Emotional Eating 101
26 04 2008I am doing some more work into emotional eating as it is something that is a big part of my love hate relationship with food.I was surfing The Fit Shack blog the yesterday and JoLynn Braley was talking about the Shrink Yourself Diet Plan that looks into the emotional side of eating. Well I took the free diet profile analysis and surprisingly it was dead on as to what my eating habits look like. It said that I am a merry go round dieter. Which is very true I freely admit this.
I decided to sign up for the four day emotional eating 101 emails. They give you an article to read and then some questions to ask yourself. These are the questions they ask in the first module.
How hard is it for you to see emotional eating in your life? Is it very visible? If so, describe the instances you’ve got in mind. Do you think instances like this are the main obstacle to you losing
weight? If it’s not so visible, why do you think you have trouble eating less and exercising more?
For me it isn’t very hard to see where I do a chunk of my emotional eating. I seem to do a lot of mindless eating when I am working on the computer and I also used to have a very bad habit of going for what ever was close when I would get angry or upset or depressed. This happened frequently when I was growing up it seemed food was my only outlet from the abuse. I knew I was a little bit overweight it seemed as though I was always 20 pounds overweight and could never get under a certain number because I knew what I needed to do in order to stay in that 20 pound comfort zone. I knew that if I just did an average job of eating right that I would never achieve maximum potential. I think that is also true in many other patterns in my life. I never felt that I really had to be anyone special because at the time I didn’t feel special. I felt dirty, unattractive and like a loner. I didn’t think there was anyone who could relate to how I felt about abandonment issues I suffered from an early age. Many times I just wanted to curl up into a corner and let the world pass me by.
Do you have trouble differentiating between emotional hunger and physical hunger? Describe
a time when you may have mistaken emotional hunger for physical hunger.What was happening at the time to make you emotionally hungry? Why didn’t you deal with it directly, instead of using food? This is a good question in relation to boredom eating. I sometimes do eat when I am bored. I just eat because well I am not hungry I just eat to have something to do. I did this last weekend and just felt horrible about it the next day. My son and I had been out and about and we had just had a bag each of M and M’s. Well ok I was physically hungry at that point, but then I had kept promising my son a hot fudge sundae and well mom couldn’t get the kiddo something and not get herself something. Yeah you can see where this is going. I got an ice cream too just because I wanted something to do while he was eating his ice cream. I sometimes catch myself snacking at meetings because well it is there and the people who prepared it for us worked so hard to fix it. Yup I grew up in the household that you ate what was on your plate and you also didn’t leave much leftovers or they became the meal for the next day. There again old habits from the past carry over into adulthood. I don’t do that so much now. I used to take seconds growing up just to not to have to eat leftovers the next day or try and get a second helping before my brothers got one. Now if it is leftover it is ok with my son eating at school all week I have to have something to eat for lunch so now I am cool with leftovers. Now actually I did do very good this past week dealing with my emotions instead of going to the fridge or cupboards to find something to snack on. I was upset about his father finding a loophole around a warrant for his arrest and I could have done any number of things but instead I got online and chatted to my friends in order to keep my mind from going to food. I am working on that it is going to be an ongoing issue with me.
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Hi Joe,
Well I can sure relate to you on the emotional eating topic! I’m glad to hear that you signed up for the Shrink Yourself emotional eating emails, too.
You probably already realized this but Shrink Yourself isn’t a diet plan at all. There’s no nutrition or exercise advise but instead it gets to “the heart” of the matter of why we emotionally eat and helps us learn what triggers our emotional hunger. It’s 12 weeks long, which is actually a short amount of time when you consider that we’ve been emotionally eating for most of our lives. I’m like you, I also started emotionally eating when I was growing up - I think a lot of people have done the same.
Thanks for sharing your insights into your emotional eating and I wish you all the best with healing it - I still have 4 more weeks of my emotional eating experiment with the Shrink Yourself program - I update them each Wednesday, so stay tuned for that.