Eating
You eat differently when nobody is watching and the secrecy has become its own structure.
In public you eat the salad. In the car on the way home you eat the second meal. You hide the wrappers. You go through drive-throughs and throw the evidence away before you get home. Your partner doesn’t know how much you actually eat. The performance of normal eating during the day requires the private eating in compensation.
The secrecy isn’t about the food. It’s about the gap between who you’re presenting as and what you’re actually doing.
The next round of secret eating arrives.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
© The Institute for Applied Strategic Therapy. All rights reserved.
Secret eating is a closed loop. The eating produces shame. The shame requires hiding. The hiding produces the conditions for the next secret eating. The next secret eating produces more shame. The loop has been running on the very things you do to keep it private.
You very likely came up in a household where eating was watched, monitored, or commented on, and you learned to eat in private to escape the watching. You may have grown up the kid who got pointed at for what you ate, and you’ve been running the secrecy ever since. You may have absorbed cultural messages about what your eating should look like in public, and the gap between the performance and your actual hunger has produced the secret eating as the workaround.
For the related patterns, see I binge eat , I eat at night , or I’m bulimic . For the broader framework, see I have an eating problem .
The secrecy is the system. The system runs on what you do to maintain it.
Strategic therapy gets between you and the gap between your public eating and your private eating, because the gap is where the secrecy lives. We address the performance you’ve been giving in front of others (the salad, the smaller portion, the careful order) and the compensatory eating that follows. When the public version stops being a performance, the private version stops needing to balance the books.
The wrappers stop being evidence. You eat the same plate whether someone is across the table or not.
Write to us and we'll get back to you personally. A qualified practitioner answers every inquiry, usually within two business days.
Message received. We'll be in touch at the address you provided.