Many of us are guilty of eating when we are depressed, stressed, or upset for some reason. Food actually becomes a sort of drug for us. It makes our troubles go away for awhile, or at least makes us forget about our problems for a minute or two.
Several years ago I saw the movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, starring Darlene Cates—an extremely super obese woman who could not enjoy her life. She could not be a part of her family’s lives, because she couldn’t do anything except take up space. No one in the family ever said anything to her about her weight. In fact, the family enabled her to stay in her self-induced prison of a body. One scene that really got to me was when members of the family secretly reinforced the floor from underneath so she wouldn’t fall through when she walked across the floor. When she walked, the camera showed what was happening in the basement. The floor was not going to hold her much longer.
In my mind, I was that huge woman in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. I cried. I felt the pain she was in. I wondered what was eating her to make her so large. Then I thought about myself. What was eating me to make me depend on food as a drug to get me through the day? Some people pop pills, some smoke cigarettes, others drink alcohol, and some eat and eat and eat.
One thing I learned when I had the gastric bypass. I could no longer eat for emotional reasons, because I didn’t have any place to stuff the food. I would have to learn how to deal with my feelings, and emotions in a more constructive way. I began to do as I am doing now. I began to write. I wrote a book of poems that dealt with a lot of issues I had growing up from a child to young womanhood. Since then I have been writing, and my signature articles are mental health and health issues.
Whenever I see a man or woman who is 400 plus pounds I feel so bad for them. I wonder what went wrong in their lives that they had to take solace in food. Sometimes there is a medical reason for people being obese, but most of the time their problems are self-inflicted. Some of us have issues of abuse in our childhoods. Being obese, for me, was a wall that I built around myself, so that no one could penetrate deep enough to really touch me. When I did marry, I married men who were scarred in their own lives. They couldn’t be a good husband, any more than I could be a good wife. We had so many issues that our lives were dysfunctional. I ate to overcome the pain. I ate to feel protected. I ate because food was my friend. I ate because _____ you fill in the blank. Any excuse under the sun was a reason to eat.
In order to unlock myself from my prison without bars, I had to have a renewing of my mind, so to speak. I had to change the way I thought about myself, and about food. Food is no longer something that I reward myself with. One of my biggest problems was that when I made progress in weight loss, I rewarded myself with an eating binge and I gained all the weight back and then some. It’s no longer that way.
For the last year I have been watching what I eat. I lost 35 pounds in that year’s time. I am now following Weight Watchers, because I find it much easier for me to stay on track. I’ve noticed at the meetings that some of the people who gained did so because of emotional issues. They admitted to being depressed, and consoling themselves with food. There were 5 people in the last meeting who admitted that they gained and what they did that made them gain. They went back to old habits to make them feel better.
We have to identify what is eating us and face it. We need to confront the monsters in the closet and bring them out into the light of day. I write about mine. If I didn’t have this outlet to explore my feelings and emotions, I would still be 400 plus pounds. If you eat when you aren’t hungry, if you eat when you are happy, upset, or depressed, you can change this habit. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen for you. Don’t give up.
Source: My Life