It’s a simple question… WHY DID I EAT THAT?

You knew you weren’t physically hungry. Instead, you just started wanting something to eat.

Marty works at a large corporation where the staff are constantly being pressured to make more contacts, increase their sales, and produce more revenue. The threat of layoffs has been hanging in the air for weeks. [Read more…]

Some years ago, I worked in a challenging job as a hospital health educator. During that time, nearly every afternoon I would get an intense craving for a cookie.

So on my break, I’d walk to a nearby bakery and buy a couple of chewy oatmeal raisin cookies.

It bothered me that I couldn’t break this habit. But no matter how hard I tried to resist, those cookies would occupy my thoughts until I got out to the bakery for my “fix.” [Read more…]

Today, I’m sharing my personal story about emotional eating.

It’s not easy for me to do this because it reminds me of sadness in my life that never goes away completely. But as a way to help you understand emotional eating, I’m opening my heart to show you my own struggles toward a healthier relationship with food.

How it began

My journey began after nine years of silence, a time in which I never spoke of my personal pain, and instead used food to push my feelings far away.

Despite years of intense efforts, my husband and I do not have children. I was born with an abnormally shaped uterus that cannot support a full-term pregnancy. Doctors tried everything possible to help me bear children. I went through several major surgeries, spent months in bed, and endured painful hormone shots.

Three different times, I carried a pregnancy for six months before going into premature labor. Two of my baby girls were stillborn. The third one lived for eleven hours before her tiny lungs quit working. Complications with the final pregnancy prevented me from ever being able to try again.

When I learned I would never be able to have children, I was devastated. My sadness lingered for years and, in fact, it has never faded completely. For a time, my husband and I considered adopting, but finances and a variety of other factors kept this from happening. So we made the decision to accept we wouldn’t have children and to move on with our lives.

I hate crying!

To cope with my grief, I stayed very busy, immersing myself in my work as a nurse and health educator. For the next nine years, I rarely spoke about my loss or told people what I’d been through. Discussing the loss of the babies made me cry, so I just didn’t allow myself to talk about it.

Whenever I felt sad about my babies, I would eat a lot and try to avoid thinking. Because soft foods felt especially comforting, I ate lots of doughnuts and noodle casseroles. My weight-loss efforts never lasted because I spent so much time eating away the painful memories of losing my babies.

Mother’s Day eating

In a few weeks, we will be celebrating Mother’s Day here in the U.S. As you can probably imagine, this has always been a difficult holiday for me. On this day, when my friends are enjoying homemade cards and breakfast in bed, my disappointment and grief return with a vengeance. For many years, I would eat all day long on Mother’s Day, trying to pretend the holiday didn’t exist.

One year after I’d battled an extensive winter depression, a counselor suggested I stop avoiding the emotions of Mother’s Day and allow myself to feel them instead. I was terrified by the thought, but I decided to follow her advice. With my counselor’s help, I planned that I would let my grief surface, then acknowledge it instead of eating to push it away.

That Mother’s Day morning, I woke up determined I would not use food to stop my feelings. I drank coffee and ate a small breakfast. Then I waited. Late in the morning, I felt the sadness rising–the deep painful emotions I’d always tried to avoid. But this time, I let them come. When the tears started, I sat at my kitchen table, buried my head in my arms and sobbed for an hour.

I cried for everything I missed by not having my babies. I wept for not taking them to their first day of kindergarten or picking out prom dresses or watching them cross the stage at graduations. I grieved for never getting to plan their weddings and I mourned that I would never have grandchildren.

I shed tears for all the love and the memories that never got a chance to exist. I hurt for the sadness I saw in my husband. And I cried for myself, and for the ache that had never left the deepest corner of my heart.

Finally, I was quiet. Shakily I got up from the table, washed my face, and went outside into the sunshine. As I stood in the warmth, I felt an amazing sense of calm. And I realized I had no desire to eat. Expressing those sad emotions had let me feel the pain and survive it without needing to rely on casseroles or brownies.

That day, I turned a corner in my life. From then on, I started encouraging my emotions instead of stopping them. Little by little, I learned to allow other painful feelings to surface and to express them in ways that moved me toward healing.

Changing my patterns

Emotional eating never completely loses its power and it still seduces me as a way to make life easier. When times are difficult or I’m feeling down, I occasionally slip into nurturing myself with cookies or a doughnut. But I keep striving to recognize my feelings and manage them before I reach my hand out for food.

I still cry on Mother’s Day. But instead of running from my sadness with a bag of doughnuts in my hand, I wait for the tears and embrace them when they come. Sometimes I cry in church, other times with my face buried deep inside my pillow. I allow myself to cry as long as I need to, and when I’m done, I remind myself that I’ve taken another step in my emotional healing.

Don was not making any progress with losing weight. It seemed that food always filled in for what was missing in his life.

He told me, “On Friday night, I planned to go to a movie, but when I got to the theater, the show was sold out. So I stopped at the video store on the way home and rented a movie instead.

It turned out to be horrible– not the slightest bit entertaining or enjoyable. But the evening wasn’t a total loss. I had my pint of Häagen-Dazs, so that became my fun.” [Read more…]

It starts innocently enough.

You open a box of Girl Scout cookies, planning to eat just a couple. An hour later, you realize you’ve finished off half the box.

Or perhaps at a party, you reach into a bowl of peanuts or M&M’s and quickly lose track of how many times you grab another handful. [Read more…]

On the way home from work, Kathy stopped to visit her mother.

She’d planned to stay only a few minutes, but then she noticed the plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

They smelled wonderful!

“I’ll have just one,” she thought. And she did. It tasted so good that soon she reached for another, then several more. [Read more…]