What triggers you to want to eat?

At the moment it`s properly stress!
I have epilepsy and a blood disorder which causes clots and lukemia etc, lost my job last year becasue of all this due to attendance as I was very poorly and yesterday at consultation I got told my blood, veins and arteries are playing up making me have the symptons I am suffering from. Food has NOTHING to do with my blood disorder I was born with it but when it effects my kidneys etc I getsad and then comfort eat or not that but just whe i eat dinner instead of soup i would have a pastry !
However I have lost 75lb and weight 130lb at 5ft 8 at a size 6/8 UK size and a US 4/6 so for this week I am not fretting! Just my life will be very very complicated and up and down.
HOWEVER I am the most happiest bubbliest person in the world and ALWAYS :happy: and :laugh: ... just very self concious because I have low self esteem and wonder what will happen in my life. No boyfriend. Not many friends. Just wonder how I will turn out.
Good luck everyone on your journey :flowerforyou:
Sarah Lucy
27
UK

Like any addiction, triggers usually occur in any heightened state of emotion - I was addicted to food and would associate eating with feelings of intense happiness, sadness, loneliness or even excitement. It was intense emotion that triggered my sense of wanting to eat.

By recognising this I learnt to disassociate food with my emotions and channel it to what its actual purpose is - to bloody live!

HOW?? Did you learn to do this???

I know for me it is stress and when I am tired at night rather then just going to bed I eat. and all the reasons you have already stated.

I didn't do it by myself. I used every single success story I've ever heard to push me to do the hard work.

I acknowledged that the reason I didn't understand why I was gaining weight was because I didn't understand what healthy portion sizes were, how much food I needed to eat a day and how much exercise counted towards losing weight. I was just winging it, and I was winging it completely wrong.

So I did the following:

- Made a mock entry in MFP of one of the WORST days I've ever had in calorie intake. It included a whole pizza hut pizza, a whole bar of chocolate, 1.5 litres of coke and many other foods. It tallied up to 5000 calories (I gained a kg that day alone).... by doing this, it just massively shook me until I understood what I was doing was wrong.
- When I was in a volatile emotion (I tend to get worked up a bit), I stopped myself in my tracks and had a mantra that I would use to control myself:
"Don't let your emotions control you. Control your emotions".
I would recite this until I was at ease. I would be at ease when I recognised the cause of my anxiety (usually stress, exhaustion or sadness) and realised that I did not want it to be beat me - LOOK WHERE IT GOT ME? Letting my emotions control me brought me nothing but pain and misery.
- I started treating everything in my life with a three-step process that I learned on MFP:
1) Know what you want
2) Know how to get it
3) Have the courage to continue getting it in the face of adversity
Knowing what you want is merely 1/3 of the battle, and was the COMPLETE process I'd make in the past when I 'wanted' to lose weight. I didn't know HOW. I didn't know how to CONTINUE. So I ultimately failed - 6 times in total.

I'm making true progress this time. A lot of your weight loss journey and your success or failure depends completely on your mindset. Strong of mind = strong of body.

friends who off load there problem onto me, and never ask me how i'm feeling.

Like any addiction, triggers usually occur in any heightened state of emotion - I was addicted to food and would associate eating with feelings of intense happiness, sadness, loneliness or even excitement. It was intense emotion that triggered my sense of wanting to eat.

By recognising this I learnt to disassociate food with my emotions and channel it to what its actual purpose is - to bloody live!