do the same for food a lot of the time.

However, when it comes to autism and binge eating, this can definitely be tough because all of the foods our mind wants to eat often doesn’t agree with our body’s physical capacities. Autistic inertia allows us to transcend into a flow state that temporarily numbs us from these physical limits and in turn, may cause you to only realize how full and uncomfortable you are when you snap out of the temporary transcendence. When you take all this, and then add in the soothing and sensory components of food, the connection between autism and binge eating suddenly no longer seems so baffling, eh?

But, there is more! Yes, there are even MORE reasons why autistic people may binge eat, including: black and white thinking, analysis paralysis as a result of not being able to choose what to eat, food needing to “make sense,” and hormonal reasons such as PMS and PMDD. You can read all about it in Part 4 of this series on Neurodivergence and Binge Eating!