Eating is an emotional activity. We often eat because we want to be social, because we want to enjoy the tastes, or because we want to feel better after a stressful event. As human beings, there’s no getting around the fact that we are emotional creatures. There’s also no getting around the fact that I will never eat solely for hunger’s sake, nor do I want to. My goal is to have a life in which I enjoy both social/emotional eating and eating from hunger alone, yet maintain a reasonably stable and lower weight.
To reach this goal, I will be losing weight as well as managing my emotions without so much assistance from food.
Now that binging is gone, I find that I still eat with subconscious emotions, particularly when I am in conflict. When I ate in big binges, it was clear that I was eating from emotional reasons. Now I find myself eating outside of hunger, trying to resolve an internal emotional conflict. Mostly, I cannot recognize that I even have an internal conflict. Here’s how my internal food fight goes:
- Experience a minor conflict, like wanting to have both a walk and to cook a nice dinner, however there’s not enough time to do both. I know DH would love a walk, but I’m not confident that I’ll have energy enough to cook if we walk as long as he’d like.
- Make a decision, or just start worrying about letting DH down.
- Suddenly I want to eat something and I’m off on a scavenger hunt in the kitchen. My inner voice says, (and my rational mind responds)
- Eat Cookies! I’m not hungry, and I don’t want cookies
- No wait, is there ice cream? Yeah, but it’s all the way downstairs
- What about an apple? Yum, I could do that. They’re nice and fresh
- Have you had lunch yet? Yes, I just ate. Hey wait a second! I’m not even hungry!
- Well, you need a little more. Eat anyway. Just taste this cookie. Isn’t there a bit of chocolate somewhere? But I don’t know why I’m eating if I’m not hungry.
- Doesn’t matter. Eat it anyway. Eat it fast so you won’t think about it. Crunch. But that’s not very satisfying. And I don’t really want it.
- Oh, then you need to eat more. It’ll taste better if you just stop thinking about it.
- And so the battle goes, until I either walk away or my inner voice shoves the food down my throat. Granted, I’m not protesting very much.
Now I’m trying to figure out how to interrupt those grazing periods, because they can surely add up in the calories, which works against my goal of losing weight. So far, I’ve been most successful when I a) recognize that I’m eating to soothe a conflict, and b) I remind myself that conflict will always exist, eating won’t solve it, and I don’t have to resolve all my conflicts to have healthy attitudes.
