Breaking the cycle of emotional eating
I’m starting the new month with an intensely personal post. The sky is blue, the birds are singing and there’s a sense of rebirth, abundance and hope in the chilled air.
I want to talk about emotional eating. The other side of my weight loss story. If you’ve read my other posts, you’ll know that I’ve been on a path of change for over four years.
Weight and weight loss is a big topic, one that’s constantly in the news and online. Whether we realise it or not, we’re bombarded with direct and indirect messages around food, body image and diet. From the adverts for the latest low-calorie food, to the ‘get slim for summer’ campaigns in magazines and the time-limited membership offers at the gym.
Through these messages we learn what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in relation to body image and behaviour around food.
And emotional eating is unacceptable.
There’s so much shame around being overweight. We’re told that we should have self-control, that it’s our own fault we end up overweight. These statements are based on logic, on the understanding that calories in versus calories out is the magical equation for maintaining a healthy weight.
I’m not a medical expert (and neither are those offering the above so-called ‘helpful’ advice) but we’re missing the other side of the coin; the emotions driving our eating behaviour.
No one wants to address this because it’s a complex area affecting people in different ways.
If you’ve always had a healthy relationship with food then what I’m about the say may be difficult to understand. I’m not making an excuse for my weight gain, I can only share my experience.
For me, reaching for food after a bad day was an automatic action, the same as breathing. This action was mindless, a habit, instinctive. I didn’t question it because it was the only coping mechanism I had.
This unhealthy behaviour was learned from a young age. Alongside using food as a coping mechanism, I also watched the adults around me wield silence as a weapon. Silence hung in the air like fetid cigarette smoke on a hot day.
Keeping your feelings inside, not speaking out when you’re upset or annoyed were very clear messages in my family.
With feelings and emotions shut away in a box, I was left with no outlet for expressing fear or sadness. And so, I ate.
No one talks about the crushing sadness that accompanies emotional eating. The feeling of floating, aimlessly in an ocean of despair. Like living under water, the sights, sounds and scents of life are dulled, muffled, slowed down and out of reach.
We’re not meant to admit this. We’re meant to be so ashamed of our unacceptable behaviour, of our weakness, our laziness, our lack of worth. And this is what sustains the fire of emotional eating.
Unhealthy eating habits need emotions in order to thrive. They need emotions and feelings to lose their way, to build within and increase in pressure until we are compelled to eat to dull the pain.
Yet eating only dulls the pain momentarily and adds another layer of self-hate and shame.
Growing up, I had many reasons to dull the pain with food. In my teenage years, bullies tore away any semblance of self-worth with their acerbic and caustic insults and jibes about my appearance. My home environment was challenging and I was an introverted child, unaware of her high sensitivity and what this meant for making sense of the world.
As I enterred adulthood, I began to distance myself from the environments and people that weren’t good for me. I learned that emotions are healthy and can be released in various ways. Slowly my own voice began to emerge.
I began to build a sense of self-worth so that I didn’t want to poison myself with sugar any more. A new walking hobby turned into a way of life and I wanted to push myself and beat my target of 12-mile hikes and fuel my body along the way.
Emotional eating no longer holds me in its grip. Now I’m able to see emotional eating for what it is; a reaction to a feeling, and a way of coping with the feeling. I’ve replaced food with more healthy coping mechanisms like talking, journaling, exercising and mindfulness.
There is so much more that I could write, enough to fill a book for certain. Yet I’m keen to share the upside to this story, and you’ll see this throughout my other posts, in how I am now and how I work towards my goals.
image credit: "peony" by hello-julie is licensed under CC BY 2.0