Breakthrough! Emotional Eating

CONFESSION

I'm an emotional eater. 99.99% of us are, just to different degrees. So, I noticed my weight is the SAME today as it was yesterday, but I had a great breakthrough today, so I expect it will drop in the next day or two.

DEFINITION OF EMOTIONAL EATING

When you're feeling uncomfortable, painful or scary emotional stuff, you eat.

That's the definition of emotional eating, in a nutshell. There are all kinds of psycho-babble definitions of emotional eating, what it does, why we do it and so on, but the bottom line is, when we don't feel good, rather than DEAL with what's making us uncomfortable, we eat something! It's called "self-medicating" too. Self-medicators indulge in sex, shopping, gambling, drugs, alcohol, bullying, eating or whatever their "medication" of choice is—the thing that will make them "feel better" after indulging. Emotional eaters indulge in comfort food. It's CALLED comfort food for a reason. Eating when you're stressed releases endorphins, which soothe those uncomfortable feelings. So, look at a fat person and you can pretty much tell how stressed, angry, depressed or uncomfortable they are with themselves. Fat is PROTECTION. What we need protecting from changes from person-to-person, but it almost always comes down to feeling a need to insulate ourselves, our feelings and who we are from the world.

MY BREAKTHROUGH

I've always struggled to "ride out" the emotional eating urges. Sometimes I've succeeded, most times I've simply delayed the urge. Today I sat with the desire and LISTENED to it. WHAT triggered the urge? Why was it triggered? How could I address the issue? Then I took action. Yes. It was uncomfortable and scary and I probably could have handled it better, but I took action, stated my BOUNDARIES and expressed what I needed. It doesn't matter if the person I expressed all that to responds favorably or not! What matters is that I stood up for myself and acted on MY BEHALF. And you know what? The urge to emotionally EAT went away. INSTANTLY!!!

I've been learning about Boundaries, and how to set them, enforce them and use them to make my life less stressful.

BOUNDARIES

The book that saved MY life is  Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life, by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend. It's also on my "Books" page if you want to know more.  Or, just read the Boundaries page for more details so you don't have to buy the book.

Essentially, boundaries are the emotional, mental and even physical fences that we put up around ourselves to tell other people how to treat us. It's NOT control. We can't control whether they listen to or respect our boundaries or not. But we can control how we respond (not react) to their abuse of our boundaries. For instance, when someone is yelling at you, your boundary is that you do not tolerate or accept people yelling at you. So you say, "When you yell at me I can't hear you because it scares me. So I don't allow myself to be yelled at. If you want to have a discussion with me you'll have to stop yelling. If you can't stop yelling then this conversation is over and I'm leaving until you calm down." Now the person can keep yelling, at which point you ENFORCE your boundary by LEAVING, like you said you would; or they stop yelling (respecting your boundary) and you can keep talking.

You're not controlling them. You're giving them options—either respect your boundary and stop yelling, or don't respect it, at which point you'll leave. They may leave. They may stop yelling. They may keep yelling. No matter what they do, YOU are STILL in control of YOU.  Boundaries are amazing things. Yes, for all you people pleasers (like me) out there, people DO get THEIR feelings hurt when you have boundaries, but guess what? Mature adults are responsible for their own feelings. It's NOT up to you to make the world feel warm and fuzzy by allowing it to trample all over YOU if that's what it takes.

SUMMARY

So today I expressed MY needs, wants and boundaries and it felt GOOD! I don't know if the other person felt good. I tried to convey my needs etc. in the most mature, matter-of-fact way possible, but the bottom line is, I matter. I come first, and not in a selfish way. But if I have nothing to give because I'm all tapped out giving to others, no one benefits. Same with you. When you say "No," to doing ten things for someone else who WON'T do things for themselves, then you don't have the energy or resources to do things for the people you love who CAN'T do things for themselves. Boundaries are about best utilizing our resources and caring for ourselves so we can do for others if we choose to.