Lasagne, Ice Cream... and All the Feelings In Between: Rethinking Our Relationship With Food

In this article you’ll learn:

• Why food becomes a comfort and a control mechanism

• How trauma and the nervous system shape eating patterns

• What genuine recovery feels like

• How therapy can help

Growing up in Italy, food was never just about eating. It was a language of love, celebration, and belonging. A towering plate of lasagne meant my mother cared. A shared gelato on a summer evening was pure joy—and sometimes, let's be honest, a clever bribe from a parent who knew exactly how to negotiate with a reluctant child. In my family, as in so many Italian homes, food expressed affection, gathered us together, and helped us feel seen and loved.

But food is complex—even in cultures that celebrate it. Alongside pleasure and connection, it can become a source of anxiety, conflict, and pain. Because here's something we don't talk about enough: from our earliest days, food becomes our first emotional regulator. Babies are soothed with milk when they cry. Toddlers are rewarded with treats for good behaviour. Upset children are offered biscuits to stop their tears. Without anyone planning it, we learn that food doesn't just fill our stomachs—it fills emotional voids, quiets distress, and makes difficult feelings more bearable.

And unlike alcohol, drugs, or other substances we might turn to for comfort, we cannot abstain from food. We must eat to survive. This makes our relationship with it uniquely complicated, and when things go wrong, uniquely difficult to heal.

Food as Emotional Currency

As adults, it's entirely natural to reach for something comforting when life feels overwhelming. That chocolate bar after a stressful meeting, the crisps while watching television alone on a Friday night, the late-night raid on the fridge when you can't sleep—these aren't moral failings. They're learned patterns of seeking comfort, and there's neuroscience behind why they work, at least temporarily.

When we eat pleasurable foods—especially those high in sugar, fat, or salt—our brain's reward circuitry lights up. Neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin flood our system, temporarily boosting our mood and soothing distress. For a brief moment, we feel better. The problem, of course, is that the relief doesn't last. The stress is still there. The loneliness hasn't gone away. The difficult emotion we were trying to escape returns, often bringing guilt and shame along with it. That same relationship with food that once brought comfort can spiral into something that resembles addiction—a compulsive reaching for food not because we're hungry, but because we're hurting.

Why This Relationship Is So Uniquely Complex

Our relationship with food is unlike any other in our lives because it's woven into survival itself. We cannot simply "quit" food the way someone might quit smoking or drinking. We have to engage with it multiple times every day, for the rest of our lives. This means we can't walk away from a problematic relationship—we have to heal it from within, while still depending on it.

But the challenge runs deeper than this. The relationship between what we eat and how we eat is shaped by far more than physical hunger. Food signals become entangled with a complex web of emotions: comfort, nostalgia, loneliness, boredom, stress, celebration, love, and sometimes, control. Add to this the societal layer—cultural standards that equate health with thinness, worth with a certain body type, discipline with restriction—and we find ourselves in a minefield. We're bombarded with images of six-packs and impossibly low body fat percentages, told that our bodies need "fixing," that hunger is something to override, that eating certain foods makes us "good" or "bad."

This toxic backdrop fuels not just clinical eating disorders but a widespread struggle with what we might call disordered eating: the constant preoccupation with food, the cycling through diets, the guilt that follows a meal, the shame about our bodies, the self-criticism that drains our energy and steals our joy. And here's something crucial: this suffering exists regardless of body size. You can be at a "healthy" weight and still be trapped in an exhausting, painful relationship with food and your body.

The Roots of the Struggle: Trauma, Control, and Our Nervous System

Through both my personal and professional experience as a Clinical Psychologist, I've learned that eating difficulties are rarely just about food. More often, they're about something deeper—something that happened, something we experienced, something we're trying to manage or make sense of.

Sometimes the trauma is directly connected to food or bodies. Perhaps you were shamed for your weight as a child, or put on diets before you even understood what that meant. Maybe there were hurtful comments from family members about your eating, or mealtimes were battlegrounds of conflict. Perhaps you grew up watching a parent struggle with their own relationship with food, absorbing their anxiety and guilt. These experiences teach us that food is dangerous, that our bodies are wrong, that eating is something to feel ashamed about.

Other times, the trauma isn't about food at all, but food becomes the arena where we try to regain a sense of control. Childhood neglect or abuse, bullying, bereavement, relationship breakdowns, chronic stress, the relentless pressure of perfectionism—when life feels chaotic or overwhelming, controlling what we eat can provide a sense of agency. When we feel powerless in other areas, strict food rules can feel empowering. When we're numb or disconnected, binge eating can provide a brief moment of feeling something—even if that something is ultimately shame.

Understanding what's happening in our nervous system helps make sense of these patterns. When we're stressed, our body's threat response activates. The sympathetic nervous system takes over—the fight-or-flight mode—and suddenly, the signals we receive from our body become scrambled. Some people experience acute stress as a knot in the stomach, completely suppressing appetite. For others, stress triggers intense cravings for high-calorie, comforting foods. This isn't weakness or lack of discipline; it's biology. Your brain cannot distinguish between "I'm stressed about a work deadline" and "I'm being chased by a predator." It triggers the same response: prepare for threat, seek quick energy.

Under chronic stress, hormones like cortisol increase our cravings for comfort foods—those rich, sweet, or salty options that provide fast relief. Meanwhile, our body has an elegant system designed to regulate eating. Hormones like ghrelin tell the brain it's time to eat; leptin and peptide YY signal satiety when we've had enough. These messages travel via the vagus nerve, creating a dialogue between gut and brain known as the gut-brain axis. When this system is working well and we're calm, we can recognise hunger, distinguish it from other sensations, eat in response to it, and stop when we're comfortably full. But when stress hijacks this communication system, these signals become scrambled and difficult to interpret.

This makes it especially difficult to distinguish true physical hunger from emotional hunger. We feel an urgent sensation that seems to demand food, but what we actually need might be rest, connection, comfort, or simply to feel and process an emotion.

The Confusion and the Quick Fixes That Don't Fix

In this confusion—unable to distinguish what our bodies truly need, feeling ashamed of our eating patterns, watching the number on the scale dictate our self-worth—we often turn to external solutions. Diets. Meal plans. Nutritional protocols. Apps that count every calorie. Rules about "good" and "bad" foods. Intermittent fasting. Keto, paleo, juice cleanses. And more recently, weight loss medications.

These approaches promise relief, and sometimes they deliver it, at least initially. There's a certain peace in following rules, in having someone else make the decisions, in feeling "in control" again. But here's what they rarely do: improve our ability to tune into our bodies' actual needs, regulate difficult emotions without using food, or foster genuine self-acceptance. In fact, research shows that restrictive dieting often makes things worse, increasing food preoccupation, triggering binge eating, and deepening the sense that we can't trust ourselves around food.

Weight loss medications might suppress appetite and lead to weight changes, but they don't address the psychological and emotional layers beneath our eating patterns. When the medication stops, if nothing deeper has shifted, the struggles return—often more intense than before.

The Cycles That Keep Us Trapped

Many people find themselves caught in predictable cycles that feel impossible to break. You restrict food, following rigid rules or cutting out entire food groups. Your body becomes biologically hungry and psychologically deprived. Eventually, you "break"—a binge episode that feels out of control. The guilt and shame that follow are crushing. You tell yourself you'll be stricter next time, more disciplined. And the cycle repeats, often intensifying with each turn.

Or perhaps it's the emotional eating cycle you recognise. A difficult feeling arises—stress, loneliness, anxiety, boredom. You feel overwhelmed and reach for food to soothe it. The food provides temporary relief, a brief escape. But afterwards, guilt and shame add to the emotional burden you were already carrying. Now you're dealing with the original distress plus the shame about eating. This increased emotional load makes you more vulnerable to reaching for food again. Round and round it goes.

Running underneath all of this is often a harsh inner voice, a critical monologue that attacks: "You're so weak. You have no self-control. Why can't you just stop? Everyone else can do this." This inner critic, trying in a misguided way to motivate you, actually damages self-esteem and makes change harder. The shame it generates becomes part of the problem it claims to solve.

These cycles are exhausting. They drain energy, occupy mental space that could be used for things that matter, and steal joy from everyday life. And the internal refrain—"I just need more willpower"—misses the point entirely. This isn't about willpower. These are learned patterns, written into your nervous system through years of experience, trauma, and cultural messaging. And because they're learned, they can be unlearned.

What Eating Disorders and Disordered Eating Actually Look Like

When these difficulties become severe and persistent, they may meet criteria for what we call eating disorders. The NHS provides a helpful overview of different types of eating disorders and their symptoms. Anorexia nervosa involves severe restriction, an intense fear of weight gain, and a distorted perception of one's body—seeing oneself as "too big" even when dangerously underweight. Bulimia nervosa is characterised by cycles of binge eating followed by desperate attempts to compensate through purging, excessive exercise, or fasting. Binge eating disorder—actually the most common eating disorder, affecting around one in fifty people in the UK—involves recurrent episodes of eating large amounts while feeling completely out of control, followed by intense shame, but without the purging behaviours.

While much of the conversation around eating disorders has traditionally focused on restrictive eating and the pursuit of thinness—struggles that disproportionately affect women—there's another pattern that often goes unrecognised, particularly among men: muscle dysmorphia, sometimes called bigorexia. This involves an obsessive preoccupation with not being muscular enough, leading to extreme exercise regimes, rigid high-protein diets, excessive supplement use, and sometimes the use of anabolic steroids. Like other eating and body image disorders, bigorexia is driven by distorted body perception, where someone looks in the mirror and sees themselves as small or weak despite being objectively muscular. The compulsive behaviours—spending hours in the gym, meticulously tracking macros, avoiding social situations that might interfere with training—can be just as consuming and damaging as restrictive eating, yet they're often dismissed or even praised as "dedication" or "discipline." Men struggling with this often suffer in silence, their distress unrecognised because it doesn't fit the stereotype of what an eating or body image disorder "should" look like.

But many people struggle significantly without meeting these clinical criteria. Constant food preoccupation, rigid eating rules, guilt after eating certain foods, eating in secret, skipping meals to "save calories," over-exercising to "burn off" food, weighing yourself multiple times daily, avoiding social situations that involve eating, defining your worth by your body size—this is disordered eating, and it causes real suffering. Your distress is valid. Your struggle deserves attention and care.

Healing: A Different Kind of Work

Therapy offers a space to untangle these threads, to understand the story beneath the eating patterns, and to build a different relationship—not just with food, but with yourself.

This work begins with awareness, but not the judgmental kind. We start by noticing, with curiosity rather than criticism, what's actually happening. When do you reach for food? What's the trigger? What are you feeling before, during, and after eating? What stories are you telling yourself about your body, about eating, about your worth? Awareness without judgment is the foundation. We cannot change what we cannot see clearly.

From there, the work branches in multiple directions, all interconnected. You learn to reconnect with your body—to distinguish physical hunger from emotional hunger, to notice fullness cues that have been drowned out by years of dieting or emotional eating, to rebuild trust in your body's wisdom. This interoceptive awareness—the ability to sense what's happening inside you—is often disrupted in people with eating difficulties, and restoring it is essential.

We work on calming your nervous system, creating enough safety and regulation that you can actually hear what your body is telling you. We develop alternative coping strategies because if food has been your primary tool for managing difficult emotions, you need other options in your toolkit—ways to self-soothe, to regulate emotions, to meet your needs for comfort and connection that don't always revolve around eating.

There's the work of softening that harsh inner critic, developing self-compassion instead of self-attack. Research shows consistently that self-compassion—not self-indulgence, but genuine kindness toward yourself—is the foundation of lasting change. We challenge the unhelpful beliefs that drive disordered eating: "I'm worthless if I'm not thin," "Eating makes me weak," "My body is disgusting." These thoughts, often absorbed unconsciously from diet culture or traumatic experiences, can be examined, questioned, and replaced with something more balanced and compassionate.

And then there's the deeper layer—processing the trauma that often underpins these patterns. This is where approaches like EMDR and Brainspotting become particularly powerful. Traditional talking therapy helps you understand your relationship with food consciously, helps you change thoughts and develop new skills. But trauma and deeply ingrained patterns often live in parts of the brain that don't respond well to logic or willpower alone. They're locked into your nervous system, playing out automatically.

EMDR and Brainspotting work directly with your brain's processing systems to resolve traumatic memories, reduce the emotional charge of triggering experiences, shift automatic stress responses away from food toward healthier alternatives, and release shame that's been held in the body. Many clients tell me they've tried everything—diets, meal plans, previous therapy—and still felt stuck. Often, this is because the trauma or deeply wired patterns haven't been addressed at this neurological level. These approaches can create shifts that feel like they happen beyond willpower—because they do. They're working with your nervous system itself, not just your conscious mind.

What Recovery Actually Looks Like

Recovery doesn't mean you'll never think about food again. It doesn't mean achieving some perfect, zen-like relationship with eating where you're always calm and measured. Real recovery is messier and more human than that.

It looks like eating when you're hungry without intense planning or anxiety. It's enjoying food—yes, including lasagne and ice cream—without drowning in guilt afterwards. It's having days where your eating feels "off" without spiralling into shame and self-attack. It's noticing stress or difficult emotions arising and having multiple ways to respond, not just reaching for food. It's looking in the mirror and seeing yourself with more kindness, or at least less cruelty. It's engaging in social situations that involve food without dread. It's trusting yourself around food again, even imperfectly.

Most importantly, it's about reclaiming the mental and emotional space that food struggles have occupied. When you're not spending hours thinking about calories, planning meals, criticising your body, feeling guilty about eating—you have energy for other things. For relationships, creativity, work that matters, experiences that bring joy. That's what freedom looks like.

You Don't Have to Navigate This Alone

If you've recognised yourself in any of this—if you're tired of the food struggles, the body shame, the cycles that never seem to end—please know that this can change. You're not broken. You're not weak. You're not failing at willpower.

You're a human being navigating a complex relationship with something you need to survive, while living in a culture that makes that relationship incredibly difficult. The patterns you've developed, however painful they are now, likely served a purpose once. They helped you cope. They gave you a sense of control when you needed it. But you don't have to stay stuck in them.

Whether your struggles meet criteria for a formal eating disorder or exist in that grey area of disordered eating, whether you're dealing with binge eating or restrictive patterns or something in between, whether this has been going on for months or decades—therapy can help. Working with a psychologist means addressing the multiple layers involved: the thoughts, the emotions, the nervous system responses, the trauma, the learned patterns, the cultural messages you've absorbed.

As a Clinical Psychologist with over twenty years of experience, I work with individuals and couples to understand what's driving these patterns, heal the traumas that maintain them, build healthier ways of relating to food and your body, and create lasting change that goes deeper than willpower. Using evidence-based approaches including CBT, EMDR, and Brainspotting, we can work together in a space rooted in curiosity, not judgment—in compassion, not criticism.

Taking the First Step

Change begins with a conversation. If you're in London, particularly around Canary Wharf or East London, or if you'd prefer online sessions, I offer a free fifteen-minute consultation where we can discuss your concerns and explore whether working together feels right. You can contact me here to book the consultation.

You deserve to eat without guilt. You deserve to inhabit your body with kindness. You deserve to reclaim the energy that food struggles have consumed. Healing begins with curiosity and kindness—towards food, towards your body, and towards yourself.

If any part of this has resonated with you or raised questions, please feel free to reach out for a confidential conversation. Let's work together to help you find a new way forward. About Dr Thomas Italiano Dr Thomas Italiano is a Clinical Psychologist with over 20 years of experience, specialising in anxiety, trauma, and eating disorders. Based in Canary Wharf, London, he offers evidence-based therapy including CBT, EMDR, and Brainspotting. HCPC registered, DClinPsy qualified. 📧 contact@thomas-italiano.com | 📍 Canary Wharf & Online Insurance accepted: Bupa, Aviva, AXA, Vitality, Cigna, WPA Book your free 15-minute consultation If you're struggling with eating difficulties or disordered eating, you don't have to face this alone. Here are some helpful resources: - Beat Eating Disorders Helpline: 0808 801 0677   Website: https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk - NHS Eating Disorders Information & Support   Website: https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/eating-disorders/ - Mind - Eating Problems Information   Website: https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/eating-problems/