In defense of emotional eating

It seems like everywhere I look, there are articles in magazines and posts on health blogs about how to overcome emotional eating. I'd like to break away from the pack and praise emotional eating. At least for me, it serves a purpose, and it hasn't done me any harm lately.

I'd like to start by saying I am an emotional eater. I eat for comfort, I stress eat, I get lonely and crave cookies or Chinese food or ice cream and I not only have to eat exactly what I'm craving, but I have to eat too much of it. Part of the comfort comes from the feeling of being too full. I'm not saying that's a good thing. It's probably a huge factor in how I got to be overweight in the first place and that feeling of being too full is uncomfortable. I hate it. But I believe it's more important to pay attention to it than to fight it. It has been helpful for me to notice my patterns of emotional eating -- what kind of mood sets it off, what happens if I don't succumb, how does it feel when I do, etc... And I certainly try to keep it in check -- I can often find other ways to comfort myself. I can write or talk or work out and sometimes doing one of those things curbs my desire to eat a whole pizza. Sometimes going to the trouble of cooking something that's healthy and delicious and eating that will curb the desire. Part of the comfort comes from the idea of giving myself what I want -- I deserve these cookies -- if I can shift that to: I deserve this root vegetable soup, then the same purpose is served.

I've been losing weight for nearly a year now, and one of the most important things I've learned is that giving in to occasional fits of emotional over-eating does not derail me. I can eat way too much for one meal or over the course of a day or over the course of several days. It usually doesn't feel good. It usually makes me feel sluggish and guilty and fat. But it is also comfortable and familiar and on some level, it works. It provides a certain quality of comfort that nothing else does and if I deny myself the right to that comfort, I get more and more agitated. I start to resent that root vegetable soup instead of craving it. Once I've eaten the donuts (because I absolutely had to, because I wanted them and don't I deserve to have what I want? because one donut doesn't make me feel like I got what I wanted, I have to eat four and have a sugar headache...) I relax. I crave my next work-out. I crave my next salad. And I see, again and again and again over the last year, that it doesn't stop me from losing weight. It doesn't stop me from working out or eating well 90% of the time. Now, part of the comfort comes from that. From the realization, over and over, that my binge didn't make me regain 70 pounds, or even 5. It didn't take away my muscles. It didn't take away my desire to work out every day or my love of vegetables. I am comforted by not having to lose my source of comfort in order to lose weight.