Autism and Binge Eating (Part 4)

Welcome to Part 4 of my series on autism and binge eating! If you’ve read the previous posts of this series, I’m sure you’ve already learned a lot! Quick recap:

In Part 1, you learned: what interoception is and how it can lead to difficulty sensing hunger and fullness. We also discussed the difference between extreme hunger and binge eating disorder.

In Part 2, we talked about the nervous system and how this relates to the sensory experience of food, including using food to stim and to using food to procrastinate.

In Part 3, we dove even deeper into the procrastination aspect, touching on autistic inertia and difficulty with transitions.

In this fourth and final part of the series, it’s finally time to unpack the role of black and white thinking, analysis paralysis, food needing to “make sense,” and the hormonal autistic binge, that is to say, when bingeing is the result of PMS or PMDD.

Autism, Binge Eating, and Black or White Thinking

First off: black and white thinking! I wrote a post a while ago about Black and White Thinking in Autism and Anorexia in which I talked about how the purpose of black and white thinking is to gain a sense of tangible control in a world that is really intangible and out of our control. And while Anorexia is typically seen as the “control” eating disorder and binge eating is often associated with someone who “lacks control,” I want to challenge that narrative right away. In fact, no eating disorder is about control: they’re about gaining a sense of safety and security. And this starts with viewing eating disorders as an adaptation rather than a pathological disease.

Autistic people tend to view the world with such depth and nuance that it can be overwhelming. Personally, I’ve asked existential questions for as long as I can remember. This curiosity was born from trying to make sense of a world that, well, doesn’t. To avoid the existential angst that accompanies infinite options and viewpoints, most autistic people have innately adapted their mindset to view the world as black and white.

Because of this adaptation, autistic people are considered to be “rigid” and “inflexible.” However, the opposite is true. In reality, autistic people are incredibly flexible and consider a variety of options before drawing conclusions. But because we then tend to get caught in a state of “paralysis” due to our ongoing mental analyses, it’s just so much easier to avoid the zone of colorful nuance. It’s so much easier to see the world in black and white.

When we see the world in black or white, all or nothing, the answers are clear. It’s either this or that, one or two. By shielding yourself from the in-betweens, you’re attempting to protect yourself, that is to say, to manipulate your nervous system to perceive safety. This is why I believe it’s much more appropriate to view eating disorders of any kind as a spectrum of adaptive eating behaviors, something you can learn more about in my Autistically ED Free Group Coaching Program!

Circling back to black and white thinking, this autistic trait can be a huge factor when it comes to binge eating. For example, say you go into the kitchen and are feeling like some ice cream. Because you struggle to interpret internal cues due to interoceptive difficulties as discussed in Part 1 of this series, you really don’t know if you want one scoop or two scoops or a big bowl or perhaps a cone.

How an Eating Disorder Provides a False Sense of Safety for Autistic People

During my anorexia, I had so many rules around food to prevent this analysis paralysis, which is a term used to describe the inability to make a decision due to an overabundance of options. It didn’t matter how I was feeling or whether I had a hunger cue or not...I always ate the exact same things at the exact same times.

When I started recovery from restriction, my meal plan gave me a new thing to hold onto, a new set of rules to follow, so I didn’t feel like I was completely drowning in the existential storm of infinite choices. But just like my anorexia had done, it was a new form of entrapment. I had zero flexibility in my life, meaning I wasn’t able to do the things I really wanted to do.

Because the internet (bust mostly the "ED recovery community") preaches this idea that going “all in” is the only way to fully recover from your eating disorder, well, can you guess what choice I made? I did write a whole post on Why All In Recovery Didn’t Work For Me in which I explain why the All In Method often doesn’t work for autistic people specifically, and that has to do with the black and white thinking mindset.

Constraints Are An Autistic Person's Golden Tool

Autistic people need constraints. We need boundaries to feel safe, so the idea of “just listening to your body” and “eating intuitively” are much too vague. This can cause someone to spiral into unhealthy habits, such as always saying "no" to food or always choosing the “healthy” or “light” option in the case of restriction, but it can also precipitate bingeing.

Going back to the ice cream example: Without any guidelines or routines in place, it can be too overwhelming to have to decide right then and there how much ice cream you want, that you may just start eating from the container. As you’re eating, you’re starting to feel “Ehh okay this is getting to be a bit much,” but because there’s no logic involved in the eating process, because you’ve been conditioned by treatment or online influencers that you can just “trust your body to say stop,” you throw your trusty black and white thinking into gear and say, “Oh fuck it! I’ve already eaten half the container and I already feel sick, so I might as well keep going and finish it off!” 

As I'm typing these words, I’m reminded of a video that an anti-diet content creator posted on Instagram a while back. It it, he said: ‘If you accidentally stubbed your toe, would you purposely stub your other toe?”

While the video and the comments expressed that it obviously seems silly to purposely hurt yourself again just because you hurt yourself before (again, as I'm typing this, I’m realizing yeah, that really would be an odd thing to do) I actually DID once stub my other toe after hurting the other foot. No joke! Let me tell you the story:

When I was little, I stubbed my toe on our staircase (thankfully it was covered in fabric). I was going to walk up the stairs, and I just hit my toe. Although it happens to the best of us, I was so MAD at the staircase! (I'm not sure if that was a form of object personification which is a really common trait in autistic people, but that's beside the point.) And because I was so mad at the staircase, I wanted to hurt the staircase back. I obviously could not kick the staircase with the foot that I had just stubbed my toe with, so I used my other foot to kick the staircase, which led me to having two hurt feet! 

The reason I share this story is because it goes to show that neurodivergent individuals often can know logically that their all-or-nothing mentality isn’t helpful, just like knowing that eating an entire gallon of ice cream isn’t beneficial to your health or well-being (reminder: if you are going through extreme hunger, you are in a different situation. I ate multiple pints of ice cream on multiple occasions during my extreme hunger because I still had a lot of energy debt to pay off.) In the case of true overeating or true bingeing, all logic goes out the window. Your most primal instincts take over, and if there aren’t any guidelines in place that can help you accommodate your neurodivergent nervous system, you’re continuously going to set yourself up to engage in unhealthy coping mechanisms. Setting up your own constraints and learning how to set boundaries with food is something that’s very unique to each individual, which is why I don’t feel comfortable giving any advice or suggestions here. But if you do want help in creating those accommodations for yourself, be sure to learn more about coaching with me HERE!

Autism and Food Needing to "Make Sense"

When it comes to autistic brains and food, black and white thinking has a twin. This twin is food needing to "make sense." If you’ve NEVER heard me talk about this concept before, please do yourself a huge favor and read my post When food has to “make sense” in which I explain exactly what autistic people mean when we use this phrase. How it relates to binge eating will again be very unique to everyone, but for me, the biggest way this manifests is food needing to have a certain “look.” 

For example, say I’m in the mood for some chocolate. One of my favorite chocolates is the Lindt 85% chocolate bar. Because I’m autistic and pay attention to the details of food because it influences my behaviors and portions around the food, I know that the bar has 2 columns and 5 rows making the bar have a total of 10 squares. One of the most appalling things to me is when people eat the chocolate without breaking the chocolate according to the pre-molded lines. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO WILL JUST RANDOMLY BREAK OFF A CHUNK OF THE CHOCOLATE AND NOT BREAK OFF THE INDIVIDUAL SQUARES! I seriously cannot understand it. Anyways, for me, I always have to eat an entire row or multiple rows of the chocolate. I cannot eat 1 square or 3 squares because then, the bar would no longer be a "perfect" rectangle. However, if I had a bar that’s 3 columns instead of 2, I would be able to eat 3 squares and wouldn’t be able to eat 2 or 4. So you see, how I eat is wholly dependent on how my mind feels about the way the food looks when I finish.

It's worth noting that chocolate is an easy example. The foods I usually ended up bingeing on were foods that are “uneven” that is to say, there’s no tangible way of making them look complete or incomplete like with chocolate. For these foods (and I talk about this at length in my post 3 more autistic traits that are actually ED behaviors), I say that the food has to be “smoothed out.” Two examples of foods that I always have in the house are peanut butter and yogurt.

During my anorexia, I would base always base the amount of food I consumed on it being weighed or measured, and if we're being honest, I’d usually do both. For peanut butter: it was 2 tablespoons, no more no less. For yogurt it was: either 1 pre-portioned container, half a cup, ⅔ cup, ¾ cup, or 1 cup. Never more, and there were definitely no in-betweens. 

When I went through extreme hunger, my body was like, “neat rules, but they’re going out the window!” I consumed jars upon jars of nut butters in days and I could easily eat an entire 1kg tub of full-fat Greek yogurt in less than 5 minutes. This was very important for me to go through. Not only because it literally forced me to break these restrictive rules I had around portions, but my body physically needed all those calories.

"Normal Eating" AFTER Extreme Hunger

The true challenge for me came when I was learning how much my body needed AFTER this extreme hunger period. I didn’t want to go back to meticulously weighing and measuring food, because it made me feel very restricted. Even if I was planning on having a portion that was significantly larger than in the past, I find that my demand avoidance is often triggered when I set a weight or measurement constraint. To elaborate, even if I said: "Okay, you won’t have two tablespoons, but you’ll have 4 tablespoons of peanut butter," my PDA brain would probably respond with “You can’t tell me how much to have, I get to decide!” and then I may end up eating the entire peanut butter jar because I can’t get it to look perfectly “smoothed out” and there are no intuitive guidelines I have around the amount.

I have to be honest with you here. This is somewhat of a new struggle for me that I didn’t have a few years ago, and it’s something I’m still actively working through. I do often find myself eating wayyy more of these foods that will just never have this perfectly satisfactory look to them, but as with everything in life, I trust that I will get through this! Just like I trust that YOU will get through this. Everything in life happens for us, it happens so that we can grow and continuously turn our best into better. 

Although that is a beautiful conclusion to this episode, I did promise you at the beginning that we would talk about the hormonal binge, AKA bingeing as a result of PMS or PMDD. Well, by the time this post comes out, I have already posted a super in-depth post on Autism, PMDD, and Extreme Hunger in which I share my experience with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, what this is, why it’s more common in neurodivergent people, and how it can contribute to binge eating. So, if you haven’t read to that post yet, I highly recommend you read it now, or otherwise, continue the conversation on autism and binge eating with me here!