Emotional Eating

Emotional eating is something I have been wanting to do more research on as it is something I struggle with greatly.  It is particularly a problem when I have something stressful or negative going on in my life, but I also find that I am an eater when I am happy.  The happy eating usually happens when celebrating something positive and I find it is easier to control these cravings than it is with the eating that comes with negative emotions.

For some reason and it is hard to pinpoint exactly when it happened in my life, but when something that was negative or stressed me out entered into my reality, it was an immediate turn to food to help me feel better.  I don't know what it was about the food that made me feel better.  I always picked something extremely unhealthy and normally made myself feel worse instead of better.  But it didn't matter, I still turned to the bad food.  In some weird way, the food was a comfort because I was making the choices about what I ate.  Instead of not having control of the negative part of my life, I did have control over the food, so that somehow made me feel better and gave me power.  Pretty gross isn't it?

I still struggle today with emotional eating.  When I am sad or mad, I still want to turn to food in hopes that it will make me feel better.  It happened the other day actually, something stressed me out and the first thing I did?  I ate an entire box of girl scout cookies- yes, the entire box.  Well, there went all of my extra points for the week!  About an hour later, when I realized what I had done, I couldn’t believe myself.  Seriously- did I need all of those cookies to feel better?  Had it made me feel better?  The ultimate answer – no, I actually felt WORSE.  And the worst part about it all is I can’t even tell you why I couldn’t say no.

Even with happy events, I have a hard time saying no to sweets.  I can’t just eat one or two bites and put it away- if you hand me cake, I’m going to eat the whole slice.  This is something I am working on especially – how to celebrate a positive event without turning straight to unhealthy foods like high fat desserts. 
I will have to admit though, I am proud of myself in one way.  My husband and I went to a wedding shower for a friend this past weekend.  Of course, there was cake and I had saved points to eat it.  Well, I had one bite and honestly, didn’t like it.  So, instead of just eating it for no reason, I threw it away.  It wasn’t good- why waste the calories?

As I work towards continuing a healthy lifestyle, my goal is to try to control my emotional eating and to work towards conquering life’s ups and downs with something other than food.