Yes indeed! Come home from work, feeling miserable and stressed, sometimes I’ve still got one arm in my coat, and the other arm is already in the refrigerator pulling out that lovely cool can of Minute Maid light lemonade. There’s a reason that I keep ten 12-packs of the stuff in my kitchen at all times, and it’s not just because I’m thirsty.
Minute Maid participates in the Coke Rewards program, and I’m already on my second free movie ticket. I recently calculated that you have to drink 582 cans of lemonade to get a free movie ticket.
Since the stuff is owned by Coke, maybe they are secretly spiking it with cocaine. Or maybe it just puts me in a good mood.
Almost 100% with food. The very occasional massage as a treat for a long training trip (but I’m cheap, so that didn’t happen very often). The very occasional glass of wine, but I’m not much of a drinker.
I didn’t realize that I ate “emotionally” because that’s what I thought it was supposed to be. And if I’m very sad about something, I don’t eat.
Then, one day I realized that when I’m stressed or bored, my response is to start eating. I don’t even really like the food, the “comfort” isn’t in the taste or flavor or texture or memory - it’s in the physical act of eating.
For me and a friend of mine, we describe it much the same way. Food is the only things that’s ours. My friend moved because it was closer to her husband’s job, got her schooling set up the way she did because it suited others, her daughter is clingy and needy and she’s married to a man who’s very forceful and picky about how he likes things. But food is her’s. If she wants a big mac with no onions and extra pickles and cheese and 12 burger patties, she can get that the way she wants it. So whenever she starts feeling stressed and powerless, she grabs for food. It’s the only thing she controls.
Really, what we should be doing is practicing assertiveness and learning how to say ‘no’. For me, I’m getting better and eating my emotions less and less all the time, but for her it’s a much tougher road to hoe.
You know how people have been talking about “will power” a lot in the Hey Fatties pit thread? My will to pick good things over bad bottoms out when I’m really stressed - if I have a lot to think hard about, I’m less likely to weigh the pros and cons of buying cupcakes because it hardly seems to matter when compared to something that’s a much bigger deal. Being stressed doesn’t exactly encourage me to eat sweets, since I crave them all the time anyway. It just doesn’t discourage me to.
I don’t use food as a coping mechanism for depression. And if that’s what you think emotional eating is, no wonder it doesn’t make sense to you. But if you picture my mood as being somewhere on a scale from 1 to 10, eating --especially cheesey, starchy, fatty foods–can bump me up a point or two.
Sometimes just temporarily, but sometimes it’s enough to move me from “I just want to go home and curl up with a good book” to “you know, knitting with friends is fun” (of course, the laughter and interaction with the friends helps too.)
Or at work, it can be the difference from counting the agonizing minutes until I clock out (and dwelling on what a worthless person I must be that this sucky job is the best I can get) , to just counting the minutes till time to go home. (Although, yes, again, breaking the routine, getting off the floor, and maybe interacting with folk in the break room may help as well).
When I’m stressed, I lose my appetite. When I’m disappointed or sad or inexplicably blue, I eat fairly normallly.
But if I’m bored with my life and feel like I have nothing to look forward to, I may indulge a little. Like I mentioned earlier, sushi perks me right up.
This is not emotional eating as it’s normally considered, though. I voted sometimes.
Good grief, you’d think people had never heard of a displacement activity.
That’s what emotional eating (drinking/gambling/shopping/exercise/cooking/bubble bathing) is, a displacement activity. Something you do as a distraction to avoid dealing with whatever is bothering you. It doesn’t fix the problem, obviously, but it keeps you from dwelling on the situation until the problem resolves itself or your other coping mechanisms kick in.
Well if the question is “Do we do things that make us feel good in order to feel good?” the answer should be a resounding “Duh” for most people. Based on this thread title, and the OP from the thread that inspired it, and some of the posts I’ve read, I get that we’re talking about different things here. But hey, I could be wrong. Apparently the term “comfort food” means something different from what I’ve understood it to mean my entire life. So here we are.
I never eat because I’m stressed, depressed, angry, etc. In fact, I’m with those who can’t eat while feeling such strong emotions. However, when I’m bored? Oh yeah. That’s the hardest time to resist the munchies.
Just yesterday I had a morning filled with boring, long conference calls then had to spend the afternoon cranking out spreadsheets. And then the smell of someone’s microwave popcorn came floating through our office… I don’t even like microwave bag popcorn that much, but it was really hard to get my mind off how much I wanted some! Probably because there really wasn’t much else to occupy my mind with. The spreadsheets were just drudgery.
This nails it, if you ask me. I’m not sure why people are having trouble with the concept of eating as a coping mechanism. It’s like smoking, or drinking alcohol, or self-harm, or one of many, many things that people do in a (misguided, but genuine) attempt to make bad feelings go away. None of those are things you choose to do if you have other options, but all of them kind-of work, and can become an unconscious, immediate response to negative emotion. You can learn other, better things to do instead, but it takes a lot of effort, and it takes an awareness that there are other ways of dealing with things that might work. That’s why it’s not as easy as telling people to “just stop eating so much” sometimes, when they’re trying to lose weight…
When I find myself feeling depressed, I go eat something with meat; in fact, if I don’t eat meat often enough I tend to feel more depressed. It’s been my understanding for years ( although I ate meat to counter depressing emotions well before I heard this ) that a lack of meat in the diet can lead to depression; at any rate, whether it’s a real effect or just placebo effect meat eating cheers me up.
I am sure that there are many overeaters out there who are eating emotionally and are just not aware of it. If we were all eating strictly to stay alive, I don’t see how there would be so many overweight people. You’d eat what you needed for nutrition and that would be that.
Of course there are people who don’t eat emotionally, but IMO there are probably quite a few emotional eaters who just haven’t made the connection. I am one who has made the connection, unfortunately that hasn’t stopped me from continuing to do it.
I also wanted to say that I’m really excited that I was able to quote Olives successfully. I have been hanging around for years and years but have only recently started to post.
I think people sometimes have a misguided idea about what it means to be an emotional eater. It’s not like sobbing into a carton of ice cream (most of the time.) Usually it’s just like, ‘‘Gah! I’m so stressed! I’m so stressed! I’m so-- holy crap did I really just eat half a pizza?’’ It takes consistent observation to realize the two are connected. It didn’t become clear to me until I started grad school, in which case it was so blatant it was impossible to ignore. I would come straight home from internship exhausted and freaked out and order takeout pretty much the second I got in the door, because it really felt like the only positive thing I had in my day. That’s when I caught phrases coming out of my mouth like, ‘‘Holy crap this day sucked. I need something deep fried.’’
It’s also interesting, because even when you’re aware of it, it’s so automatic that it’s difficult to stop. I vividly remember one day I was offered a giant muffin. I took a few bites of the muffin and then set it aside for later. Five minutes later I realized I’d eaten the muffin! I had no intention of doing it. I didn’t realize I was doing it. I just did it. Because that’s how I was conditioned to cope with stress. It’s the same process when you blank out while driving and wonder how you got that far. I was eating while my mind was checked out ruminating on stuff. Crazy.
