Wow Where is that switch? I'd like to turn mine on! I can't relate to the "that that to your daddy" part, but boy do I know about the emotional eating. I remember so vividly the early years of my mmarriage when I would be really upset with my husband, I'd go out to eat lunch and eat Mexican Food! Ususally by myself, Both that really hurt HIM didn't it!!!

I know I'm not as bad as I once was, but I can't seem to get the emotion out of eating.

Wow, that thing about "give it to your dad and you'll feel better" is way over my head. Is your mom around, and can she rationally discuss what she was thinking? My mom gets nuts and starts defending herself if I even hint that my food issues could be related to her childrearing. I would be surprised to hear that all of us did not have messed up food relationships as children. My story is that I was the only obese child of four, with my mother saying "I don't understand it - she eats less than all of them". Each meal became a lesson in portion control, carb restriction (this was the sixties), and responsible eating. I started WW at 8, and pretty much learned that the lack of food was real love. By contrast, my thin siblings had the food piled on the plate, my brother's portion rivaling the Matterhorn because "he's a growing boy". (What were we three girls?) I didn't get the food=love story until after I had returned home from college after a year's absence. I finally got my Matterhorn of mashed potatoes, I guess old Mom missed me.

ageoldie - yeah, your husband really suffered through that lunch - When I was first married I weighed 140 or so, and my husband made mean jokes for years, apparently to motivate me to lose weight (I was 15-20 pounds overweight). Well I guess I showed him, and now he really is suffering along with me because of what he can't do in his life with a handicapped wife.

Strangely enough, I am a person who believes that food is an important part of being loved. There are many ways to be taken care of, but without being nourished we would die, and besides air and water, there is not much else so vitally important to our bodies.

Can't somebody figure this out for me?? -Ruby

I'm not really sure where my food issues came from. My parents were very aware of that sort of thing when I was a child and so we never had to "clean our plates" and my parents were careful not to turn food into power struggles. Unfortunately, my parents were very unaware in other areas. My dad was very controlling and verbally abusive, my mom was the stereotypical co-dependent pleaser. I began focusing on my weight during early adolescence. In my early twenties, I developed anorexia. I am now a compulsive emotional eater. I'm not really sure where I adopted the food=comfort theory, but I definitely did. Now I eat when I'm happy, when I'm sad, when I'm stressed, when I'm celebrating. Even as I am eating a meal, I am thinking about what I will have at the next meal. So, if you're passing out the switch that disconnects food and comfort in your brain - I'll take two.

You're right about the water and fresh air. I don't attach a single emotion or atom of emotion to either one - but neither one has ever been measured, judged, rationed, or denied to me! -Ruby

This statement hit me at my core. I love food. I look forward to eating. Going out to dinner to me is like how I used to feel about going to Disneyland or my birthday. I get excited thinking about it. I am new to this group and I have been reading through the posts. But this statement just really brought it into perspective and made me think about the feelings I have when I eat.

My parents used to bribe me to lose weight. They once told me that they would buy me 80 music tapes if I lost X amount of weight. I never did lose it and therefore felt like a failure at 9 years old. They also never changed their eating habits to help me. Even though they were both diabetic, they continued to drink Coke and eat crap.

Anyway, this thread is great. I came here hoping to figure out why I do what I do and I think I may have.

Well. Being in the midst of being unloved by a man I've been doing a lot of cooking for recently, this is a tough one for me. Let me see if I can be coherent here.

As a kid, I was on the weight loss track early. My mother's an RN, and she worried about my weight I think both from a health perspective and because she worried about my being teased, etc. I was not all THAT heavy, really, when I look back at it, but I started at a nutritionist around 7 or 8. I don't think I thought food was love, but I do think I thought it was control. If I ate when others didn't allow me to, that meant I was in control.

I do think, though, that food CAN be a way to express love, and I think there can even be a healthy way to do that. This guy I've been doing all the cooking for--it's fairly healthy food, but what makes it an expression of love is that I put a lot of thought and time into making something from scratch that I know he will find especially delicious--and he knows that's what I did. I enjoy cooking for all my friends, and when I cook for friends I find I eat very reasonable--even small--portions, and I'm satisfied with them, because I'm busy enjoying them enjoying the food. It becomes about the love, not the food.

I think the problem with thinking of food as an expression of love is when we feel that there's a gaping hole where love ought to be and we think the food can actually fill it. So I guess my own way of working on this problem is to try to work on appreciating the love I DO have. This particular guy may have decided--it seems he has--that he'd rather be with a really skinny, gorgeous 20-year-old who's also crazy (literally, she has serious mental problems) than with me, even though I'm his "best friend." But there ARE people who genuinely love me. There's my mother, and my ex who is still a friend, and I have two REALLY close friends who would do just about anything for me. I am loved, I am worthy. I don't need to eat to prove that to myself. But it does help to remind myself. And it helps to tell the people who DO love me how much I appreciate everything they do for me, to keep building those relationships.

I guess I mean to say that I think feeding people is a WAY of caring for them, a way to show your caring--through the care you take to supply their needs--but food isn't a substitute for love, just as giving someone a diamond necklace might SHOW that you care about them, but it doesn't take the place of actually loving them. The love has to come first, we have to work on it, work to cultivate it. And that goes for self-love too.