I'll Have Seconds With That Emotion

Today I’d like to take a slight detour and talk about the psychology of food. You know, emotional eating. The cultural take on emotional eating goes something like this: Girl has a bad day at work. Girl gets upset. Girl goes home and eats a half gallon of Chunky Monkey. Girl feels better for five minutes. Girl hates herself for the rest of the night, and since she now hates herself, proceeds to polish off the last of the macaroni and cheese, along with a bunch of corn chips and guacamole. Some might call this a food binge. I would call it my life before I lost 100 pounds.

Obviously, a person who would do something like this is seriously disturbed, no? And isn’t that what we believe, even if we don’t say it out loud? A person who is fat is a person who’s lost control. A person who’s undisciplined. A person who is probably psychologically and emotionally deficient in some way, otherwise they would get motivated and DO SOMETHING about their weight.

That’s exactly what I believed about myself for most of my life. That there was something seriously wrong with my head. If only I could straighten out my screwed up psyche, then I would find the strength to stay on a sensible diet and lose the weight once and for all. Not only that, but I believed other people (translation: normal-weight people) were better than I was simply because they could eat cake and stay thin and I could not.

But then I lost 100 pounds. I didn’t lose 100 pounds because I cleared out all of the squirrelly, twisted mazes in my mind. In fact, in some ways this weight maintenance deal has made me more neurotic than ever. I lost weight because I put myself in the hands of a doctor and a nutritionist and DID EXACTLY WHAT THEY TOLD ME TO DO. Yes, I know, that’s an un-American thing to say. I let someone else tell me what to do. Shocking.

Yet, I lost the weight and have kept it off for four and a half years. In that time, I’ve learned a few things. Like how our intrinsic beliefs about what constitutes “good food” chain us to a way of eating that keeps us fat. How food manufacturers design products that are highly palatable (translation: highly addictive) to keep us coming back for more, and oh yes, keep us fat. How our own willingness to discount our strength and believe in our deficiency keeps us from questioning the status quo, and yup, keeps us fat. And instead of getting angry – because maybe you have a genetic predisposition to gain weight and you need help to learn how to deal with that, but instead you are pushed and prodded by the food culture to eat the very foods that will make your genetic predisposition become reality – instead you blame yourself for being an idiot who wants to have her cake and eat it too.

Have no doubt, emotional eating exists. But the question is, did I eat the way I ate because I was screwed up? Or did I eat the way I ate because I didn’t know a better way to deal with life’s difficulties and no one was able to show me a better way? My observation is that most of us have weird, eccentric nonsense banging around in our heads and you can’t really predict how bad it is with any particular person just by what they weigh. Overweight people are not more emotionally disturbed than thinner people, but they do have to deal with an awful lot of disturbing stuff, like being portrayed as out-of-control nut jobs when in reality they just have a physical condition called obesity.

Whew! I feel better now.