This piece was originally published here on Substack.
This blog post might surprise you if you’re expecting me to say something along the lines of “Your food was restricted” or “You weren’t allowed to have sweets or chips.” While food restriction can certainly lead to disordered eating, it’s not limited to that alone. I’ll be talking about the things you didn’t get—less visible than what you were eating: your emotional needs.
Why Emotional Needs Are Important
When we are born, we are dependent on our caregivers to keep us alive. They take care of us—feeding, holding, changing our diapers, making sweet faces to connect with us, swinging us to sleep. Our needs change as we grow older: Toddlers would need more play and exploration. Teenagers need more autonomy (e.g., deciding what to do and when), freedom of self-expression (e.g., wearing what they want, expressing healthy anger), and realistic limits such as having curfews, academic or household responsibilities.
No caregiver can meet every need perfectly. Caregivers are human too—with their own emotions, traumas, and limitations. Therefore, inconsistency in meeting a child’s needs is inevitable. However, when this inconsistency is frequent or misunderstood, children may internalize the belief that their needs are “too much,” “inconvenient,” or even “selfish.” Over time, they may learn that having needs leads to shame and rejection.
How Emotional Needs Influence Our Relationship With Food
The pain of unmet needs is too heavy for a child’s psyche. So, in a clever and adaptive way, we develop ways of coping and avoiding that pain. Unmet needs don’t simply vanish because we avoid them, though—they just move to the background. But it’s not easy to keep them there, so over time this conditioning can manifest as attempts to control or repress inner experiences through disordered eating behaviors.
Important: Two things can be true at once.
A caregiver may genuinely be unable to meet a child’s needs due to real-life limitations (e.g., financial struggles). A child asking for a burger might be met with a stressed-out “no” and a shameful expression from the caregiver. Although the shame stems from the caregiver’s own limitation, the child may internalize that their desires are a burden or shameful. Children are naturally egocentric; they lack the cognitive capacity to understand adult perspectives. This isn’t about blaming caregivers. Sometimes it’s cultural. Sometimes it’s what the caregivers experienced in their own families. Keep in mind that there are many layers that one can’t fully cover with a blog post.
The Right to Say “No”
Verbal “No”: If saying “no” led to guilt-inducing messages, criticism, or pressure to say “yes,” you may have learned to prioritize others’ needs at the cost of your own. This can lead to poor boundaries and people-pleasing tendencies.
Non-Verbal “No”: Especially in collectivist cultures, due to hierarchy, kids are taught to greet family members in a certain way. When wanting to just wave from distance with a smile, you may be forced to go hug or even kiss others when you are not feeling like it. Suppressing bodily autonomy can translate into disordered eating behaviors later in life.
Food/body-related expression: Difficulty saying “no” to food, emotional eating due to frustration of difficulty setting boundaries, or following external cues instead of internal hunger or fullness signals.
Safety to Show What You Feel and Need
If you were labeled as “needy” or burdensome, or made to feel guilty for sharing your emotions or asking for something, you may have internalized the belief that expressing needs is “bad”—or that you are bad for having them. Even something as subtle as a dissatisfied look can create this learning.
Alternatively, if emotional outbursts were punished or seen as weakness, you may have learned to suppress them altogether.
Food/body-related expression: This might show up as ignoring bodily cues like hunger, thirst, or the need for rest. Restriction can become a symbolic way to silence your needs. Because emotions are felt and stored in the body, disordered eating often functions as a way to numb or disconnect from those sensations—you feel full but ignore it and keep eating anyway, or you want to eat but override it and push yourself to work out instead.
Room to Get It Wrong
When mistakes were met with criticism, disappointment, or shame, you may have learned that love and approval were contingent upon “getting it right.” Instead of seeing errors as part of growth, they became threats to your worth. This can cultivate perfectionism, not only in academics, work, or relationships but also in how you approach food and your body.
Food/body-related expression: You might find yourself striving for “perfect” eating habits or body goals. Missing a workout or eating something “off-plan” can trigger guilt, shame, or a cycle of self-punishment through food. In this way, food becomes another arena to prove your worth or avoid perceived failure.
Autonomy to Choose and Have Preferences
If you grew up in an environment where decisions were made for you—what to wear, eat, feel, or believe—you may have learned to disconnect from your internal cues. When your preferences were dismissed or mocked, it taught you that your desires didn’t matter or weren’t trustworthy.
Food/body-related expression: A wish to control food intake may become a symbolic way to reclaim a sense of autonomy. You might find comfort in the control of what, when, and how much to eat because it offers a sense of safety or power that wasn’t available in childhood. Alternatively, constantly seeking external rules (diets, influencers, calorie counts) may mirror the early experience of having others dictate your choices.
Invitation to Be Messy, Indulgent, and Playful
Children need freedom to explore, play, and experience pleasure without fear of judgment. In families where order, discipline, or modesty were prioritized over joy, playfulness could be seen as frivolous—or even shameful. When pleasure is linked with guilt, the natural capacity to enjoy food, rest, or softness becomes distorted.
Food/body-related expression: You might experience guilt when eating foods you enjoy or feel uneasy when relaxing instead of “being productive.” This deprivation often leads to cycles of overindulgence and self-punishment—binging as rebellion, restriction as penance. When perfectionism or external validation drives your worth, body control becomes a way to prove discipline or deservingness of love.
The problem with disordered eating is that your needs are still left unmet.
As a kid, you learn to push through with these behaviours in the objective and subjective conditions you were in. The part of you that engages in such disordered behaviours is still living in the past, as if you are that little kid who doesn’t have any other option.
Remember: each time you choose to engage in the disordered behaviour, you are once again telling that kid they are shameful, guilty, bad—that they should remain invisible. Recognizing that you were never “too much” but instead deserving of support and nourishment can be a powerful step toward recovery.
As an adult, you do have an option to do things differently and heal. Therefore, healing often involves learning to give yourself permission to need, to speak, and to care for your body and emotions without shame. Without limitations, without suppression. Pay attention to that little kid inside you, paying tribute, honoring their needs because this is what they deserved in the first place.
Zeynep is a therapist, an eating disorder survivor, and an influencer. She struggled with an eating disorder and was stuck in the diet-binge-purge cycle for 8 years. So she “gets it.” You can learn more about Zeynep on her website.