Help a comfort eater? Anyone have experience with this aswell?

In My Humble Opinion
1

For starters I feel a bit uncomfortable writing about semi-personal stuff on messageboards, especially when percieved as a newbie, I find it a bit cringeworthy. But I have been reading this board for a long time so it feels partly ok…

4 years ago I was around 146 pounds (my heaviest was 182 pounds at age 13), as a girl who was 5’4" this was chubby, after a lot of hard work I completely revolutionised how I dealt with food, this didn’t happen overnight though. I had to stop eating when I wasn’t hungry and most of all never emotionally eat, I had always emotionally ate but being healthy and toned was something that I wanted to achieve badly and when you want something that bad you do it.

Fast forward to now, I’m 19 and 114 pounds, a healthy weight. Been exercising, plus I HATE the junk food, now if I eat things with a lot of sugar or fat or salt it is so obvious to taste and it tastes hideous. Also I never ate the stereotypical junk food (like fast food which I cut out when I was 13) in the first place it was always the chocolate with me.

Three weeks ago I had really bad food poisoning, my GP said to only eat bland foods when you can, so for two weeks my diet consisted mainly of white bread (stuff which I had avoided), I also used this as an opportunity to rediscover chocolate and cakes discovering they were actually quite disgusting to me now.

Right now I’m going through a very stressful time and my depression has flowed and I’ve been using all this food which I hate as a “comfort” if something personal upsets me I’m again very tempted to eat this “bad” food. Also I once or twice used it as a way to abuse myself, it’s like “it disgusts me, but I want to hurt myself”. This has just started very recently like two days ago. So I’m nearly teetering, but I also look at myself seeing how good my body looks and feels thinking “you’re way too old to think like this now, you’ve been through a lot and worked hard”. Ok, I don’t think exactly like that but it’s honestly the jist of it.
I’m using food again, instead of eating to survive and have a healthy system.

I’ll be ok, I just hope that I won’t always react like this, I probably won’t, people grow. But right now it feels like a bit of a struggle.

That’s my saga, anybody else want to talk about their feelings on this or how did you deal with this?

2

I dunno. You’re at a healthy BMI, but at the low end of the healthy range. As someone who considers good food one of the great pleasures in my life, I have trouble understanding the dichotomy you’ve set up, where you either use food or eating to survive. What about eating for the natural, sensual pleasure of food?

Daniel

3

I’m with ya there.

I’ve posted before about my weight loss/weight gain yo-yo. I’m a 6’3" male, and was 260 at my heaviest. I was 170 at my lightest (which on my frame, looked a little sickly-thin honestly). These days I put on about 30 pounds during the winter and lose it all again in the summer. I have a really hard time with my relationship with food, so I understand how frustrating it is when someone like (no offense) LHOD chimes in with advice that’s basically “I don’t understand it, but why don’t you just fix it?”

For myself, I love exercise, running and biking and taking my dog on walks. But I love doing all those things outside, and during the months that I can, I’m outside a lot. During the winter I basically give it up because I hate the gym. My eating habits follow… Summer with friends, I stick to good healthy meals. In the winter, I figure “nothing social is going on, I’m not exercising anyway, I’m going to stop by Long John Silvers on my way home from work.”

It’s very difficult… I know I shouldn’t eat Long Johns, but I somehow rationalize it and find myself in the drive through even when I know I’ll hate myself later for doing it.

So what has helped me? Well, nothing yet since I still struggle with developing a good relationship with my food. Exercise definitely helps… when I do great things to my body with running and biking, I feel especially terrible ruining that with a trip to McDonald’s. Also I know that when I have a 6 mile run on Saturday morning, the last thing I want to do is have a big meal at Hooters on Friday night.

It’s about finding a balance, and it’s really difficult for people like me to find that. At 6’3", the heaviest I hit is about 200 - 205 these days, and at that weight I’m not what people would call “fat”, but I prefer being in the 175 - 185 range. People usually seem shocked when they hear about my struggles with food, but it’s something I deal with constantly.

I don’t have any advice for you, other than to constantly remind yourself to do good things for your body and try your hardest to ignore the urges.

Just out of curiosity, do you find yourself eating worse when you’re alone (I don’t mean alone like single, I just mean physically by yourself)? I know that’s one of my downfalls… I try to be around people during meals and only keep healthy stuff in my kitchen at home.

4

No, you’re totally right–when I say I don’t understand it, I shoulda left it there, or else more likely not posted in the first place. My lack of understanding is a failure of imagination, not a sign of superiority.

Daniel

5

I had a whole part about compulsive eating but I realized I was projecting my own issues on you. The only thing I will include is that is sounds like you have programmed yourself to think of some things as evil and absolute thoughts mean they can never be eaten. Another absolute thought might mean that having them again means you are completely reverting to habits you didn’t like.

PLEASE don’t beat yourself up about this or be overwhelmed by fears of going off the deep end or backsliding. If you’ve been sick and are currently depressed, yes, you may have feelings of unworthiness or wanting to hurt yourself by excess eating. Take time to rest, relax, break the cycle. I find that I get very sad when physically ill like food poisoning; you will regain your strength and be able to think in a more settled way.

I know it’s hard to talk about but I’m glad you felt like you could say something here.

6

But at the same time, what you said is a healthy attitude toward food. It may seem out of reach or alien to me right now, but perhaps it is a goal. Food will never be simply a fuel source for me; there will always be an emotional aspect. But you are expressing a healthy emotional aspect; yes, there is more to food than just fuel, but it’s not an enemy or my only hope. It’s a reasonable pleasure.

7

I appreciate your struggle, and have quite a struggle myself. Food’s by far my favorite and easiest comfort. Logically I think I should choose when and what to eat on the basis of health, but emotionally it’s difficult to do that.

You might expect that as you age you will probably become more wise and reasonable and self assured, but this does depend on how your life goes and how you work on yourself. If you find you are getting worse at these things, you should probably notice and try to fix it. What you do with comforts and decisionmaking will be one of the many things that rise and fall with your life wisdom.

You might also expect that your metabolism will more and more favor overweight as you age.

For what it’s worth, I find women much more attractive at what they often will say is “chubby” weight. Usually, when I hear a woman saying she’s dieting, I think it’s a shame because she really looks very nice as she is or ought to be a little heavier. So, I don’t much like what I think are the external influences on women’s weight choices. But this isn’t important if your focus is on the body you want to live in rather than on what you want others to think about it. Whatever my aesthetics are, I hardly think it’s other people’s jobs to appeal to them.

8

That’s ok wasson :slight_smile: I don’t really need advice as such, I’ve faced this in the past and in the end you know what feels good for your body and you know what you REALLY want.
I find myself eating worse when I’m bored or downstairs at the computer, I’m much more tempted with the kitchen just feet away. The only food which is mine is all natural wholefoods and dried fruit and smoothies but my mum buys things which are sugary and salty. For example she brought home cupcakes, normally avoided by me but I ate most thinking if I eat them now then they won’t be here later, so no temptation and another start.

Thank you gigi
Also I realise that there are no evil or bad foods, it’s all about which food does what to your body and how your body will react. Like if I eat a sweet potato with salad for lunch my body is getting a good range of nutrients and carbs or if I ate a cupcake that I’ll get a sugar rush and the saturated fat.

And to draw on what Napier mentioned I don’t eat healthily or exercise thinking I’m doing it for overall beauty it’s definitely just so my body is at it’s optimum and functions properly.

It does annoy me when people think it doesn’t matter what you look like as long as you’re happy, that’s true to a certain extent but people shouldn’t go on as if the only reason to be thin is to look good. When I saw an obese woman say that she doesn’t care what she looks like and that she’s proud to be fat, I think “it’s not about that, it’s about your health”. Nobody should stay unhealthy just to rebel against a predisposed ideal.
Yeah I agree with your last couple of sentences.

Uh that grammer was really poor but sometimes it’s difficult to articulate when you know exactly what you want to say but not how to form it into coherent sentences :smiley:

9

Here’s a thread from last year where several of us talked about the same thing: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=383545&highlight=tales+compulsive+eating

10

We had another thread a while back in which I commented that since I’ve been overweight, I’ve been vastly healthier. At my lightest, I was even lighter than wasson. Unfortunately I’m now at the stage (6’3 1/2", 238 lb) where I need to lose weight. I’m looking to lose 25 lb, gradually, but it doesn’t seem to be coming off.

So chill, and don’t worry about your weight too much.

11

I think the fact that you realise what is going on is the best thing for the situation. You are aware that you do this and so you can work on it. Now, as to how to work on it – drink water. Unless you’re already drinking over 100oz of water a day, it won’t hurt.

I find that I will sometimes want to snack at work (I get bored because I work in a call center, and you have the options of 1) reading a book only to be interrupted when a call comes in, 2) eating or 3) being bored to DEATH) and have found that if I instead drink a bottle of water, all is well. My stomach gets to feel like it got something put in it and my brain gets to feel like it got to do something.

My daughter is going through the same evolution you did – she is wanting to be tone and healthy where before she was less so. Like you, not really so much fat as just not optimum. She exercises when she gets that “I’m bored, maybe I will eat something” feeling. Of course, she is a teenager and not working, so it is much easier for her to plop down on the floor and do sit-ups than for me at work!

I agree about the fact that being thin is not always about how one looks, but I do want you to keep in mind that there are many people out there who are quite healthy as obese people. The statistics tell us that those people won’t continue to be healthy if they continue to be obese, but please watch the judgements on them. Yes, you discovered how to fix your weight problem, not everyone else is so lucky – I gained over 200 lbs (all the wile being on extremely restrictive diets, phen-fen, exercising, etc) before I finally had a doctor who listened to me and figured out that I wasn’t a fat, lazy slob who ate all the time. Hating to quote Gi Joe, but knowing is half the battle.