Autonomous Eating Behaviour

You eat without being hungry. Or you don't eat, even though your body needs food. You stick to strict rules — or you break them all in uncontrollable bursts. You count calories, macros, points, or you stuff yourself indiscriminately with whatever is within reach. Your relationship to food has taken on a life of its own. It no longer obeys your natural rhythm, but a program that took over the controls somewhere along the way.

Medicine has many terms for this: emotional eating, binge eating, orthorexic tendencies, disordered eating behaviour. And all these descriptions have their validity. But they don't answer one question: Why has your body stopped regulating itself? Why don't you trust your own hunger anymore — and your sense of fullness even less?