Support Thread for Recovering Emotional Eaters

[ICanDrawABassClef]

Hello. I have namechanged for this one. Wanted to start a support thread for any fellow recovering emotional eaters. I have been feeding my feelings for years, fighting triggers and struggled to make a connection between hunger and emotion and generally making a mess of things.

This isn't a What To Eat / What Not To Eat kind of thread - there is loads of great advice on MN for that on Big/Slim/Whatever board.

I would love to be free from EE one day, until then, I will just continue to try and understand why I do it and not be too mean to myself XX

Hi

When I was a kid I was lucky that Susie Orbach's book was out - Fat Is A Feminist Issue - which made me look at food in a whole new way.

She is absolutely right. If I have a house full of food I don't eat it. If I ration the food in the house, I think about it.

Can I join you? I am so sick of me and my appauling relationship with food, yoyo dieting etc etc. I am an intelligent reasonably articulate woman and yet I can't seem to overcome my compulsive emotional eating even when I know I will feel worse afterwards. HELP!

Hi LineRunner and Fifitrixibell and

Linerunner - Fat Is A Feminist Issue - think a re-read might be in order !

Fifi - I understand where you are coming from .I feel at best, somewhat stupid, yet I know I am not. I also hate the fact that everyone can see I that I eat too much because of my appearance. It's such a visible addiction. What has helped you so far ?

I'm not sure I've found anything other than sheer will power to combat the compulsive eating - and my will power doesn't last long. I have lost significant amounts of weight previously doing slimmimg world. Because with SW ther is always something you can eat it fits in with my need to be putting something in my mouth all the time, but it doesn't actually deal with the root cause of my problem, so eventually I go back to eating the wrong stuff then put the weight back on again. I just hate the way I am .
Have you found anything which helps?

Not yet ! Have gone through the usual CD, LL, WW, SW but nothing has ever addressed the real deep seated issues. I have always felt like this regardless of my weight or jeans size.

I have dipped into Eat Less and found that book to be very sensible and well written.
Feel that this period of my life, the EE issues have been the worst. I think about food ALL the time.

having a bad evening