How to Stop Emotional Eating
Category: Health
Have you ever tried to stop emotional eating?
Or maybe a better question would be “are you an emotional eater?”
Sometimes we just go along in this thing called life and we don’t even realize why we do what we do – we just do it.
Automatically. And it becomes a pattern.
When I was ten years old, my father deserted our family. He literally ran away, took our only car, and even left the state. We were almost evicted from our home and food was scarce.
When my dad left, he took part of my heart with him.
This is only photo that I have of me in the same photo with my dad as a child. I am the one on the left – 5 1/2 years old at the time. My mother is pregnant in this photo with my little sister, so we were four kids growing up together.
When I was 12 years old, I began babysitting. With babysitting comes the perk of giving the kids a night-time snack and permission from the parents to “eat whatever I wanted!”
Now I could have chips and brownies to my heart’s content – and somehow, the good taste seemed to make the ache in my heart feel better.
And then a very sad thing happened.
I embraced the lie that the good feeling of food replaced my need for love. I ate my way to obesity trying to fill up that hole in my heart.
What followed was 41 years of yo-yo dieting – up and down. I just could not stop the emotional eating that characterized my life.
I remember a conversation with my sister-in-law one time when we were commiserating over the state of our “generous” bodies and, ahem, shall I say “propensity to overeat.”
I said to her, “I HAVE to eat yummy food – it is the only thing that loves me!”
Of course, what I meant was that it was the only thing that made me feel good inside and made that hole in my heart disappear – at least for a fleeting moment. And it was a lie.
On August 9th, 2012 while at the Shaklee convention, I realized that I needed to take the extra pounds off once and for all. I am extremely healthy due to my supplements, exercise, and other great lifestyle choices . . . EXCEPT for my weight.
Not only did something click in my brain, but something clicked in my heart too. I knew that God has only given me one body for my time on earth and I needed to care for that body which is also His temple.
I committed to losing 20 lbs by November 9th – 90 days.
When you make a commitment, whether it is to lose weight, build a business, start a blog, or whatever, you have to have a plan – and then you have to implement that plan.
A weight loss plan, to be successful, MUST include nutritious food so that you don’t suffer from hunger and the resulting grumpiness. And it must have special guidelines to help address the emotional eating downward spiral too.
An important part of my successful weight loss was Shaklee180 program.
You too can turn around your size and your life!
Oh, I almost forgot. I exceeded my goal to lose 20 lbs in 90 days – I lost 26 lbs! How cool is that?
A few years later, I was able to release even more weight in a 4 month effort to get healthier. Read about that here.
But the best part of all is that I no longer believe the lie that I can fill up that hole in my heart with food.
First published: May 2016
Updated: October 2023
