[xelnagapurity]

Hey guys, my name is Stephen and I'm new on here, and I just wanted to share my story. I already have most of this posted in the about section of my blog, but I think it tells my story pretty well and it's kind of long so hopefully you read it all!

I've struggled with emotional eating for almost all my life. When I was younger, I wasn't really very "fat", but I was definitely a bit "pudgy", at that age it's the kind of baby fat that looks cute on a kid. When I started getting older, I found it harder and harder to control what I ate. I would eat everything I could. I would sneak food when others weren't around, and just had no will to stop eating everything in sight. Keep in mind though, I was only a kid.

But a lot of the patterns and behaviors that I had when I was a kid carried over into my teen years. I didn't like eating in front of people because I was ashamed at all of the food I was eating. When people were around, I wouldn't eat, and when they were gone, I would eat. It didn't matter whether it was large or small, I just felt ashamed of my eating habits and didn't want people to see me eat, as I was afraid they would judge me.

The funny thing is, for a lot of the time when I was eating and binging on food, I was actually in pretty good shape, and pretty thin. I played a lot of sports growing up, so it kept my weight down... and when I stopped playing them after the season, I would gain some pudgy pounds.

I remember one specific example: I was going to a comedy show to see Carrot Top perform, and I remember walking around the arena feeling as fat as could be. I got to meet him and I got my picture taken with him which was really cool. I'll get back to this point later.

All throughout High School my weight almost broke the scale. When I was about 13 I weight 210lbs, and when I was a Sophomore in High School I weighed over 300 pounds, over 30% body fat, and was literally an obese kid - some people actually got scared for me if I continued down that same path.

No matter what I did to try and lose weight, nothing seemed to work. I hated going to the gym, and would make all these excuses not to go. I would literally say "It's Friday. I'll just wait until Monday to go so it will be a fresh start and I can REALLY start working out!" As you probably can guess, that never worked. I said that pretty much every week for a few years. I would also say that with eating healthy. "I've made the decision to eat healthy so I live a better life!... but I'll start NEXT week..." I even went so far as to STOP eating healthy if I made ONE slip up. One slip up isn't an excuse for sabotaging a healthy lifestyle, but if your a hardcore emotional eater, it's all the excuse you need.

I literally felt like I was trapped under a blanket of fat. When I was in High School, I was pretty much on a sugar, fat and grease diet: I would have 3 or 4 bowls of cereal in the morning; I would have 2 giant peanut butter cookies, 1 chocolate milk, a candy bar, and sometimes even 1 liter of soda on top of that about 2 hours later during break; for lunch I would usually have 2 pieces of the greasiest pizza you can imagine, plus a candy bar and a large soda or two, plus maybe a cookie; and I had all of that, and it was only 12:30pm in the afternoon. Even though I had all of that food, I STILL struggled not to eat more. I ate like it was my mission in life. It was like a life or death decision.

But one of the key moments that helped me have even the tiniest bit of control over my hunger was when I saw that picture that I took with Carrot Top when I met him at his show. I remembered that my aunt had the picture on her refrigerator before, and I went to look at it one day and it wasn't up there. Keep in mind that I hadn't seen it in about 4 or 5 years.

So I asked her if I could see the picture, fearing that I would look as fat in the picture as I remember feeling. But the craziest thing happened that changed my way of thinking... I wasn't fat in the picture. I was skinny and as in shape as can be. And this blew my mind, because I remember feeling SO FAT that I was EMBARRASSED to be out in public feeling as fat as I did! This was a huge shift in my thinking, and I remember that I felt more in control because right then and there, I realized that emotional eating was mostly in my HEAD!

But over time I read more and more about emotional eating and the process and the internal aspects of emotional eating. So over time after doing a lot of work on myself, I think I can now say that I've beat emotional eating, but even still, staying in control of my eating habits takes work. As I've lost weight, I've also been able to help other people. I mean, I haven't been able to help anyone lose 20 pounds in 1 week or anything absurd like that, but I've been able to give people some tips and little tricks that I use to stay in control, and some advice that has seemed to work for them also.

So I really enjoy helping others overcome emotional eating, and even if I don't have the magic solution that will make you wake up tomorrow free of emotional eating, I've dedicated myself to really try and help others with this problem because it has been such a huge part of my life that I have overcome and I hopefully can help others in any way, shape, or form also.

So HOPEFULLY you've made it to the end of this super long post, and I hope you found my story somewhat interesting or inspiring and I just want to say thanks again if you've made it this far!

So recently I created a website/blog setup that's dedicated to helping others end emotional eating and binge eating from their lives.

Thank you so much for reading this everyone, I'll talk to you all soon!

Stephen

[Onederchic]

Welcome to 3FC and good luck with your goals.

[DhaniCauldwell]

Welcome!

Dhani