Did I Overcome Emotional Eating?

A couple of days ago I posted about my eating disorder/ disordered eating. Before those issues began, I was a huge emotional eater. People would say that once the food was in front of me nothing and no one else existed. It was as if I was in another universe.

It’s probably why there are times, especially when I am at work, where I will wait until I get home to eat. I want to chill and enjoy my food, which involves me being somewhere or doing something that brings me joy.

I wouldn’t say I am an emotional eater anymore. I think a lot of it was healing and learning when I was eating to feel good or to satisfy hunger. It was a gradual process so I didn’t realize that it was happening.

I think that waiting to be home or to be in front of the tv or something like that could maybe be considered emotional eating. Or at least stems from when I was an emotional eater. I don’t know. I am not an expert. I know I struggle with wanting to wait to eat until I can be “happy.” Yet, not particularly eating food to be happy or satisfy an emotional need.

I started running again almost a week ago. I got off track when I increased my medication dosage and it physically affected me, especially when it came to fatigue. I decided to make a goal to run/walk at least a mile a day if not more for thirty days. I would love to be able to run an entire mile, something I have never been able to do.

I have always loved to run, but I have always been more of a sprinter. I have learned that I am weird when I say that I prefer to run on a treadmill instead of outside. Now, that I have one I plan to get to a place where I can run even longer than a mile, but I am going to work on running a mile first ha.

This time around, I have had a lot of thoughts when it came to my diet and previous weight loss situations in my life. Today, while I was running I remembered when I was about eight when I took a Curves class (which I don’t know if they still exist but it was basically a weight loss program). Some of it was just to be with my mom and aunt but still gave me this mindset as an eight-year-old that I needed to lose weight. That story isn’t relevant to emotional eating but it reminded me of how young I was when I began to learn about being fat or thin to be “pretty.” Something I never really thought about because my mom struggled with her weight her entire life. Then both her and my aunt had gained a lot of weight and kept it on because of the medication they took daily. Which for my mom wasn’t a new thing because her weight fluctuating most of her life. For my aunt, she was always thin so gaining weight that she was unable to lose bothered her. Because of this, she was somewhat obsessed with being thin and putting that on others around her, me being one.

I think when it was just my aunt raising me my emotional eating began. She took away all of my favorite foods that I ate regularly when my mom was alive. Things that weren’t the healthiest but still were things I enjoyed and was used to eating. The biggest thing she took away was Froot Loops because they were so terrible ingredient-wise and full of sugar. Yes, they have a lot of sugar. When I got older and looked at the ingredients of Froot Loops and the other foods she took away ended up not having as bad of ingredients as my aunt made them out to be. Losing my mom but then losing foods that made me happy initiated my attachment to food. I am going to stick with Froot Loops because to this day I love them. Before they became a forbidden thing, they made me happy, but healthily. When I had the option to eat them, usually at other people’s houses, I would eat such a big portion because I was so happy to finally be able to eat them. I remember one birthday. I was around sixteen. My aunt and I were in the grocery store and I legitimately asked for Froot Loops for a birthday present in hopes she would finally buy them for me. No. My attachment to this food grew beyond a healthy attachment.

The restriction of food also helped grow my attachment and emotional need for food.

Until running, I hadn’t had a workout that was as beneficial as running has been for me. Running consistently might help me lose weight and might have been a reason I had when I started the first time when I had just got my treadmill. That and a few of the jobs I would like to do involve being physically fit and being able to run a longer distance. Running can give me such a high, especially for longer distances. I ran/walked a few miles yesterday and I felt like I was on a cloud afterward. I have a lot of anxiety and brain fog, something that running can help with. As it gets closer to the end of the year there are many deadlines at my job. So, that was one reason I decided to get back into my running groove in hopes to make it easier for me to do my job.

Though there is the possibility to lose weight or tone up, I am running for other benefits aside from weight loss. On the days that I don’t want to run, I tell myself how better I will feel afterward, specifically mentally. Also, right now that thirty-day challenge is helping too, especially today when all I wanted to do was stay in my bed.

With Thanksgiving just happening and all the food that comes with that made me realize how I respond to it has evolved. Usually, I will not eat anything the day of Thanksgiving until the big meal. That way I could eat all of the foods I had an attachment to, especially mashed potatoes and corn casserole. Even when I wasn’t hungry, I had to eat as much as possible as if I was never going to eat ever again. This was the first year in at least a decade that I ate food before the Thanksgiving meal. I knew I was going to run/walk a 5k and knew I needed food in me to do that. Running has helped take away the focus of eating just to eat and has given me a healthy reason to eat and nourish my body.

Today I wasn’t running to work off whatever I ate for Thanksgiving. I was running just to run. My relationship with this huge meal doesn’t give me an excitement that I once had. I think it is perfectly okay to be excited about a Thanksgiving meal, but for me who was an emotional eater, it had only accelerated the attachment I had with food. Running today made me realize that the excitement or attachment I had with Thanksgiving has disappeared. Which in my post about disordered eating shows how I now struggle with eating food. Something, running has helped stabilize (that and other things I touched on in my other post).

For the first time in years, I have a somewhat healthy relationship with food and my body simultaneously. It’s usually been one or the other. Wanting and finding what allows you to have a healthier lifestyle is what has helped me. I stopped focusing on what food I should and should not eat. I stopped trying to exercise to lose weight. Those are two things that have helped alter my relationship with food.

That and self-love, which is a battle that looks different for each person.