No, I don't feel you were being judgmental. It's a conversation, I'm open to other interpretations as long as others know I come from a different place. I still don't think I explained it well enough but I'm glad you get the gist of it and even more glad you could draw a comparison in a more general way to your own life.

It's great to hear that not everyone struggles with feeling guilty about food. I only came to the realization recently of how bad I was about this. I feel great about my food choices now, whatever they might be. This is one of those particular aspects of my eating disorder - relearning that all foods hold nutritional value has been an important step in overcoming my ED.

We're all different. You can't break out of someone else's prison.

I really love that article and I think ideally that would be perfect. But I think that is alot harder to do. I do get pleasure from food in both good and bad ways. I can take a slow dreamy bite of cheesecake, savor every bit. Joke that it is orgasmic lol.

Or for example I am not a great cook but trying! I find something awesome on pinterest attempt to make it and it comes out great & it tastes great. The other day I made chicken kebabs. Which I have never made before, honestly I havent cooked chicken that often in my life even. They were like the best things I have ever made. Every bite was so good, it was healthy, and I was proud of myself. I was eating pure happiness lol

But when I think of emotional eating I think it is usually based on feeding my emotions, not food triggering emotions I guess. I really noticed it the other day when I had a delicious healthy meal made in the fridge waiting for me. It was soo good I had been thinking about it all day. But I had a really bad morning, was crying my eyes out and all I wanted to do was stuff my face with crap. It isn't even quite so much about the food but the feeling of being absolutely stuffed.


I really love what you said here. I have that problem where I do feel good or bad based on what I eat. And it does suck. Before I was losing weight & a huge [art of why I fell off was that I started overthinking about what I ate. I am very active on blogs, on forums all about weightloss and then you get the people doing xyz and wanting to copy them to feel like you are doing it right. Or feeling guilty because you are not following the latest fad. The whole carb thing really hits home for me. I do not wish to give up carbs, yes manage them but not give them up. And so often you get this overwhelming pressure that carbs are evil and it makes me doubt myself. I can be doing everything right and then feel like crap because I am not doing what someone else is? meh

Though I have anxiety disorder and tend to go alittle crazy and over worry myself lol

Great post, very insightful and self-aware. Regarding emotional eating as you described it: a lot of people, myself included, are aware of their emotional eating habits but don't understand how it works. There is a great chapter in the book Overcoming Overeating that explains the cognitive and behavior process of emotional eating. Once I understood the process I became acutely aware of how to fix it, and I've been working on it successfully ever since. Even the most seasoned dieters fall victim to it continuously, leading to the viscious yoyoing effect.

And boy you are right, humans are social creatures and they follow the pack to whatever outcome. I started to question the pack mentality as I slowly started to realize that seasoned dieters have a lot of knowledge but a bad track record of little success. Look, when a person tells you that low carb works and has multiple losses and gains on the diet I never question their character or their strength as a person. I do however question the benefits of the diet and people take it even more personally than if you question their willpower. It's a bizarre phenomenon to me, that people would defend their diet and blame themselves for failing on it but I do remember feeling the same way for a long time.

It's important not to allow external forces to dictate your progress. Looking inwards, focusing on my satisfying eating experiences and building my self esteem are better uses of my time than trying to argue against a diet mindset.

I am emotional eater for sure! when it comes to stress, sadness, problems, depression i start to eat! I reward myself with food as if i was a dog((( this is terrible( I am sure you can manage this emotional hunger. But i just do not know how to do it! If to focus your mind on something else you forget about hunger for a while. but only for a while..

Thanks for the link. I really enjoyed the article and believe I'm on the same wavelength as the author. I've never considered myself virtuous for eating healthy foods or derelict for eating unhealthy ones. For me, a life without baguette, Brie and wine picnics, streetside crepes, and all-you-can-eat sushi would lose some of its luster. Not gonna happen.

F.

If I try to focus on something my body will refocus me on a binge lol. I have found that incorporating mindful eating practices has helped me enjoy food more and get less anxious about eating.

It's great that you feel this way, I'm finally getting to the point where I've forgiven myself for enjoying food. It is totally possible to enjoy eating and letting go of guilt has completely enriched my life. Think about all the work, culture, and tradition that goes into baking a baguette, into developing the cheese, into growing the greats for wine, the skill that goes into making sushi. Food connects us to people, experiences, and joy.

Mindful eating practices have solved my portion control. Because I eat so slowly and with such focus on enjoying my food I have come to eat less and less and less. One cookie can offer so much pleasure if I take the time to enjoy it, it is a fulfilling experience all on its own. Compare that now to my binging days when a box of cookies was scarfed down in secret as quickly as possible. It was a painful experience, not at all enjoyable.

The time I spent hidden away gorging on huge amounts of foods is gone. Sitting at a picnic enjoying bread and cheese, being outside, it offers such a rewarding experience with food, an emotional experience.

I'm an emotional eater, I'm pretty sure.
It's my main problem. I eat perfectly all work week. Healthy food/healthy portion sizes. And if I have a cookie/candy or anything "off limits" I'm okay with it because I controlled it.
However...on the weekends I lose all my control and the very moment I get bored, i eat. I won't even be hungry, but if I'm not actively engaged in something i will be eating. Watching tv...reading...surfing the net...I will be eating something. I don't know why it is. It's very hard for me to control.

I also have moments where I had a horrible day at work. Not just a "oh, i worked so hard today, it was horrible." More like a "I worked so hard today and my boss did nothing but yell at us because he's having a bad day so all of us have to have a bad day and why am i even working in this job, ect..." and after a day like that all i want to do is go home, slam back a few hard drinks, eat a box of kraft mac n' cheese and not care at all that I'm over calories.
I need to learn to self soothe without food.

Sleep is actually a very good thing. For those of us who are classic emotional eaters, we want to address all our bodies' needs with food. We interpret all our senses as hunger. When we get tired at the end of the day we often reach for a snack - meanwhile our body is telling us "if you don't give me the sleep I need then you'll have to give me the energy to stay awake." Other times we need rest, sleep, relaxation, physical activity, these are all bodily needs.

This has been, and continues to be at times, me 100%. Really enjoyed this article and perusing the blog. It is very interesting to me to hear that some of you do NOT feel this way, I think that is wonderful, and I envy those feelings of neutrality. I am so curious, what is the difference? What makes people like wanna, and myself, equate certain foods choices with our morality/character, and not others? Any theories? Because if I can help my children never develop this way of thinking about food I would consider that a major parenting win.

That's a good question and just like you, I want to avoid passing on unnecessary food issues to my son. I don't have a scientific answer for you but my guess is that the emphasis placed on willpower got to me. If you think about it all the advice to "eat this, not that" doled out in diet programs, magazines and forums make it sound as if it is a matter of choice. When you hear a celebrity comment on their weight loss and say "I substituted carrots and hummus for cheeseburgers" it makes you say wow they have strength. Not to mention the positive reinforcement if dieting. Ever been out to lunch and order a burger and your friend orders a salad? Dot you say or think "oh gosh you're so good". It's cool to diet, it's cool to be sporty, it's cool to be restricting yourself, people get immense satisfaction from accomplishing to abstain from foods.

Some I us internalize that dichotomy very deeply. It's an ongoing struggle to be good.

As for my 3 yrs old, I don't reward him when he eats healthy food. He likes peas. Awesome. Eating should never be congratulated IMO. I never make him finish everything on his plate. I never say "one more bite". I don't keep a lot of sweets in the house but he does have some occassionally. He's allowed to eat whenever he wants, usually I compromise with him. If he asks for cookies I might say " do you want a banana or a cereal bar?" He chooses. If I don't have cookies he deals with it. If he's not hungry during meal time that's fine too. I just want him to feel comfortable expressing his hunger and not feeling obligated to eat if es not hungry.

I love this article. I have come to accept that emotional eating is not a bad thing. Everyone does it, even normal eaters do it occasionally. As long as I am aware of what I'm doing I have no ill feelings about it. I have a number of coping techniques that I use to deal with my emotions but sometimes, only food will do and that's ok! Since my hunger/satiety signals have become very strong it has become nearly impossible to overeat, so even my emotional eating moments are very small calorie wise.

Im glad you liked it. It definitely helped me see emotional eating in a whole new light. I have felt the same way lately with the hunger and satiety signals. I COULD eat to soothe myself but honestly, when Im not really hungry the food just doesn't taste as good and it doesn't make me feel as good as it used to. I am usually better off if I do something else to cope with my emotions. but, having the freedom and the non guilty choice to choose to take care of my emotions with food, has really made all the difference for me. And like you said, if I do choose to cope with food, it is way less food and it doesn't' turn into a guilty binge.

It's hard to believe that I have not binged in a few months. If you had asked me just a few months ago if I thought I could ever go without binging I would have said something like... NO. I believed that I would always and forever be a binger and the extent of my success would be to manage my eating disorder by forcing a healthy diet when I was in a lucid state, but the reward of binging was too great to get rid of, I was completely dependent on it. Without ever intending to or thinking it possible or even trying to I think that this is an actual cure for my eating disorder I think I'm binge-free. A very unexpected surprise. While I am still capable of emotional eating I no longer zone out or feel the need to. And believe me, I've tried! I've tested myself, I've gone through the motions of trying to go through a binge. And I can't follow through with it no matter how much I try. Every time I eat past fullness I feel miserably ill. I will drive myself to a drive thru and then drive right past it. I'll plan to take myself out for a full on steak dinner and get side tracked by the delicious sounding salad, wasn't in the mood for steak after all.

It all started because I was curious about hunger. Everyone was so afraid of hunger, afraid of awakening their hunger, offsetting their hunger with healthy snacks, just a general fear of being hungry. I knew I was eating all the time but I didn't know what hunger was. So I set out to feel my physical hunger and from that I was able to separate all my emotions from hunger. I put a little trust in my body to know what it needed and it has rewarded me with so much more than I've given it. It's only been 4 months of IE but I think I can go as far as to say that IE is curing my ED and pulling me out of a very long depression for which I've been advised to take medication several times in the past (never did though).

Congratulations Wannabe It's great to see your progress. Thank you for sharing your insight and experiences.