The Consequences of Emotional Eating and How to Stop

When I was a kid I went through some stuff. But the problems I've had with food don't really have anything to do with those. They've got everything to do with how I dealt with or didn't deal with my issues. For starters I had a bad habit of assuming that I couldn't talk to anyone about the problems I was having. I went to counseling for a while and while it helped some the one thing I really took away from it was that people didn't understand how I felt. So instead of trying to talk to people I hid away. Oh I was there as far as they were concerned but I was really off somewhere else. And usually when I found comfort in something it was in a book, or a movie, or food, or some combination. Even when I finally started dealing with my problems and moving forward, I held on to my bad habits about food along with my tendency to eat emotionally.

I ran across an article about the consequences of emotional eating. Truthfully I've got to say that those consequences aren't nearly as suprising as the author thinks. Not at least from my perspective because I've experienced all of them.

It's one of the reasons why programs like Overeaters Anonymous can be so helpful to people who have developed debilitating addictions to food.

When I went to New Orleans last year there was a point where I was standing on the bank of the Mississippi River with the French Quarter behind me and I talked about my issues with self control and food with a friend who happens to be in AA. Most of what I was doing was whining and making excuses for why I was having such a hard time with getting my weight under control. But there were two things he said that I took away from that day. One was I'm responsible for my overeating. I have to own that and take charge of it. And I am the person who's responsible for making a change. The second was that I don't have to go it alone. OA is out there. There are other resources out there.

Now I didn't do anything about my issues for almost a year. But when I finally did it turned out that once I took responsibility for my overeating that I was able to take control of my diet. It turned out that I wasn't so consumed by eating that I needed OA to get out of it. But there are some people who aren't as able to make the change as I was. That pit you dig from emotional overeating is a hard one to climb out of because let's face it, it's not like you can just swear off food. But help is out there.