Beyond willpower: Understanding overeating

Imagine an old tree stump. Over the years, it has grown mushrooms, moss, grass; it has blended into the forest so naturally that it feels almost wrong to remove it. You look at it and think: you could pull it out… but why? You should, maybe – yet you don’t want to. You want to, and you’re afraid. This is exactly how habits work.

Over time, they become overgrown with life: routines, familiar people, a certain social world. They serve a purpose. They become part of your identity. And that’s why you can’t simply “get rid of them.” This has nothing to do with willpower. You cannot uproot years-long patterns by force.

To change anything, you first need to understand yourself and your habits. Here, we explore overeating and the layers that often sit beneath eating patterns.

How personal history can shape our eating

Sometimes it’s a family story – a loyalty to traditions and values. It doesn’t matter that some of those traditions may be unhelpful or outdated. They are part of your family, and therefore part of you.

Sometimes it’s rooted in years of dieting. Then physiology takes the lead. Your wise brain has no idea when the next “famine” will come, so it prefers to keep you safe and overeat whenever it can. In this sense, you are still an ancient hunter-gatherer. Progress has moved on, but your brain is still faithfully performing its original task: keeping you alive.

And sometimes it’s about headaches, feeling unwell, low self-esteem, or simply a bad day. Food becomes medicine and comfort. Think of advertising slogans: “You deserve it,” “Treat yourself,” “Take a break.” This is learned behaviour which becomes a habit just after a few repetitions, becomes a habit. And habits are hard to break.

Living in a food environment that works against us

But personal history is only one layer. There is also the environment you live in, and it is designed to work against you.

The food industry, backed by top-tier marketers, has perfected everything: packaging colours, names, branding – all crafted to make you pick a product off the shelf, take it home, repeat the ritual, and come back for more. Ingredient lists, especially where sugar hides under dozens of aliases like dextrose or maltose, could fill pages. Teams of skilled professionals work to keep you buying regularly and to hook you on their formulas.

As Robert Lustig explains in Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine, modern processed foods are intentionally engineered to drive overconsumption rather than nourishment. He writes: “Processed food is addictive, not because of calories, but because of what’s been done to it.”

Lustig describes how added sugar, refined carbohydrates, and flavour enhancement disrupt appetite regulation and overwhelm the brain’s reward system, making overeating a predictable outcome rather than a personal failure.

So next time you walk into a supermarket, switch off autopilot and ask yourself why you’re choosing a particular item – not fish or potatoes, but packaged foods. Take salted caramel. Why is it salted? Because it tastes better, you can eat far more of it, and it’s less cloying. It gives you a maximal dopamine spike. After that, ordinary food can feel dull. 

And once certain foods are in the house, resisting them can become far more difficult – not because of a lack of self-control, but because of how our brains and habits work together.

Emotional eating is more complex than it sounds

And then there is the emotional layer. People talk a lot about “emotional eating,” and yes, it can be a major factor – but it’s not universal, and it can show up in unexpected ways.

You can eat to soothe loneliness or sadness, but you can also eat because you’re happy, because you’re with friends, because you need to relax, because the TV is on, because you’re celebrating a good day. Or simply because you felt like it.

When you put all these layers together: family, physiology, habits, environment, emotions – the picture becomes clearer. And only then can you begin to understand what is actually happening and how to step out of it.

Why does one person stop after two biscuits, while another feels as if their brakes are broken? Why do some people manage when others are around, but lose control when no one is watching? And then comes guilt, shame, disgust. A closed loop.

Taking a more compassionate first step

The first meaningful step is to acknowledge all these psychological and physiological layers. To explore how they work specifically in your life: where are the risks, where are the supports, and what is unnecessary or imposed from the outside.

And then, leaning on your strengths, begin to gently rewire your habits, naming everything that comes up along the way. It might be difficult emotions, or your favourite chocolate bar, loyalty to traditions or fear of the fridge. There are no “unimportant” topics.

Counselling can support this process by helping you explore the patterns and underlying reasons behind your eating behaviour at a deeper level. Rather than focusing solely on outcomes or control, therapy helps you notice what happens in real time – how triggers form, how habits have been reinforced, and what drives them so that you can begin to understand them from a fresh perspective.

As Judson Brewer observes in Unwinding Anxiety, “A problem can’t be solved by the same consciousness that created it,” highlighting why gaining new insights can be more transformative than effort alone. In counselling, you work collaboratively with a professional to sort through thoughts, emotions, and conditioned responses so that, over time, different choices become possible and more sustainable.

This path isn’t easy. Two steps up, one step down. That is how it often works. If you are fighting it alone, these steps look like a failure. In therapy, we recognise it as a successful learning path which leads to a completely different quality of life, and that change is permanent.

References

Lustig, R. (2021). Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine. London: HarperCollins.

Brewer, J. (2021). Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind. Penguin Publishing Group.