But some of us who don’t eat for comfort are fat, and some people, like you, who do eat for comfort are thin.
Taling about feelings with thoughtful and nonjudgemental friends can be a large part of changing habits. Someone who is walking in your shoes.
Have you checked out your local support groups?
Thin people who eat for comfort grow to become fat people who eat for comfort.
Thanks for the support. I’m sure Weight Watchers will be delighted - always a silver lining, right? Right?!?
Food is definitely tied to emotions for me, and I’m a thin person. And I will sometimes emotionally eat.
Exercise (for me yoga, jog, go for a walk)
Crochet (knit, quilt, paint, whatever you do)
Cleaning is great, you can work out a lot of aggression scrubbing.
Beat things up in WoW or City of Heroes.
Loose myself in a book or a movie
Visit friends and talk about it
Eat or have a drink - just neither to extreme. If I get the munchies, its air popped popcorn. If I need chocolate, its one small piece of good chocolate).
One thing to do is figure out how you need to deal with THIS stress. Sometimes its physical - you need to run or clean. Sometimes its distraction or veg time. Sometimes you need to talk it though.
I don’t agree completely. I am aware that there are people who eat for comfort and for whom the phrase “comfort food” is really literal. To me “comfort food” is, for instance, the Dutch food I used to make for my husband when we lived in the US and he was homesick. Or how I like crunchy food when I am angry or out of sorts. So the notion is not the alien concept to me that it is to her.
That it works is an alien concept; I understand that it does (people tell me so and I don’t think they are lying) but I can’t figure out what’s so great about it. I can’t feel it. I think if I ate my feelings as is described I would still have my crappy feelings only I would be uncomfortably full with skyrocketing blood sugar to boot.
I do have some great friends to talk to, although sometimes it feels like trying to talk to a heroin junkie about being afraid you’re about to relapse. I don’t know many people who don’t have a messed up relationship with food and the ones I do know are much like MeanOldLady and Leaffan, in that I could be speaking in some Martian language and while they’d love to be supportive, they don’t really know how. If someone came to me with anger management/aggression issues, I’d be totally clueless and unable to relate as well, so I understand where they’re coming from.
As I mentioned upthread, I’ve been to several OA meetings and I carry the “Just for Today” book with me and try to read through it daily. On the downside, my tenuous relationship with all things “higher power” makes it difficult for me to find anything I can really grasp onto in OA. I get as far as admitting I have a problem and taking a serious personal inventory and then it edges into admitting you’re powerless and turning to your higher power and my brain cuts out.
I’ve also done Weight Watcher meetings with marginal success. While I enjoyed the success, I hated the way I felt. I was counting points and stocking my pantry with as many 1 point snacks as I could and seemed to always ALWAYS be thinking about what I just ate, what I’m going to eat, how many points I have left, how I can fit that piece of chocolate cake into 3 points so I still have 4 left later when the carb rush from the cake bottoms me out and so forth. I’d never really felt obsessed with food until then and while it was great for showing me what portions look like and forcing me to find foods that are higher in fiber than what I’d normally look for, it was just too brain-consuming.
I’m not sure if there are non-religious based support groups similar to OA for compulsive and/or emotional eating, but I’m going to go ask Google once I submit this post.
Feelings of anxiety + a need to be pampered = You Need A Massage!
Doing nice things for your own body has the nice psychological benefit of encouraging you to continue being nicer to your own body. You could even use a massage as a sort of bribe/reward. (“If I don’t shnarf down that cake in the break room, I’ll get myself a fifteen minute foot massage instead.”)
I didn’t say it was an alien concept. I said that I never defined the term “comfort food” as something that makes you feel better, and always thought of it food that is simple and familiar. I have seen TV sitcoms reference the idea of pigging out after a breakup, or whatever bad thing, so the idea is not new to me, but how this actually makes anyone feel better is a mystery to me, and I imagined that very few people actually do this in real life.
Right. In my mind, it’s called “comfort food”, because it’s comfortable to eat, just like an old pair of sneakers is comfortable to wear. It ain’t fancy, but it’s familiar and predictable.
And as for the pigging out after a breakup, I always construed that to mean that during the relationship, the woman was trying to stay skinny and attractive, and once it was over, she may as well eat whatever she wanted. Especially because she’ll stereotypically be doing this in old sweatpants and fuzzy slippers, showing that she just doesn’t give a damn what she looks like anymore. But I also figured most people didn’t really do this.
But not everybody who’s fat got that way by eating for comfort.
See, this is the fundamental disconnect or difference between the two groups! 
This is a huge reason most fat threads here turn into arguments about how you just need to eat less, and then the reply of it’s not that simple, and then the reply that yes it is, it’s just eating less.
Both sides are completely right. All you need to do to lose weight is eat less. But for the people who have that psychological addiction to food, there is the root cause that you need to tackle first.
As an example, MeanOldLady, you mentioned when a friend brought breakfast and you only had one bagel and didn’t even finish it. That is an extremely foreign concept to me. The only time I’ve managed to do something like that is when I consciously work to not eat everything. Otherwise, I’ll eat it because it’s there. It doesn’t even matter if I like it or not. The very fact it’s within eating distance makes me compelled to eat it. Again, that doesn’t mean it’s not my FAULT if I eat it. It totally is. I’m just trying to show how completely different my attitude towards food is, even when I want it to change.
- BTW, I’m going to actually be seeing a psychologist/counselor who specializes in eating disorders (which compulsive overeating is) to get to the root of my problems. I also starved myself in high school, so I know both ends of the spectrum.
Even for someone who’s not a compulsive overeater, there are things other than hunger that influence how much food you eat.
I started doing yoga to relieve pent up stress and anxiety, but now I do it 3x a week in the mornings as maintenance. I prefer to start out my day with it to clear my head, but different people have different needs and schedules, so go with what works for you. There is an element of planning in doing yoga and you might have to use several different DVDs before you find one you’re happy with (my local library has a bunch of different yoga and pilates dvd that I rotate through). I do find that the methods of meditation and stretches that you learn from the DVDs can be applicable throughout the day when you’re away from home.
I know what you mean about injuries - I pulled a tendon running a few weeks back, but I’m looking forward to running again once I get some proper shoes. Learn from me and don’t be stupid about trying to muscle through any sharp pain that you might have when you’re exercising. When you first start, take it slow and have some comfortable running gear. Walking is great too. I love walking by our local parks and when I can manage to pull my SO into going with me, it doubles as a good time to chat about what’s going on in our lives (knowing someone cares about your problems is also very stress relieving).
Exercise does require a little more planning than eating whatever food you have on hand, but it does seem to curb or at least dampen emotional stressors that I might have throughout the day. If you really need something to do with your hands right at that moment, maybe you could knit or have some play-doh ready to make into whatever strikes your mood. I took a ceramics class before and it was always satisfying to pound the crap out of a chunk of clay. Arts and crafts in general are good for keeping the hands busy while stimulating other parts of the brain than the parts you use for work (for most office jobs).
Hasn’t happened yet. I’m 43. I don’t ALWAYS choose eating for comfort - but I WILL eat for comfort.
I wasn’t talking in absolutes. Just was pointing out that there is a relationship between comfort eating and becoming fat. A thin person who is an emotional eater very well may become a fat person in the future, as their age and metabolism catches up with their habits.
[quote=“malkavia, post:1, topic:532209”]
So tell me, always-thin and newly-thin people, what do you do with your feelings? If you have a shit day at work, get bad news about a family member, lose a pet, get in an argument with your SO, feel a bit blue or (deep sapphire blue) how do you cope?
/QUOTE]
Yeah… for me, as an always-thin person, I have never associated feelings with food and it’s hard for me to understand people that do. I eat when I am hungry and no more than that. If anything, being really upset or stressed would make me *lose *my appetite, not want to eat more. As to how I would handle my feelings, I dunno. I don’t really get overly emotional at things.
I’m 20lbs down and 25 to go. I’ve never been skinny.
Looking back on all the times that could have triggered binges, I had thought processes that steered me away from them:
I knew that the pleasure brought from eating was not just fleeting, it actually masked the reality that emotional eating compounded your problems. The cycle of eat/self-loathe/eat more/self-loathe more was not what I needed at those low times. It would have been like kicking myself while I was down.
I would try to figure out why things bothered me and what I could do about it. If my boss made me upset, was it because I was genuinely unappreciated, or did I have an inflated sense of my value as an employee? If I fought with a friend, was it because I was being a bitch, or did she have her own issues? Were both of us to blame? I wasn’t always successful at psychoanalyzing the situation or thinking up a solution, but I focused on the problem, not my feelings about it.
I like food and have always had my comfort foods, but I resisted letting myself turn to food for solace. I didn’t want to waste time on temporary fixes or comforts. I didn’t want food to have power over me, or to become dependent on it emotionally. To deal with my problems, food just wasn’t an option. Period.
I go on the backyard and shoot rifles. Usually .308 caliber. It’s very therapeutic.
Or they may control their emotional eating. They may understand the relationship between food and weight and health, and eat emotionally - but not to excess. Like someone who drinks sometimes to relieve stress, but doesn’t develop a drinking problem. If your toolbox for dealing with emotions is full of tools, and food is one that you take out once in a while - you won’t have an issue. If your toolbox only contains food (or alcohol, or shopping, or even exercise or cleaning the house) you are probably going to have issues as these become compulsions.