Emotional Eating

"If Hunger isn't the problem, than food is not the solution!"- Unknown

About a month ago or anytime before that, if you were to ask me if I was an emotional eater, I'd probably tell you I wasn't. I'd also most likely tell you that I don't snack. I truly believed that. I wasn't really trying to lie to people, but that's exactly what I was doing. Lying not only to other people, but to myself also. I've come to realize a lot about myself while on this journey so far.

Hi, my name is Kim, and I'm an emotional eater. I eat when I'm bored, I eat when I'm happy, I eat when I'm sad, I eat when I'm NOT HUNGRY! This is something that I really need to work on and I'm trying very hard to do just that. I would eat mindlessly, without even noticing what I was doing. Just because... I also have very little self control. If I see a bag of chocolate or a freshly baked batch of cookies (Hi, my name is Kim and I'm a cookie addict.) then I have a really hard time making myself eat only one piece or just one cookie. Even if I'm not really hungry for it, if I get a taste of something that I really especially love, then it will trigger that part of my brain and I have almost no control over what I'm doing. So, this needs to stop.

On Sunday a really dear kind lady that lives close to us brought over a plate of enormous cookies, along with a sympathy card. I ate half of one after church. Then I ate another half of one. Then I ate a whole one, thinking that if I ate a whole one that maybe my brain wouldn't crave them anymore. Then a few hours later I ate another whole one. By the end of the night I felt like throwing up. Like I said before, these cookies were huge, probably about a 1/4 cup or more of dough per cookie. BIG! Cookies are a big trigger food for me. They are something that I need to stay away from. And I'm coming to realize this. So please, if you know me and live close to me, don't give me cookies. Thank you. Oh, and if you do give me cookies then I'm just going to throw them away. Because I have no self control over cookies. I need to clarify also, I'm talking about homemade cookies, not store bought. So those 100 calorie packs that I got from friends recently are safe. :) Maybe if they were a bigger bag of low calorie cookies and I had to take only one serving out at a time I'd have a harder time. But since those are prepackaged in a small portion, I don't feel the need to binge on those. The same goes for chocolates too, if they are individually wrapped "fun size" pieces of chocolate, then I have control and I CAN eat just one. But, if you give me a bag of m&m's or a regular size bar of chocolate, then I have a hard time only eating a few m&m's or only one square of chocolate.

Enough about cookies and chocolate...

My point is that I do eat just for the sake of eating. And I do have trigger foods, cookies and chocolate being some of my BIG trigger foods. And I honestly can't tell you what my other trigger foods are right now. I'm learning all of this as I go. But I'm so glad that I'm discovering this about myself. And I'm going to be working on this, to help myself realize that I should only be eating when I'm truly hungry.