Why You're Not Eating When Life Gets Hard (It's Not What You Think)

There's a well-worn explanation for why eating disorders tend to flare during stressful periods: when life feels chaotic and uncontrollable, food becomes something you can control. The portion sizes, the timing, the choices, what goes in and what doesn't. It makes a certain kind of sense, and it's not wrong.

But there's a layer underneath that explanation that doesn't get talked about nearly as much.

Stress doesn't just live in your thoughts. It lives in your body.

When you're under significant pressure—whether it's a relationship rupturing, a loss, or a period of sustained uncertainty—your body is flooded with information. Intense feelings. Challenging sensations. Terrifying feeling of groundlessness, uncertainty, fear, and chaos.

For many people who eventually navigate an eating disorder, they often never learned how to navigate feelings, especially the more challenging ones. During times of stress, rather than feeling the feelings, we lock down, and all that internal noise and flooding of information has nowhere to go.

And here's where food comes in in a way most people don't expect: eating changes how you feel inside. It brings energy into the body. It wakes things up. It grounds you in the here-now present reality and all of the feelings that go with it. And when you eat, you suddenly feel all of that.

Restricting, on the other hand, can quiet that signal. Turn the volume down.

What this has to do with interoception

There's a term for the internal sensing system at the center of all of this: interoception. It's the body's capacity to perceive itself from the inside. It’s the mechanism by which you know you're hungry or full, tired or wired, needing rest or needing movement. Interoception is the felt knowledge of what's happening within you, moment to moment.

When the body is overwhelmed with stress, dimming that interoceptive awareness can feel like the only survivable option. It's not a conscious decision. It's more like a protective strategy the system arrives at on its own: if I can't tolerate what I'm feeling, I'll make myself feel less. Leave the stress undigested and suspended until it feels safe enough to face it.

The trouble is that safety, even when it does arrive, isn’t always registered by the brain-body.

When the body never gets the memo

Sometimes the stressful event ends, but the body never updates. The crisis passes, but the feelings accumulated during it (the ones that got put on hold) are still sitting there, waiting. And over time, the body starts to feel like a scary place. We might fear the body and dissociate from it. We might say, “I’m scared of my body.” But what is really happening is that the body itself is scared, carrying old stress it never had a chance to process.

This is when the act of eating can feel genuinely threatening: not just emotionally, but sensorially. To eat is to feel more. And feeling more, when the body is already overwhelmed and filled and filled with undigested feelings, can feel unbearable.

What recovery actually looks like here

It's not about forcing yourself to feel everything at once. That approach tends to confirm the body's fear rather than gently contradict it.

Real movement happens in the small, incremental work of slowly and with care waking interoceptive awareness back online. Noticing, without pressure, whether you feel a flicker of hunger. What sounds good to eat, even faintly. The difference between full and stuffed, between satisfied and empty. These aren't trivial observations. They're the first threads of a conversation with a body that learned it wasn't safe to be heard.

Digesting old stress takes time. It's layered work, and it’s part physical, part emotional, part relational, part something that resists clean categories. But little by little, the body can become a place that is less scary and a place you can return to.

That's where safety lives. Not out there, somewhere in the world finally becoming manageable. But in your own body—in a gradually restored capacity to feel yourself, and to stay right there in the tenderness of your authentic presence.

If this resonates and you're longing to feel more at home in yourself, I'd love to be in the room with you. Get in touch with me here to enquire about 1:1 coaching and group programs.

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