Time to battle the food issues – Trigger Warning (TW)

Note: Reader, in this post I use “healthy” and “unhealthy” in quotes as terms to describe foods my parents approved and disapproved.  No other meaning is intended, and I apologize for any triggers this may cause to fire.

In therapy on Monday, I said it aloud: I’ve not eaten what I want in front of my parents in over 20 years.

Let me back up a bit.  As a child, I am pretty sure that I had few to no issues with food other than knowing that I hated eggs, fish, tomatoes, and lima beans.  I was your typical kid living in a house with parents who believed in “healthy” food, and I was happy.  I ran around outside with the other neighborhood kids, played with my brothers, and generally was up and going continually from early morning until bedtime.

Then, when I was 11, something happened that turned my life upside down.

One of many side effects from that event appears to be a changed relationship with food.  I became an emotional eater – whenever I was overwhelmed by an emotion, I would eat to curb the feelings.  I started sneaking “unhealthy” food into the house and hiding it in my bedroom so I could binge on it without being seen.  Eating like this, in addition to the regular meals my parents expected, had little noticeable effect on me, as I was involved in multiple activities that required movement and exercise….and so, I kept it up and never dealt with it.  To this day, the pattern continues – I still am an emotional eater, and the things I crave are things I am embarrassed to eat in front of most other people.  In addition, I am not nearly as active physically as I used to be, and so I do gain weight.  I am heavier now than I have ever been and, until now, I’ve not addressed any of these things head on.

Until now.

So, I’ve made a decision: I’m going to be using this blog to go over my food issues and try to identify and then correct my patterns.  I figure, knowing how my brain works, figuring out what I am getting from continuing this behavior will help me modify it.