I'm moving past the feeling

I've always been a little on the brazen side, especially when I write. I put things out there that I probably shouldn't. I don't see myself stopping any time soon, so here's s'more, whether you like it or not.

I am an emotional eater. Big time. I don't know if this is something I've ever said out loud to anyone. Over the past few weeks, I have been eating late at night. A habit I broke for quite some time, and for some reason is back. Well, not for some reason.

I'm always reading about bad eating habits and weight loss, and over the past few weeks I've found some really helpful things online. My biggest problem with weight loss is not staying active, it's what and how much I eat so I am usually looking for tips on controlling my eating habits, specifically emotional eating.

Probably the two most interesting things I've read on overeating, or emotional eating, is that the reason people overeat, and even emotional eating is partly biological. The reason people overeat is because we are biologically engineered to eat food when it is in abundance. Our minds trick us into thinking that this isn't going to last long, so we need to eat all of it, because humans were never made to live in a world where access to food is always readily available. We are biologically striving to store fat, because that is what used to be necessary for survival. What I read, also said that people who tend to store more fat, i.e. lower metabolisms, would have had the biological edge back then. If you think about why so many people are overweight, it makes sense. I've known people all my life, some I was close to and some I was not, that ate much less than I did, and were much heavier. Emotional eating is also a biological trigger. Our ancestors, in times of stress, would eat. This was for power, for fuel, a biological necessity to fight whatever was threatening them. This also makes sense when you think about the long term effects stress has on the body. The human body, while very resilient, was not designed for prolonged levels of stress like most people feel. That also explains more about why many people have to have some outside source of relieving that tension. Whether it's healthy or unhealthy, we all have coping mechanisms for stress.

While this is refreshing, I have to be careful that I don't use it as an excuse to eat badly (cause I will), but more as allowing myself to be easier on myself when I do slip up.

Lately, I have been eating just to eat. For example, today I started out very well as I usually do. Sometimes, I go bad from the start (haha!), but at least that's a consistent day! But anyways, when James got home from work we drove to Denton after finishing up my errands like we planned, and we ate at McCallister's. I probably ate more than I should have, but I didn't go overboard. But on the way home, my stomach was a little upset and I started talking about how I was going to eat some crackers when I got home to settle my stomach, but it felt like it was just an excuse to eat. I didn't eat the crackers when I got home, but after James went to bed, I ate about 10 or 15 of them, and a couple of hours later had a leftover cupcake and a cheese stick, and I wasn't hungry. My excuse was that I didn't want to go to bed (because I have a 6 day work week coming up, and work is depressing me) and as you can see I'm still not there. I'm sort of falling into this slump where I'm not doing anything productive.

I feel like the eating comes from boredom, which can be a big trigger for me. Even though I was always kind of aware that my eating was emotional, I'm really trying to dissect my eating habits so that I can end the bad ones. I think there's several parts to my emotional eating: One thing is that when I lived at home, there was limited to no junk food, and there was never soda. When we were younger, my mom would buy us a snack and a soda on Fridays if were good all week. This developed a pattern that I sort of perverted. What should of happened, was that if I was good all week with eating healthy then I could treat myself. Instead of that, I now feel entitled to it or like I deserve it because I had a long day so I eat crap. Though obviously, the "being good" all week, didn't have anything to do with diet. Fyi: I don't eat fast food very often. My crap refers to soda, chocolate, and if I mistakenly buy something horrible for the house. I think I also eat/drink the crappy stuff because I guess I felt deprived as a child, but I know now that I will do the same for my kids. My parents were so adamant about not letting us have soda that it became a false addiction. This is something I'm working to improve.

I also eat my feelings, especially when I'm depressed. I consider myself to be a highly emotional person, and I am expressive. I wouldn't consider myself to be passive aggressive. I think sometimes I feel things way more than I want to, or I use it as a way to distract myself or block myself from emotions. For example, a friend of mine and her boyfriend flipped their car twice after leaving my party. James told me after I found out that he had tried to stop him from driving, and my friend tried to drive but obviously that didn't happen. There was a whole horror story attached that sounded like something out of a movie. They are both okay though, and that's what matters. The point of my story is that when I found out, I didn't react like a normal person. I actually accused her of messing with me, and sent her a really nasty text that I won't write here, let's just say it was uncalled for, and she sent me a photo of her boyfriend's bruised up face. I think I reacted like that, because I immediately felt a sense of guilt, and I didn't want to believe it. I can be extremely cold to people I love because I want to seperate myself from feeling or caring about other people. Over the past few days, I have even mentioned that I don't want to see them for a while, and mentally thought some things trying to even dissuade myself from being their friend anymore, which wasn't real. This same friend had an accident where her hip popped out of place for months because she fell after I lost my balance hugging her and accidentally put all of my weight on her. Not long after something pretty traumatic happened (not between us), but anyways paramedics and cops were called and she was carried away in an ambulance, and while she will admit she avoided everyone for a while, I wasn't as good as a friend as I probably should have been. But, I'm not really processing it the way I should be. The truth is I feel really bad, and I'm just trying to give myself an excuse to not apologize because I feel guilty, even though James told me I should not feel guilty because it's not my fault, and it was scary, and they can be emotionally draining to be friends with.

And another reason I think is that I feel empty and unsatisfied with my life right now, and I feel stuck. This is partly why I feel depressed which also adds to my overeating habits. And the last reason is that I have always felt like a dissapointment to other people because of my weight (which is ridiculous because I've never really been that big). I was a chubby kid, and I still have self image issues because of this. I guess I felt like I was supposed to be perfect, which is still something I struggle with. I'm just not happy with myself, and that's the biggest reason why I overeat.  On that note, your mind, in another biological trick, gets a high or a genetic benefit from being right, so you will rebel from eating healthy if you're doing it for other people. Just like you won't stick to an excercise if you don't want to be healthy based on your own decision to do so.

Oh, and before I go: A couple of neat tricks I learned about how to talk myself out of eating at night: This article said to treat yourself as you would a newborn, or your child. You wouldn't let your children overeat, you would put your newborn to sleep when it was tired, you wouldn't wake them if they weren't well rested, you would make sure they only had healthy food when they were hungry, so you should treat yourself like that. Another tip was to imagine yourself as your ideal self. What your habits would be, how you would spend your basic day, the things you probably don't think about when you think about your future or ideal life. But if you catch yourself engaging in a bad habit, ask yourself: "Would my ideal self do this?" "Would my ideal self be sitting here gorging on chips and dip at midnight?" "Would the person I eventually want to become eat an entire bag of M&Ms by herself?". This has been extremely helpful for me.

[Note: Sorry this blog post is so scatter-brained. I'll try to go back and edit it later. My blog seems to mostly be a place where I vent and process my feelings and feel much better afterwards, even if no one reads it.]