Hibiscus, I was just thinking about that as I read through the posts... Does anyone else have emotional triggers rather than food triggers? Or is it really an emotional trigger but you accidentally relate it to some specific thing you ate?
For me it's all about the emotion. There's no particular type of food that will set me off. When I was younger I used to pride myself on not showing any real emotion. I was all perky, all the time. I was not allowed to be sad, frustrated, or angry. No one EVER saw me cry, though I did that a lot. That came from never want my stepfather to see that he had hurt my feelings or scared me - if I showed him how upset I was, that meant he won, somehow. So I would say that I had already been hurt so much that nothing could ever hurt me again, I was numb. Well, I wasn't numb, I was stuffing. I stuffed all my emotions away and followed it with mounds of food to keep it down and hidden.
So, if I am bored, or, more specifically, don't have something useful to do to keep me busy, I will graze, slowly, all day long on whatever I can find until I am stuffed and sick. If I am depressed or blue I will specifically go for sweets. I will tear the house apart looking for something or combine bizarre things just to get that sweet. But if I'm hurt or angry - if I want to cry - then Katie bar the door because I am unstoppable. I am SO not allowed to be angry for some reason. I don't want to cook or even think about it; I usually snack hard when I get home, then hit a restaurant and get appetizers, a whole loaf or two of bread, peanuts, a full meal, and then dessert. So far I have refrained from drinking alcohol when I do this, but for some reason I always announce that intention before we go, like, hey let's go get dinner out, I need a drink.
Well, I didn't mean to come in and dump all of my crap...
but does that sound familiar to anyone else? I know we're all emotional eaters to some extent, that's why we're here at 3FC to begin with, but is emotion triggering an actual binge for you?
Thanks,
Lala