Saturday, May 22, 2004

Emotional Eating

I am slowly working my way through The Ultimate Weight Solution by Dr. Phil and have reached the section that talks about emotional eating. I have discovered that I am most definitely an emotional eater. My score on the emotional eating quiz was just a few points lower than the highest score you can get. There is also a quiz, or more accurately a stress scale, that assigns points to various stressors in life. You chose the stressors that have occurred in your life within the last 12 months and add up the points to determine your overall stress score, with 10 equaling low stress and 95 equaling paralyzing stress. I added up the points for all the things that have occurred in my life in the past year and got a total score of 280. And that’s just from the things that were on this general list. There are many other stressful things that weren’t even on there. No wonder I’m suffering from major depression, not to mention weight gain. When you add that together with the thyroid condition that went undiscovered for so long, it’s a wonder that I’ve even survived at all.

I’m surprised that I never noticed the connection before. Now that I’m aware of it, I can look back on my life and see that a majority of my biggest weight gains occurred either during or shortly after very stressful events in my life. I was very thin up until a few years into my first marriage. I started gaining weight about a year after he started abusing me and continued to gain weight up until we got divorced.

My second major weight gain began shortly after marrying my second husband and realizing that he was an alcoholic. Although he was never physically abusive like my first husband, he was verbally abusive when drinking and inconsiderate and neglectful overall. It probably didn’t help matters that when he would sober up and realize what he’d done, he’d make amends by taking me out to dinner. Eating those fattening meals and deserts might have made me feel better at the time but they haven’t done me much good in the long run.

My third major weight gain occurred after the breakup of my relationship with another man I was engaged to. That relationship fell apart when I found out that he had another girlfriend on the side and was planning to continue the relationship even after we were married. I found out later from the girlfriend that he had even been trying to come up with a way to bring her along on our honeymoon without me knowing about it.

My final bout with weight gain has, of course, been in this last year and has a lot to do with the emotional stress of dealing with social anxiety disorder and major depression. If you add up all these situations and combine them with the fact that I had a childhood filled with abuse and neglect, you get one very stress filled life. I can see now that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to bury my pain, not to mention myself, under all this food. I don’t want to be that way anymore. I’m ready to dig myself out of this mountain of fat I’ve buried myself under. I’m ready to be free. 

 

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