Find Your Fill Elsewhere

December 8, 2011

My history with binge eating is long, sordid, and something that I never acknowledged until a couple of years ago. I just thought I ate a lot – I never took the time to identify that I was using food to feel better emotionally, while making me worse off physically.

image via equinoxefr on Flickr

The last 2 days, I made poor food choices at dinner (pizza, and then Taco Hell – BLECH). These would have been, in my previous life, massive binges. My food choices this past year have been pretty on-pointe. Yes, I’ve experimented with different meal plans and such, but they were all calculated efforts to see what makes me feel best.

These poor dinner choices I’ve made have caused warning lights to go off inside me:

ALERT: Something is wrong. This is not what you do. This is not what makes you feel good.

As I’ve done many times on this long road to health, I had to stop and think hard about the WHY behind my actions. I had a lightbulb moment today: TRIGGER > CIRCUMSTANCE > ACTION.

Trigger: I’m an emotional mess. My current health issues mean I’m turned all upside down. I feel discombobulated, tired, and frustrated. I had a case of the “why me” syndrome – why, after all of my really hard work, am I facing all of these issues? Of course I know the answer: these have been around forever, they’re just coming to a head now. It has nothing to do with being deserving or not deserving. It’s much easier though to just blame yourself and hold in all the anger and frustration. Perfect triggers.

Circumstance: A perfect storm of justifications to make decisions that normally don’t even exist in your head: An empty refrigerator. A busy schedule. A drive thru on every corner. No meal plans or dinner ideas. Hunger. Quick fix.

Action: Search for a quick fix: poor food choice and overeating. Hoping for some satisfaction and release from my trigger but finding only guilt and a stomachache.

In the end, I am overfull of food, full of regret, but still emotionally empty. Nothing is solved, and the cycle continues.

So why do I ramble on about this? In the pursuit of living a healthy lifestyle, you can’t always be perfect. You do things right many times, and other times you slip up. Use every opportunity to learn and use the knowledge to do better next time. You can’t fill an empty tank with decisions that will only make you feel worse.

  • Susannah

    Dear Emmie,

    You are strong and determined and you will never EVER  give up!  I have been following your blog for about 6 months now and almost always follow the links to  past posts.  I have been and continue to be deeply impressed by your strength and honesty, your humor and your fearless self examination.  Emmie, you are wonderful!!  I am sorry that you are experiencing health problems right now.  It isn’t fair when you work so hard to be healthy and you feel lousy.  But you have already saved your own life – physically and emotionally.  You will find your answers and keep  moving towards your goal.  I am sure of that.  Sending positive energy your way…..

  • Lindsay

    I wanted pizza so bad today I’m pretty sure I smelled it when in fact, it was nowhere near by!! I did NOT give in. Chicken and Broccoli it was. I do slip, we all slip up. Live, feel like shit with a stomach ache, and learn. Then get our butts to the gym. 

  • Kathleen

    Keep up the great work you are doing and do not allow the every now and again set back to be the end of your journey!  You are an inspiration to many and take some time to learn more about your b-12 shots.  I have pernious anemia and as a result I not only take shots, but sublinguals as well.  I notice that the shots make me feel yicky and therefore I want to eat more to compensate for feeling crummy.  The sublinguals make me feel energized and therefore I want to eat less.  

  • Amyreneeschulz

    I love these kinds of posts–you hit on so many things that I feel (I myself am a chronic emotional eater and trying desperately to stop) and it is so inspiring for me to keep on pushing along and not give up. Thank you for your honesty and keep it coming! 

  • http://twitter.com/christieinge Christie Inge

    Hey Emmie, I think that there is a book you would enjoy – It is called Self-Coaching 101. It is written by Brooke Castillo who I just took weight loss coach training with. I think that you will find it enlightening.

  • http://twitter.com/MizFitOnline carla birnberg

    fantastic post AND Im stealing the book suggestion from Christie below.  thank you.

  • Rebecca Bond

    Well done for recognising where you are, I bet a few years ago you wouldn’t have, you would have blindly carried on without rationalising and understanding your feelings and reactions. 

  • Gwen

    This is so timely for me Emmie: I’ve definitely been noticing myself doing some emotional eating lately, as well as using food rewards to make myself work harder on my stress-inducing job search.  To top it off I am having some annoying health issues that are going to make it very inconvenient to cook at home this week.

    There is some weird thought in my head that I’ve worked hard and “deserve” to eat what I’m craving: the implication is that it will make me feel good to do this.  The thing is, it doesn’t really make me feel good, physically or emotionally…. what a strange cycle.  Awareness of this is a huge step: for so many years I didn’t see what I was doing.

    Rather than feeling guilty, I try to just acknowledge this weird thing I am doing, and shift over to a better track.  The health issues thing is hard, because there is some little voice saying “I am trying hard, and I still feel cruddy!  why try so hard?”: like you, I’m a type A person who is used to getting what they want when I put in a strong effort, and I’m thrown off-kilter by the less cause-effect relationship with my body/weight.

  • http://iscribbler.wordpress.com/ iscribbler

    Thank you for this post – it came right after a similar thing that happened to me last night.  Fretted, bought, ate and then massive guilt and still unhappy. This doesn’t happen quite so often as it used to, but the guilt is about 10x worse since I know that I can do better.

  • http://kclanderson.com KCLAnderson (Karen)

    A while back I decided to be more curious/compassionate about my binges/overeating and less critical/shameful and it lead to me to do it less. Instead of having a goal of “never again” my goal is to increase the amount of time between episodes and to decrease the amount I eat when I have one.

  • Anonymous

    Kinda there with you … I’ve made some bad food choices lately …in the past that would be a ticket to  full-on binge.  Now I just try to be kind to myself and when I am weak do my best to shoot for balance overall. 

    It’s been a long time since I’ve had an all-out binge. I think everything starts with being kind to yourself.  I try to remind myself that “normal” food relationship people don’t beat themselves up for stopping at the Bell – you shouldn’t either.  =)

    That being said you know that good food makes you feel good, so each meal is new opportunity to put quality fuel in your tank.

  • Elise

    Sometimes the biggest success is “failing”… but seeing that failure in a whole new light.  The fact that you had that alert go off in your head and see that you don’t want to make yourself feel this way is huge. 

    This is true with food issues, but also with life in general.  You’ll (meaning I’ll) make the same mistakes to the point where it seems like they’re impossibly endless, but over time the changes do happen.

    At least that’s what I’m telling myself as I look back over the past year and goggle at all the ways I’ve messed up.  :)

  • http://twitter.com/Schmiet Diet Schmiet

    Em, I feel the same as you. Have been doing a bit of over-eating on weekends lately. Am good all week, but have been allowing myself ‘treats’ on the weekends which means the 5 gym sessions and healthier days are all wasted….

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