Rachel Plumage Talks About The Struggles Of Emotional Eating

I’m not the greatest at wanting to share my deepest “me” esp. for the world to see, but one thing I have come to realize is that by sharing some of MY struggles, I can help someone else. So that is why I post some of the things I do.

A topic I approached yesterday with a client was emotional eating:

So I want to repost an article that I wrote last year about it and my journey and issues with it. It is something that I still, at times struggle with and if it is something that you have dealt with in the past, you learn that it doesn’t go away; you just work on trying to get to the root behind it and to work through those. Sometimes, it means that those triggers bring up a reoccurrence and you fall off the “wagon”, even when you think you have long overcome that.

Emotional eating is something that I am really passionate about, not only because I still struggle with it, but because SO many women struggle with it.

In the next few weeks, I will share some insight and ways I have found that help me in addressing it.

There are so many of us that are “consuming” our feelings instead of dealing with them.

We use food as a crutch. Instead of dealing with our emotions, we eat. Somewhere along the line we went through a difficult time where we needed a specific thing (love, acceptance, calmness, etc) and in that moment food filled that void and just like that, the connection in our brain was made.

Suddenly food became something completely different in our minds. Suddenly food had a much bigger purpose than merely quenching our hunger.

Suddenly:

Food = Feeling better

Food = Feeling loved

Food = Feeling calm

Food = Feeling in control

Food = Feeling nothing (Even if it is only for a while)

Even though it’s VERY difficult for me share, I can’t really talk about emotional eating without sharing my own journey or without sharing how and why food became a crutch for me.

So here’s a little about me. Now it’s not for you to pity (good god, I’m 48 and well over it!)

I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional home, we struggled financially, and my mother was married and divorced several times. Food was pretty scarce quite a bit of my growing up. I had moved so much that I had been to 7 schools before high school. My mother was a binge eater and clinically Bipolar. The list can go on for another mile, but no need, you get the picture.  Like all families…we had our cross. (Or crosses)

So what does this have to do with my emotional eating?? To be honest, everything…

Don’t get me wrong, my emotional eating isn’t my family’s fault.  But now, years later, I realized that my food issues are definitely related to the fact that our household was unstable when I was growing up.

I became an emotional eater then, because I didn’t know how to handle all the stress in our household and food became the solution. Although I have realized all these things, I REFUSE to just accept that I will have issues with food forever. I refuse to just accept that I will always be an emotional eater.

I know for a fact that there are other people just like me and that is why I am writing this, because I want to tell you that you are not alone. Maybe your dad drank too much, maybe you were abused (verbally, physically or another way), maybe you grew up with a mom that controlled you and made you completely obsessed about food and your appearance, maybe you lost a loved one and without even realizing it, food became your solution.

If you are an emotional eater, it’s important to know that another diet is not going to fix it. Like one of my mentors, always says: “All food/eating issues are awareness issues, not diet issues.”

This means that emotional eating is caused by something deeper…something that we are probably not aware of and if we want to solve it we are going to have to work on our awareness.

- Rachel Plumage NASM CPT Boxing Instructor/Personal Trainer Ridge Fitness

For more info on the 5 Things That Contribute To Emotional Eating, click HERE!