I have always maintained that I am not an emo-eater. Loneliness doesn't make me binge. Mostly I go the opposite direction when I'm sad or angry, meaning I DON'T eat - especially with sadness. Extreme sadness (loss of a loved one, etc) could mean lack of adequate food for days.

BUT YESTERDAY was a different story. I binged. OMG, I binged. On cheese whiz & crackers (Ritz!!) and that was AFTER I'd had my healthy yummy breakfast & was completely satisfied hunger-wise.

This was a very sad binge. I was so sad... sometimes the holidays bring that out in me. So no real reason for the sadness; nothing major happened; nothing out of the ordinary or anything like that. Just a general sadness. And I binged on the cheese & crackers until I felt like barfing. I sooo hate that feeling.

And now I wonder if I haven't binged on sadness in the past & just didn't recognize it as sadness. I feel weird.

I can definitely relate. I am an emotional eater. I usually find any excuse to eat. But I do think its hard sometimes figuring out what is triggering your eating. I can totally see why you may never have associated emotional eating with bingeing in the past. Unless you're in tune with yourself at that moment or you decide to look at the cause of your bingeing after the fact then you're not going to see if you are or aren't an emotional eater. I don't know if that's you or not, but I know that it takes a lot for me to figure out why I'm eating what I eat. And sometimes it may not be a strong emotion for me. Like I said, I find any excuse to eat. And sometimes I just eat because I'm bored and like eating.

In the end, I guess for me it's not so much understanding whether I'm emotionally eating or not. It's about figuring out how to not eat a full bag of chips when I'm in that moment. I'm still working on it.

Sorry that I'm not really offering any advice. Just commiserating. Sorry that you felt sadness over the holidays. I can totally relate to that too. For me, I look over my life and get depressed about how I feel like I've failed at everything. It's just a reminder that everyone else around me seems happy and I'm just not. But I'm trying to work on this as well and see the little victories in life. But I also feel like sometimes it's ok to just be sad. As long as it doesn't take over your life (like it has a tendency to do with mine).

Good Luck! And Happy New Year!

Bingeing comes in many forms, many disguises. It can even evolve from one thing to another. It may be triggered by stress during a period in one's life and at another time, the trigger is hormonal. Bingeing is a reactive behaviour to a trigger.

While it can be helpful to recognize the possible trigger, it's not always possible. I find that in the end it didn't matter what the cause of the binge was, it was more important to connect with the whole process of it in order to understand it.

I record all that I eat in a nutritional software. whether my entries for the day are diet perfect or a binge, I record every bite. I do this to keep a reality check going. Soon I learned the consequenses of my bingeing and the length of time it took to get the regained weight back off again. My focus shifted from being angry or negative about the binge and fussing over the probable reasons to what I could do to lessen the impact. I started to clearly see the pattern of it, what situations opened the binge door and woke that sleeping dragon. I found ways to stop binges before that were way out of hand.

I will always have the tendency to binge. I do not believe I can cure it. But I can find ways to deal with that tendency and being gut level honest with myself about it helps in ways that finally work to lessen the impact on my health and wellbeing.