Emotional Eating… aka Real Vs Fake Hunger

Hi, My name is Becca and I’m an emotional eater.

Guilty as charged

If I’m happy, I want to eat.

If I’m sad, I want to eat.

If I’m lonely, I want to eat.

If I’m tired, I want to eat.

If I’m bored, I want to eat.

Wait… Is bored even an emotion? Regardless, I could go on and on and on, but you get my drift.

Growing up a lot of things in my house were rewarded with food.

You do good on a test? Well let’s go for icecream!

Me? Want icecream? Neverrrrr!!!!

Bully at school was mean to you? Here’s some cookies!

Good or bad, there was almost always food involved. Birthdays, holidays, an hour or two after dinner there was always a “snack” of some sort when I got bored and would mindlessly eat it in front of the tv or computer.

I don’t “blame” my parents for this issue I have, I mean, I didn’t HAVE to accept any of this, but whatever. It is what it is.

Since I’ve been back from vacation this has been a very tough subject for me. I actually emailed a friend and said I wanted to emotionally eat everything in my house. Literally.

Thankfully she knows me, and she knows my struggles and very honestly pointed out that I understand WHY I want to overeat, it’s emotional, not real hunger. Eating will not shut up the voices inside, it will not make me feel better or fix the situations at hand.

All it would do would add guilt to my already emotionally unstable self. Why would I ever want to do that to myself?

To regress on my progress, for what? Five minutes of mindlessly shoveling food into my face without even tasting it.

Because you KNOW that’s how emotional binging is. Fist to mouth. Get it in there, eat eat eat. Shut up those inner voices with more food. You reach the bottom of the bag/container/dish and except for the crumbs all over yourself you barely realize you’ve eaten 23956347856 calories of junk because well… it all went in SO FAST you barely tasted it, if you did at all.

So after staring down my stuffed full freezer, seriously debating moving the GOOD food out of the way to get to the small pint of icecream at the back, I stopped myself and asked if I really NEEDED it.

If there is only ONE thing I learned about myself and my body from prep it would be about hunger.

It’s a constant on somedays… and somedays non-existant.

In my life before prep I was rarely hungry. If I was even remotely “hungry” I ate.

I mean come on, I was over 200lbs at one point, CLEARLY I did not like to be hungry.

Yeahhhh....

The fact of the matter is now I feel hunger…. And oddly enough THAT is how I stopped myself from emotional eating this week.

Yes, when I was upset/overly emotional did I feel hunger? Yes. Of course I did. That’s the signal I take to binge eat.

But in prep I very often feel hunger. It’s basic math, to lose weight you must take in less calories than you need, which in “normal” circumstances equals hunger. Was my hunger this past week worse than usual? No, not really.

So why use that “hunger” to overeat. I don’t need to stuff myself to feel better, I needed to feed my soul, not my gut.

… And that is what I did. I took control of the situation… of my happiness. Once I finally admitted to not only myself, but to a few other people that I am in fact NOT happy with certain aspects of myself and my life I was able to put a plan into action to change those things… and you know what? The urge to eat everything in sight slowly went away.

I didn’t feel haunted by the jar of pb or the icecream in the freezer. Did the pizza place in the metro smell absolutely fan-fing-tastic? You bet your lean ass it did, but ALL of those things will be there in 14 weeks.

Actually, that’s a lie. In 14 weeks those bad boys will be in my belly, but that’s not the point. I think you got my point.

… Or I hope you did, I’m kind of losing myself here.

Basically what I’m getting at is that if you TRY you can justify anything, from binge eating, to choosing to remain on your plan.

For me, the “need” to eat and feed that hunger wasn’t enough to counteract the hunger I feel to be on stage again, leaner, tighter and more on point than I ever dreamed.

It will only get BETTER from here

So for now I’m squashed those demons back into submission. Hopefully they stay there and leave me alone, but even if they don’t I know how to deal with them… and I know I always have a great support system to HELP me deal with them when it feels to overwhelming to deal with on my own.

Have you ever dealt with emotional eating? How did you overcome it?