Secret Eating - Why You’re Sneaking Food
There’s something that’s so compelling about sneaking food, hiding it, indulging in it when no one’s around, and enjoying the thrill of it all. But at the same time, secret eating often leaves us in a state of guilt, shame, and worrying that we’ll suffer the dreaded punishment of weight gain.
What’s behind secret eating? Why do we do it? Why does it feel so good, yet so bad?
Secret eating, sometimes called sneak eating, or even guilty eating, is one of the most fascinating of unwanted eating behaviors. So many of us find ourselves sneaking food, eating when everyone else has gone up to bed, or eating in that special place where no one will find us, and indulging in it with equal parts of guilt and excitement.
When we eat in secret, we’ll often do our best to hide the evidence. We want to enjoy it as best we can and at the same time, make sure no one finds out. So we always need to be alert around maintaining our secret, and our innocence.
Sneaking food is the kind of behavior that we can feel compelled to do. Meaning, we can’t easily stop ourselves. A part of us doesn’t want all the guilt, but another part of us can’t seem to resist the temptation.
Let’s take a deeper look at secret eating and get to the bottom of why we do it.
Secret Eating & Human Nature
We don’t need to look very far to find the roots of secret eating in history and culture. In fact, one of the most well-known stories in the world, the tale of Adam and Eve, is based on the act of sneaking food.
As the story goes, the first couple was given an all-important food rule:
Don’t eat the apple.
Somehow, they are tempted to break this rule. Notice how they assume they’re not being watched when they break the rule. And then soon afterward, we find Adam and Eve hiding in the garden, feeling terribly guilty, and for the first time, they’re ashamed of their naked bodies. What’s worse, they are then punished for sneak-eating the forbidden food.
Is any of this sounding familiar to you?
For a majority of people, there’s an initial “rush” when we sneak food. It’s exciting. It gets our adrenaline pumping. It’s a unique kind of high.
But soon after, it’s easy to fall into all the unwanted repercussions of secret eating. We can…
Feel guilty or ashamed
Be obsessed about concealing our crime
Experience bloating from eating too much or too fast
Feel fatigued or brain foggy if we consumed too much sugar
Drop into deep fear that we’ll gain weight
Find ourselves in self-judgment, self-hate, and self-attack
Live in a constant state of agitation around what we just did, and what we will likely do soon again in the future
All these repercussions of sneaking food are very predictable. In fact, they’re quite common. And they can be very uncomfortable.
That’s because secret eating can impact just about every other dimension of our life:
Our relationships
Our work
Our focus
Our friendships
Our sexuality
Our self-worth
And more
Secret eating can be a haunting secret that we don’t want anyone to know about.
The first step to saying goodbye to secret eating and freeing yourself of its unwanted consequences is to understand it more deeply.
The Psychology of Secret Eating
There are a number of powerful principles that help us understand our eating psychology more thoroughly and deeply. One of those key principles is this: There’s always a brilliant reason, rooted in biology, psychology, or both, as to why we do an unwanted eating behavior.
In other words, there are good, logical explanations for why we participate in behaviors that we say we don’t want to do. Knowing these explanations helps us better understand what’s driving us.
Here’s the first brilliant reason rooted in psychology as to why we would sneak food:
1. We all have an inner criminal archetype, part of our inner personality, that influences our behavior.
Archetypes are like sub-personalities inside of us. Every human being on planet Earth has a multiplicity of archetypes or personas. When it comes to eating behaviors, common archetypes are:
The Criminal
The Child
The Perfectionist
The Hedonist
And many more…
We all have a criminal archetype somewhere inside. It’s the part of us that wants to break the rules. To test our parents. To test society. To fool the system. To be outside the law. To experience our dark side. To feel the rush of doing something illegal or forbidden.
So, for those of us who engage in secret eating or sneaking food, a part of us just wants to experience the thrill of the crime. It can feel so good in the moment. And at the same time, there’s a rush or high of being on high alert and making sure no one ever finds out. It’s your little secret. And the thing about secrets is this:
Secret eating makes us feel in control, more powerful.
Secret eating gives us a sense of being more powerful. It conveys a certain authority.
It makes us feel like we have conquered the system, defied the law, and we now stand outside the rules of society, of our parents, our family, and even the rules of health and nutrition.
But such power is short-lived. We are always nervously looking over our shoulder when we’re constantly living in our criminal mind.
There’s yet another potent reason rooted in our psychology as to why we eat in secret:
2. We’ve accepted the (toxic) belief that some eating is “bad.”
We are taught that weight is our enemy, body fat is our enemy
Or if the number on the scale is not acceptable, then our life will be one of unhappiness.
In our day and age, body fat is seen as a sure sign that we are unlovable.
We are taught to believe that having body fat means we will never find true love. That we can’t be our real and truest self. And that we can never be happy.
So with this kind of toxic input from our media, our music, our social platforms, and more, we naturally conclude that food should be illegal since it’s food that seems to be the culprit in making us fat.
But the problem is, we need food. We crave it. Our biology demands it. We must have it to live.
So we find an odd middle ground where we see eating as a crime, and we are the criminal who MUST commit the crime of eating.
And of course, as any good criminal knows: The best way to do any crime is to do it quickly and to do it in secret. But as any good criminal also knows: We eventually must be punished for our crimes.
So we create self-punishments like:
Harsh self-attacking thoughts
Intense guilt and shame
Impossible to follow dieting and food restriction
Punishing exercise
Eating even more food that we fear will make us fat
See how our inner nature can drive secret eating? How the behaviors that we believe are unstoppable actually have brilliant reasons for their existence?
3. “Good” Foods & “Bad” Foods
Most people I meet have a list in their minds of “good” foods, and the “bad” foods. We have a clear idea of the foods that are healthy for me to eat, and a clear idea of the foods that will likely detract from my health or make me gain weight.
Our lists tend to differ, while at the same time, they share some commonalities.
For example, some people have meat on their bad list, while for others, they consider it good. Most people agree that vegetables are on the good-for-me-to-eat list. Many people agree that sugar is on the bad-guy list.
So here’s the conundrum:
So many of the foods on our “bad list” are some of the tastiest and most alluring:
Junk food
Fast food
Fried food
Ice cream
Sugar of all kinds
So if a food is on your bad list, and you eat that bad food, what does that make you?
It makes you a “bad person.” A criminal.
And what do we do to bad people? We punish them.
This punishment is not just shame, guilt, and self-attack, as you’d expect. We also punish ourselves through:
Dieting
Exercise
Negative self-talk
Body shaming
And more
So we have essentially punished ourselves for the crime of eating a food that we ourselves have labeled as illegal.
Ironic, right?
When we judge a food as morally bad, we will eventually judge and punish ourselves for eating it.
If you’re ready to say goodbye to the unwanted habit of secret eating and sneaking food, you’re already well on your way. That’s because you have a deeper understanding of what this behavior is all about.
Jessica Kishpaugh is a Holistic Nutritionist, Nutrition Psychology Counselor & Emotional Eating Coach, Owner of LoYo Wellness in Wyckoff in Bergen County, NJ and Founder of The LoYo Method Coaching Program for busy women to heal their relationship with food through the power of food psychology and mindset and behavior habit changes. Jessica specializes in nutrition psychology, emotional eating, binge eating, overeating and mindfulness stress reduction.
Book your FREE Breakthrough Call HERE to get clarity on your relationship with food, to understand what’s holding you back from achieving your health and wellness goals, and to discover a solution so you can nourish your mind and body and live into your full potential.