Comfort feeding (cw: disordered eating)
When I come home from work at the end of the day, my daughter squirms in my mom’s arms and leans toward me. As soon as I take her in my arms and sit on the couch, she turns her face toward my chest, her nose and mouth searching for a nipple. Sometimes she is hungry, sometimes she is tired, sometimes she isn’t searching for my nipples so much as she is searching for my heart and reassurance that we are connected and she is safe.
Sometimes babies nurse because they are looking for comfort, my mom told me. Mia was only a few weeks old and I was still sore from childbirth, sitting on a pillow to soften the bony cushions of our well-loved couch. Breastfeeding babies will often nurse to fall asleep or soothe themselves; in fact, breastmilk contains hormones that can function as pain relief, easing the trauma of the rotation of heel pricks and shots that seem constant in their first few days of life. Mia often falls asleep with a little bit of milk dribbling down her chin.
Comfort feeding is a biological norm for the human species. When we are sad, or scared, we turn to nourishment as nurturance. Food and security are intimately linked for every living thing. It makes sense, then, that a pint of ice cream in one hand and a spoon in the other is one of the most classic break-up stereotypes. We might be hungry, but more than that we are tired, we are sad, we are searching for reassurance.
I am a comfort eater. Being allowed to choose what I wanted to eat was a loaded issue in my family, and my dad constantly monitored what I was eating, to the point that my senior year of high school I rarely ate meals at home. I found excuses to be out of the house during or near mealtimes and used all my work money to buy food—buttered noodles with parmesan-crusted chicken on my Saturday lunch break at Noodles & Company, a quick trip through the drive thru at McDonald’s on my way to a friend’s, weekday sandwiches at the campus deli at our local community college where I took classes. I have eaten almost every item on the Panera menu in the last decade. Eating alone in my car became my safe haven from the sea of (I assumed) judging eyes.
I definitely had a disordered relationship with food—the result of generational fear and trauma that took me years to unpack in therapy—but not for the reasons I thought I did. I was embarrassed by my love of comfort food. I was embarrassed that I could not force myself to eat kale, that I lacked the “discipline” other people seemed to have to eat big salads for meals and all the trendy health foods I hated. Because of my father, eating salad felt like “giving in” to him and losing something vitally important in myself, and yet I was ashamed of my inability to force myself to swallow.
I have spent years in recovery now (with some ups and downs, but altogether in the right direction). When I began my recovery journey, I followed many Health at Every Size (HAES) accounts on Instagram. Many of them talk about binge eating, and one account talked about how there is nothing wrong with comfort eating. We all have coping mechanisms, and as long as you are not harming yourself (i.e. eating to the point of making yourself sick), then comfort eating is really not a bad coping mechanism. Restriction of any kind will only make binges more overwhelming.
I was repulsed by this advice at first. You mean I can eat as much of what I want, whenever I want?! I did not trust my body to know her needs or her limits. I was afraid of the yawning cavern of yearning inside me, and I was afraid of what it would take to fill it. I was disgusted by my own need for physical, tangible comfort. I had so deeply internalized that my body only deserves punishment and cruelty. The idea of unharnessing her, letting her run free, made me feel uncomfortable.
I’m grateful that I moved past my discomfort to practice self-compassion. Self-compassion has changed the way I feed myself, but it has also changed the way I dress my body, the way I talk about my body, the way I feel about my body when I stand in front of the mirror. What used to be a mild distaste for my reflection has led to an intimate affection borne from the journey we’ve been on together. Our need for comfort is one of the most human things about us. How horribly fascinating that the things that are most foundational to humanity are the things we are often the most repulsed by.
I often contemplate the fact that I am raising a daughter in a world that wants her body and appetite to be small. I want to be tender with her humanity, so that she does not grow up believing that her body needs to be reigned in and punished for needing comfort. So when she searches for food, for warmth and nourishment and security, I pull her close, trying my best to teach her to trust her body’s hunger, that she can always eat for as long as she wants to.