Emotional/Binge Eating

caylapal888

Hii, my name is Cayla. I am in my late 20s. Recently after an event in my life I have been struggling with emotional and binge eating. So I am happy I found this group. Hopefully I can connect with a few of you.

ech9570

Caylapa888 - I totally relate to your post! I had a period of time in my life in my early-mid 20's when I got down to "ballerina" size - just slightly underweight - after struggling throughout my childhood with my mother's incessant control of what I could or couldn't eat. I was very into ballet through high school and was at a normal weight, but much bigger than my ballet teacher wanted me to be. I ran into her in the grocery store after getting down to my lowest weight ever and she congratulated me! :=) My mother never noticed, btw.

Back to the point - At that same time, I had a very painful breakup with someone I dearly loved - and I started binge eating. I really could not stop and I started gaining back all that weight and this confirmed to me that I was just a loser (no pun intended). That was decades ago and I'm still eating for emotional reasons at times but I have a much better perspective on the problem. Now, I know that eating substitutes for a feeling of loving attachment from someone else. My mother was a wonderful person, but always hostile and demeaning to me. I believe she saw me as a competitor, and she also attributed to me all the negatives in her self image. In other words, I grew up with a narcissistic mother who - for her own reasons - was unable to give maternal love to a daughter. I forgave her years ago, but I still live with the consequences and emotional eating is a big one.

I don't have the "answer" to emotional/binge eating, except to try my best to accept that this is an ingrained pattern in my personality and I need to be mindful of the triggers and choose a healthy lifestyle. And I need to give up the belief that unless I was thin, I was not acceptable. But I do believe that trying to maintain a healthy diet has been helpful to me. I have had to learn to accept myself as I am and I still struggle with emotional eating at times.

Bottom line (finally!) - don't "go on a diet" as a fix for your emotional eating. You will end up in an endless cycle of dieting, overeating, dieting, overeating, dieting, overeating etc. etc. MFP is a good tool to use to learn how to eat and live in a healthy way.