Feel Good or Eat Good

Why are so many feelings wrapped up in our eating patterns?  Call it emotional eating, comfort eating, weakness, or whatever.  The foods I love are foods that bring back feelings and memories of the past.  Comfort food.

As I struggle to regain my focus on eating healthy and losing weight, I find myself doing a bit of comfort eating.  A friend and I took her son to his grandmother’s in another East Tennessee city.  We also went back several days later to pick him up.  Both times we took a ride through her childhood memories and they reminded me so much of my own.  I was on a memory high.  On the way back both times, we stopped at an old style drive-in.  You know the kind . . . you drive up and they come to the car and take your order.  Or you can sit at one of the wood picnic tables.  The menu boards list what seems like 100 options, from breakfast biscuits to burgers, hot dogs, chicken, chili, and sides.  And then there are the ice cream options – cones, sundaes, floats, and milkshakes.

Memories from my childhood came back.  I always loved crinkle cut fries with lots of salt and ketchup.  I ordered the large size.  I asked the waitress what kind of milkshakes they had.  She rattled of the standard flavors and then kept going.  She said banana and my eyes got very big.  “With real bananas or just banana flavored?”  She responded, “Real bananas” and I did not have to hear anymore.  Mmmmmmm.  My mom used to make us banana milkshakes.

Emotions definitely come into play when you make choices about food.  I let the emotions control what I ate and didn’t think twice.  I can’t do that all the time or I need to find healthier alternatives that will satisfy that emotion.  This is my biggest challenge on this road to healthy eating.

What is your biggest struggle?

This Too Will Pass

It’s been a tough week.   I never really thought I was an emotional eater until now.  In the past, I did not react to stress by going to food.  At least not that I was aware.  I tended to not really think about food when stress came around.  I don’t really have a lot of stress in my life on a regular basis so maybe I just didn’t know.

This week was stressful.  And I wanted to eat all kinds of things that were bad for me.  I wanted a McDonald’s hamburger and fries.  I don’t really even like McDonald’s except for their french fries.  I wanted pizza.  I wanted a foot long hot dog from a local drive-in in a combo with krinkle cut fries with lots of salt and ketchup.  And a milk shake.  And I ate it all over the course of the week.

I don’t really even like fast food.  I have not really missed it at all during the last 8 months.  But in a reaction to the stress, I wanted all that stuff.  I wrote it all down too in my on-line tracker, every day and all of it.  It was a lot of calories every day and I didn’t burn much more than what I took in each day but I did burn more.  The tracking and the lack of calories burned gave me a wake up call.  It had to stop.  And hi, my name is Tere and I am an Emotional Eater.

It made me look at what I was doing and made me realize it has to stop.  I have lost a lot of weight and gained so much more over the last 8 months.  It really has not been hard until this week.  I ate more than one serving of everything.  I ate things I didn’t really love.  All because I was stressed. 

The stress will go away but the weight gained (or not lost) will be here to remind me that I cannot do that.  The trips I have made to the bathroom have also reminded me!  Ugh!

Like I said, this was a tough week but I will not self-destruct.  I have done some self-reflection and learned something.  The stress will pass on by eventually and it is not in my control.  But what I put in my mouth is in my control.