Ep 80- Secret Eating

August 21, 2025

Have you ever eaten in secret, snuck food late at night, or felt ashamed of what or how much you were eating? You’re not alone. In this episode, we dive into the psychology behind why you secretly eat and how to stop.

You'll learn:

• What is secret eating?

• How shame, guilt, and perfectionism fuel secret eating habits

• Practical steps to feel comfortable eating in front of others again

TRANSCRIPT:

 Confident eaters who has ever secret eaten before. If you have, you are not alone. I have more stories than I could count of times that I have eaten out of a trash can in a bathroom alone in my room, so I promise you that this is something that, as shameful as it can feel, is a lot more common than you might imagine.

First, to define what secret eating is, it is characterized by eating privately to conceal being seen. So it is usually  accompanied by these feelings of shame, like, there's just something wrong with me. Guilt, I'm doing something wrong. I shouldn't be eating this. Feeling like I just wanna be alone, so no one has to look at me when I am eating this large amount of food.

And there's a few behaviors I commonly see that identify secret eating, whether that's eating alone in your car or your bathroom. Sneaking food late at night when everyone's asleep or before anyone wakes up, hiding wrappers under the piles of trash or throwing them away in a separate trash can. Keeping a secret stash of food, pulling food out of the trash can.

Have you ever thrown something away only to fish it outta the trash can and eat it again later? Maybe you've told yourself this doesn't count because no one saw it. If I don't have to see it, if no one else has to see it, if I can just pretend like it never happened, maybe I'll feel like it doesn't count anymore.

So why is it that we secret eat? First, it's to protect our identity as a healthy person. This is something that came up a lot for me. I was always viewed as the person who ordered the salad without dressing out, worked out all the time, was always researching the latest nutrition stuff, and so I didn't want anyone to think that I wasn't this healthy person that I had put on this persona of.

I wanted people to think that I was really good around food, that it was just easy for me that I didn't struggle when secretly I did. So if you want to try to protect your identity as I'm this healthy person, I have it all together. That's another one. If you like your life to look perfect, which I mean, that is what we are taught.

We all like our life to look  perfect because we think that means we will have better survival outcomes if people think better of us. So by trying to protect our identity it stems from this fear of judgment because judgment to our lower brain means social death, and that could mean we get eliminated from the tribe and we're not gonna survive anymore.

So in order to feel accepted, loved, worthy, we think we need to fit in. We think we need to do the right thing. And on our brains, that means if we're overeating, that might mean we're doing something wrong and we need to hide this.  So there's this feeling of shame. The belief that if people knew this about me, they'd reject me.

They wouldn't wanna be my friend anymore, they wouldn't love me. There can also be possible inner child wounds. Many secret eaters have learned that it wasn't safe to express needs, emotions, or messiness. Who was taught that as a kid? That if I am gonna cry, I better just suck it up or I better go to my room and not show that in public.

So eating alone can become this act of rebellion or  self-soothing against that.

Admitting it that we're overeating often makes it feel real. It's like I can't even admit to myself that I'm struggling with food, let alone someone else. So when we are overeating in public or binge eating in public, it makes us feel like it is so much more real that if we try to hide it from ourself and from  everyone else.

If you have this thought of what  will they think of me? If they see me eating a chocolate chip cookie in public, will they think, oh, she's already fat. She shouldn't be eating that. Will they think, oh, she's so unhealthy. Will they judge you? If you imagine that people are going to think those things about you, it is because you're thinking about them yourself.

It is because you think you shouldn't eat a cookie in public because you're already overweight. It is because you think you're doing something wrong or being unhealthy. Anytime we imagine some other person is having these thoughts about us, it's probably because we are having these thoughts first. So our work is not to change what other people are going to think because we don't know. And the truth is people might think things about us, but if we feel good about ourself first, then it doesn't matter because we don't believe those thoughts.

If someone came up to you and said, I hate your purple hair, but you didn't have purple hair, you'd just be like, oh, that's weird. Why would they ever say something like that? I don't have purple hair, and it wouldn't bother you. So it's the same thing if you don't think I'm doing something wrong, and if you learn to be a natural eater and in control of your eating habits, you're not gonna be worried about what people are thinking about you when you're eating because you no longer believe that about yourself.

Another reason we secretly eat is because we fear losing control around other people. And this makes a lot of sense, especially in the beginning when you have no skills or tools around your urges, around your thoughts, around your emotions. And so you're scared that if I go into the situation, if I start eating these cookies at the wedding, I might go crazy. This is coming from the fear of being seen in your vulnerability.

So we eat in secret to protect ourselves, but that very protection starts to become a prison I where we're hiding who we really are from the world. We're hiding our goals, our ambitions, and our hardships from the world, and it makes it feel like we can't be our authentic selves. That we have the secret that no one can know about.

Oftentimes it feels like we can finally be bad in private without anyone having to see. If you have a lot of these good, bad food labels, which we'll talk about in a minute, that can lead you to wanting to do the bad foods in private so you can finally enjoy them. Without the guilt, without the shame, without the fear that anyone will say anything about what you're eating.

I see this happening a lot with moms too. They don't want their kids to say something about what they're eating. They don't want them to think that they're being unhealthy, so they'll go eat in secret.  and finally beneath the secret eating is this thought of, I'm doing something wrong.

Now there's a difference between shame and guilt, and shame and guilt can both be at play in secret eating. Shame is thinking that there's something wrong with me versus guilt is I did something wrong. And it's important that we get into guilt because it feels a little bit better to make it as like, I'm doing something wrong versus there's something wrong with me.

There's nothing wrong with you for eating a lot of food, okay? You're still a normal human. And in fact, a lot of these eating habits that we feel crazy about make a lot of sense when you look at your history with restriction and dieting, it all adds up.

But when we're in this, what I call a shame bubble, we can't see a way out. We just wanna hide. We wanna do nothing. We wanna lay in bed and watch Netflix all day and eat snacks. So we need to get out of the she bubble in order to heal. And what that looks like is saying, all I'm doing right now is eating food. There's nothing wrong with that.

Okay, so what is going to be the solution to stop secret eating? These will all be in a worksheet in the show notes. If you download my podcast worksheet bundle, you are going to get, I think  we have at least over 10 worksheets in there now that you can use as a podcast companion guide so you can study it a bit deeper.

So the first thing I want you to do to stop secret eating is to spot the pattern. Look for when does it usually happen? Do I normally secret eat at nighttime after conflict? When alone? What are your go-to foods that you tend to eat in secret? Is there a place you go to a certain emotion before secret eating episode? Is there a person or a couple of people who you are afraid of seeing you eat imperfectly and why?

If you were afraid of your mom seeing you eat a cookie, why is that? Is it because she usually makes a comment? Is it because someone calls out your weight? Hopefully not because I wanna have a talk with them, but if it happens, then it makes sense on why you want to eat in secret and we need to be okay having someone say something about our eating habits in public. If we want to practice eating in front of others. Or having a conversation and setting some boundaries.

What are you afraid would happen if someone saw you eating like this? Are you afraid that your husband would get divorced from you? Are you afraid that someone would stop being your friend? Are you afraid that someone wouldn't love you as much anymore? Get all those thoughts out to create some awareness.

Then I want you to unravel the thoughts that you're doing something wrong or being bad. So right out a time that you ate in secret. Think about a time recently where you went and you ate alone on purpose.

Were you actually doing something wrong or bad? Answer that question. It might be yes. The answer might be I was truly overeating. It was a true binge and that is something I don't want to be doing, but sometimes we have this thought that we're doing something wrong when we're really not.

For example, like you might have just wanted to eat one cookie, but you were scared to eat it in front of your best friend, so you went and ate it in secret after, and then maybe you felt so guilty that you had three more as well. But eating the cookie isn't really doing something bad that's just enjoying a piece of pleasure. And we're allowed to have pleasure in our lives.

And if you think you were doing something wrong or bad, how do you show up when you think that way? What happens for most of us, we go into all or nothing thinking and then we say, screw it. We've already ruined it. We're already being bad. Might as well keep going. And what might change if you got curious and compassionate instead, if you instead said, how interesting that I want to go eat in secret, why is that?

What if I had compassion for myself when I start eating that first cookie in secret? I came back to myself and I said, I love you. I'm here for you. I have my back. I do care. It does matter what I eat. I am important. What might change then, in that eating behavior.

It is really important here that you start to value the opinion of yourself over others' opinions. People are always going to have thoughts.  You can put the same situation of you eating one cookie in a room full of a hundred of people, and all of the people are going to have a different opinion about it. That's just the truth of life. People are going to have their thoughts, but what you can control is your thoughts about yourself, how you value yourself, your opinion. And the truth is, no matter who you hide from in this world, you can never hide from yourself. You always see what you're doing and that impacts your confidence, that impacts your self trust. That impacts your relationship with yourself.

So what you are seeing about your eating habits is important. It does matter, and in fact, it is the most important person who sees because you are with yourself all day, every day for the rest of your life. And so you want to decide that no matter what anyone else thinks about this habit, I want to choose. Maybe I'm okay with having the cookie and I want to value my opinion on that. Maybe I'm not okay with having it, and I wanna trust my opinion on that. Even if everyone around me is saying, well, you're supposed to have a cookie, it's a birthday party. If you value your opinion of yourself first, you will put your decision of which you want above anyone else's.

Next, you need to start to release your identity around being this perfect person or this healthy eater. No one is a perfect person. No one, and if you think they are, they're not. They're just hiding something from you as well. No one is a 100% healthy eater, whatever even that means. Maybe even that person, you know, that tends to eat a hundred percent clean again, whatever that means. Like what does it mean to eat a hundred percent clean? But let's say they only eat foods that are grown out of the ground. Or slaughtered and eaten as an animal. Even those people, they're not perfect. And what we eat is not the only aspect of our health.

So allow yourself to just be the normal eater, the confident eater, the intuitive eater, whatever you want to your new identity to be. But it's not gonna be the perfect  healthy eater. It's gonna be the normal eater, the natural eater.

And finally, I want you to purposely practice eating your trigger foods in front of others. So if you always eat, I ate a lot of Nutella in secret. You guys know this, that this was always my trigger food that I binged on. I would just like take finger folds of it.

I had to practice eating Nutella in front of other people. As exposure therapy for my food fears. Did I overeat on it? Sometimes, yes I did and sometimes I did feel a little guilty after I did feel it a little ashamed that other people saw that, but I had to practice eating in front of other people to show myself I'm not doing something wrong.

This will rewire the belief that you need to hide. You don't need to be on or perfect when eating in front of others. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has slip up from time to time. And some people actually find this exercise so helpful because when they're eating in front of others, they're often less likely to binge.

So practice being present with yourself around this food and with other people. And in my Confident Eater program, I walk you through how to handle urges and how to eat these trigger foods in moderation. So if you want further support with that, I am here for you. All right. Have a good week. Confident Eaters.

Talk to you next week.