Josh TrentIdentity Transformation Architect and award winning Host of the Wellness + Wisdom Podcast—a decade-strong show with over 750 episodes and 15M downloads.

Overcoming Night Binge Eating: My Dysfunctional Family Secret #shorts

23 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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1:27

In this personal monologue, the speaker recounts a persistent addiction to nighttime binge eating that persisted even after improving daytime eating habits. He attributes the behavior to his upbringing in a highly dysfunctional immigrant family where both parents worked long hours, leaving the children to largely raise each other. This chaotic environment created feelings of hurt, loneliness, and stress, leading him to develop a secret coping mechanism of sneaking into the fridge and pantry at night to eat whatever he could find. As an adult, he recognizes the need to revisit and understand these early emotional triggers in order to break the cycle of night binge eating.

Chapters

I had this horrible addiction to nighttime binge eating. I can actually just like control all my eating in the daytime, but when it came to night after 8 PM, all bets were off, so to speak. And I usually thought that that was the reason why was because I wasn't just eating enough during the day. And even though I fixed that, I still found myself having the tendency to eat at night. So I had to dig a little bit deeper. We lived in what I could consider to be one of the most dysfunctional families on the planet. My parents were gone for 12 to 14 hours a day trying to support us, immigrants to a new land, trying to make a life for us. So I was being raised by kids that were 2 years older than me. And we all know what happens when kids try to raise other kids. It's almost like Lord of the Flies, so to speak. And the bullied will get bullied. So for me, one of the ways I was able to cope with this and ways in which I was able to have control over myself and my situation was to go into the fridge and to go into the pantry and to eat whatever was edible inside of those— inside of those areas. And this gave me a coping mechanism. It gave me a way to cope and deal with the amount of hurt, the loneliness, the stress I felt while being in that situation. And I needed to, as an adult, to dig back to where this came from in the first place.