Having a difficult relationship with food affects nearly every other relationship in your life, including your relationship with yourself—because it tends to erode self-confidence and usually brings high levels of shame. Eating disorders are extremely isolating, causing you to turn away from other people, even people you love the most and who love you the most. Because of the shame associated with your behaviors, you may find yourself lying to those you love about your eating, or hiding food, or hiding the evidence of food, or hiding your purging or exercise behaviors.

Your drive to binge and your obsessive food thoughts can drive you away from connection and can distract you from being present with the most important people in your life. The way you feel physically, mentally, and emotionally after engaging in harmful food behaviors can make you not want to reach out to friends, and shy away from social events or dating or any sort of intimate or romantic relationship.

The connection between eating disorders and relationships is multifaceted, and as I was reflecting on this topic and coming up with points to address, I realize there’s so much more than I can tackle in one post (this post is also a podcast episode). So, this post is going to be the first part of a series of posts to address healing your relationship with food, yourself, and others. As you read this (and the posts that will follow), know that each person and each relationship is different, so please take what is useful to you and what resonates with you and leave the rest. I’ll share some of my own experience in the area of relationships along the way—to help you see that you’re not alone, and to hopefully give you insight into some of the issues that you are personally dealing with now or that may arise in the future.

Eating disorders interfere with basic physiological and safety needs and our ability to connect in relationships

An important initial point I want to make as I embark on discussing healing your relationship with food, yourself, and others is that it mostly likely needs to go in that order—or at least healing your relationship with food has to be the priority in eating disorder recovery. You can, of course, work on your issues with food while you also work on yourself and your relationship with others if you want, but it’s so hard to resolve issues in those other relationships (and with yourself) when you’re in the midst of what can feel like an all-consuming survival battle with food.

To explain why this is the case, I’m going to briefly talk about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which provides a framework for why food issues interfere with your relationship with yourself and others. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a well-known psychological concept that explains our human motivations. Maslow said that there are five tiers or levels of human needs, and in Maslow’s hierarchy, these levels are usually depicted one on top of the other within a pyramid.

At the base of the pyramid—the biggest part—are our basic physiological needs like breathing, food, water, shelter, warmth, and sleep. These needs form the foundation that must be relatively stable in order for us to pursue our other motivations and higher needs. The next level is safety needs, which are the needs for security, stability, and protection from danger or harm. The third level is social needs, which includes the need for love, affection, belonging, and social interaction. The fourth level is esteem needs, including the need for self-esteem, achievement, recognition and respect from others. The last level is self-actualization, which is the need for personal growth, fulfillment and the realization of one’s full potential.

These levels–beyond the basic physical needs—aren’t completely fixed and they can operate simultaneously at times, but the basic premise is that we can’t focus on more meaningful things in life (like improving our relationship with ourselves and others) until our basic physiological and safety needs are met. When an eating disorder is part of your life, it strongly interferes with physiological and safety needs and makes it so difficult to move up to the higher levels of Maslow’s pyramid.

When you’re restricting food, your body and brain are operating from a primal, survival-driven state and you don’t have the mental, emotional, or physical bandwidth to pursue more meaningful things in your life. Additionally, when you’re hooked on the terrible habit of binge eating, your brain becomes conditioned to operate as if binge eating is a basic survival need—so that when the binge urges are operating, it’s hard to focus on anything else because you feel like one of your basic needs isn’t being met. Of course, binge eating is not a real need (like a need for normal amounts of food), but the point is that—in the moment that you’re feeling that drive to binge—it can feel like a real need.

The feeling of having an “unmet survival need” during binge urges is a big part of why it can feel so tempting to just binge to make the urges go away. There is an illusion that if you can get the urge to stop (by bingeing), you can get back to the rest of your life and focus on what’s important. But when you look at what happens after you act on the urge to binge, you see that the opposite is true. The binge gives you a whole new set of problems which are worse than the urge itself and further prevent you from focusing on other areas of your life.

Acting on an urge to binge is not like acting on an urge to drink water when you’re very thirsty. When you have a need for water and you’re therefore unable to focus on anything else in your life, then drinking a big glass of water will make you feel so much better. You will feel like you can function normally again and focus on what’s important to you. However, with binge eating or another bad habit or addiction, instead of feeling better after following the urge, you feel absolutely terrible and you’re usually much less able to put your attention on what matters to you.

Eating disorders also interfere with that second level of needs in Maslow’s hierarchy. Restricting food, bingeing on food, and having other obsessive or compulsive behaviors around food affect our basic needs for safety and security. When you have an eating disorder, there can be a great deal of fear—including a fear of food and a fear of the binge eating itself. Also, there can be dangerous health issues, and a lot of unpredictability in your day-to-day life based on whether or not you binge. It’s also common to lack self-trust when it comes to eating, and this creates a lack of stable and safe feelings within yourself. All of this is to say that when your relationship with food is off, it creates a situation where your fundamental physiological and safety needs are not being met, and it becomes so incredibly challenging to focus on your relationship with yourself and others.

Fixing relationships issues doesn’t cure eating disorders, and it’s difficult to improve relationships when struggling with food  

In Brain over Binge, I talk a lot about why I disagree with the advice to try to fix other issues in your life as a remedy for binge eating. You may think you have to heal your self-esteem and your relationships, as well as find fulfillment, in order to stop binge eating—but I believe this advice has it backwards in most cases. How can you possibly focus on your higher needs for fulfillment, connection, love, belonging, and meaning when your basic needs aren’t being met because of the eating disorder?

I often share my experience in eating disorder therapy, which involved trying to address deeper issues within myself, with my emotions, and in my relationships. For me and so many people that I’ve worked with over the years, this was an ineffective path to stopping binge eating. One of the main issues was that, much of the time, I felt completely unable to actually focus on things like relationships or self-esteem, because my eating disorder interfered with me following my therapist’s advice. Looking back, this only made sense because the issues with eating were consuming my mind and body’s resources, and Maslow’s hierarchy explains why that was the case.

With all of that being said, people with eating disorders don’t just completely shut off from the rest of the world and from relationships with others and with themselves. People with eating disorders do manage to have friends, romantic partners, successful careers, creative pursuits, and fulfillment in other areas. But, if you have or you’ve had an eating disorder, you know how challenging this can be, and you know you sometimes feel like you’re leading a double life. It can be like going in and out of feeling like you’re in basic survival mode—consumed by your desire to restrict, binge, purge, overexercise, or obsess about food—and then in other moments, feeling relatively normal and being able to pursue your higher needs and goals.

When I had binge-free days, I would feel like I was going up Maslow’s pyramid of needs. I was able to spend quality time with the people I cared about, I was able to pursue romantic relationships, and I could engage in some personal growth—only to be thrown back down to that lower level again when the urge is to binge arose.

A story from my own life: A relationship meets the struggle with food

To bring this into real life, I want to share a story from when I was in college and dealing with bulimia. The story involves dating, and it was something I briefly wrote about in Brain over Binge regarding a guy I was dating in my last year of college who I ended up confiding in about my eating disorder. At the time, my therapist was encouraging me to share my struggle with people in my life, to get support; and looking back, I realize he probably wasn’t the right person to confide in. He was great in many ways, but I don’t think he necessarily wanted a deep emotional connection with me. I think he was just trying to have fun and to be honest, probably wanted things to progress to a sexual relationship as well. As an aside to this story, this was definitely the opposite of my own motivation for dating at this time. Sex and physical intimacy was something I very much tried to avoid during my eating disorder—primarily because of the deep shame and disgust I felt toward my body from all the bingeing (well, that sprinkled in with some guilt from my Catholic upbringing which is a story for another day).

I will talk more about the relationship between sex and eating disorders in one of the upcoming posts in this blog series, but the point of telling this story here is that by dating this guy in college, I was trying to meet some of those higher needs for connection, belonging, and even love. Yet, all too often, I got sucked right back into the world of bingeing and stalled any progress toward those relationships needs. The guy I’m referring to here—I gave him the name David in the book (not his real name)—was a source of some good times for the four or five months that we dated. We did some fun outdoor things that I love, like hiking, canoeing, and water skiing. We also went to restaurants, a few concerts, the movies, and we hung out at each other’s apartments. It was mostly good in those moments, but there was another side to it too.

If I was bingeing, or feeling sick from bingeing, or exercising all day to try to purge, I would make up excuses not to see him. This happened a lot. I do remember one time, I reluctantly agreed to see David anyway after a binge. We went shopping, and I can remember wearing really baggy clothes to hide my bloating, and I can also remember not wanting to look at him in the eyes because my face was so swollen from all the food and water retention (this was something that happened after most of my binges). I can still remember walking around the store in my baggy clothes, looking down, trying to make awkward conversation through my shame, and I remember feeling so relieved when I got back in my car and drove away.

Shortly before we broke up, he took me to his family home for the night, which was a bit of a drive from our college. That night, an urge to binge overtook me and I snuck out of the room where I was staying, and I ate a large number of cookies from a big tub of them that was in his kitchen. I did manage some semblance of self-control, and I ate an amount that I didn’t think anyone would notice—or at least that’s what I told myself. But the next day, we were in the living room and his mom was in the kitchen, which was adjacent to the living room, and she definitely noticed. My mind is a little fuzzy as far as exactly what she said, but I remember her opening it and expressing some frustration and confusion about who ate them. I just sat there feeling frozen and so ashamed, and I didn’t say anything to David or his mom. I was embarrassed and bloated and so uncomfortable on the drive back to college later that evening, and I broke up with him not long after that.

The relationships with David likely would not have worked out anyway because of some differences, but I definitely blamed the eating disorder for the breakup at the time. I did not say that directly to him, but in my mind, I told myself that I could not be with someone if I was going to have to hide my shame from them, or not be able to be intimate, or cancel fun activities, or not be able to look them in the eyes because of face swelling, or eat all of their family’s cookies in the middle of the night. I do laugh a little now about the cookie story so many years later because I think of what an odd first (and last) impression I must have made on his family. But it certainly wasn’t funny at the time, and I know many of you reading this can relate to doing things you’re not proud of when you’re under the influence of an urge to binge.

I had told David about my eating disorder about a month before we broke up, and he was not very sensitive about it—likely due to a lack of understanding and being a college guy just wanting to have fun. When I tried explaining the binge eating to him and told him that’s why I had canceled some dates and plans, he asked me sarcastically, “so you’d rather eat chocolate cake than be with me?” I remember feeling so foolish in that moment, but—as I shared in Brain over Binge—even though his comment was very insensitive, there was some truth in it. Yes, when the urges to binge hit, I definitely would have chosen to eat cake (or a tub of cookies) over being with him. Those were the times that I was not able to focus on any of my higher needs or have the capacity to be present with another person.

The years of my eating disorder felt like swinging back and forth between trying to live a normal life and falling into the nightmare of binge eating. It was so frustrating to have my relationship with food interfere with any relationship I tried to develop, including a relationship with myself. There wasn’t something fundamentally wrong with me in the area of relationships, even though—like the rest of the population—I had so much to learn then and I still do so many years later. But at the time, I definitely thought something was wrong with me. Now that I look back, I can see that I was just temporarily distracted and consumed by the food and therefore unable to expand my life much beyond that.

This is where I’m going end Part 1 of this blog series. I hope it’s helped you understand more about how your eating disorder can interfere with your ability to connect with others and pursue higher needs. I also hoped it has helped you feel less alone and less like you’re broken in the area of relationships.

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The topic of relationships comes up so much in coaching that in order to help people more effectively, I recently got certified as a relationship coach (in addition to my certification in health coaching from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition). So, if you are having issues in relationships as you recover from binge eating, it’s definitely something I understand and something I can help guide you through in one-on-one coaching.

Additionally, I have a lot of personal experience in this area ranging from the issues related to the eating disorder, and then later through a challenging marriage, parenting, divorce, co-parenting, dating, difficult relationships, breakups, and healthy relationships as well. Just like I frequently remind you that I do not eat perfectly, I also do not do relationships perfectly by any stretch of the imagination, but I have overcome some challenges in this area, and I have a capacity to listen without judgment and to help you work through your own unique issues. This goes for Brain over Binge Coach Julie as well, who is certified in life coaching and can help you with so many other issues that may come up in your life or in your relationships.

Learn more about 1:1 coaching and book your 45 minute or 20 minute session.