Weight Loss :: Are You Medicating With Food?

Taking a break from this afternoon’s work, I stopped by our local joint to grab a burger and fries. Yeah, I eat that, but not often. It’s a couple days before my period and while some women crave chocolate and sweets this time of month, I crave junk food. It must be a holdover from my previous life.

So I’m in this place and I’m waiting for my order and I start to look around me. Virtually everyone in this place is overweight – some grotesquely so. Plus, they can’t sit still. They bop their legs up and down, nervously play with their cell phones, pace furtively, sit at tables and eat rapidly and (seemingly) without pleasure.

Do a Google search on weight loss and there are about a gazillion web sites dealing with diets, obesity, overeating. Clearly what we have here is a problem with our relationship to food.

As runners, we tend to be hyperconscious of our weight and nutrition in general. Our level of activity allows us to eat virtually anything we want without a huge consequence to our weight; the bigger concern becomes the effect what we take into our bodies has on our performance (I’ll pay for those fries tomorrow).

For some of us however, food becomes more than sustenance, more than a daily pleasure, we self-medicate with food to avoid unpleasant emotions, to numb out and suppress. Ironically, if you are a food medicator, you may actually be suffering from a real inability to take care of yourself (or guilt associated with taking care of yourself) emotionally.

Are you medicating with food? Ask yourself:

• Do you ever “eat unconsciously” (popping food into your mouth without even knowing you’re doing it)?
• Do you frequently find yourself eating when you are not truly hungry?
• Are you bored, overwhelmed, angry, stressed much of the time?

Try to identify your feelings when you eat, and try to “sit with” your emotions. Very few of us allow ourselves to feel what we’re really feeling. We believe that unpleasant emotions should be alleviated immediately- treated like an aspirin for a headache (start to get the picture?) We try to numb ourselves out just to avoid dealing with our real issues.

Christine Erickson writes in her recent article on emotional eating, “Many individuals get stuck on this point as they can not pin point some deep dark event in their lives that would cause them to over eat. We have all heard of individuals who have been raped or abused as children, who then understandably have issues with over eating as adults. Luckily however this is not the case for most of us. It’s important to remember that emotional over eating does not just occur in those individuals who have experienced some horrible or traumatic event. However, some individuals do indeed realize after some thought that they do consciously or unconsciously hide behind a layer of fat to help keep them protected. If this is representative of you or your situation, then it is easy to see why, in order to achieve permanent weight loss you must deal with the emotions surrounding the case or reason. No amount of dieting or exercise will be enough.

"Medicating with food is often as dangerous a cycle as it is a short-term fix. You may feel great for the few minutes that it takes you to inhale a tub of ice cream or box of doughnuts but shortly after the guilt sets. Now we have two reasons for feeling crappy about ourselves and thus the cycle continues.

"You have to be honest with yourself because as we all know you can’t fix what you do not acknowledge. The first step in any recovery is acceptance and acknowledgment. You must be able to recognize what you need to change in order to make a plan and ultimately make changes necessary for success.

"One of the best ways to help you recognize your triggers is to keep a food journal. It is important to list not only what you are eating but also the circumstances leading up to the eating and how you are feeling at the time. Keeping this sort of food journal will allow you to not only see what you are eating and how much but more importantly the why. Documenting in this way will help you to sort out what your triggers are so that you can begin to take control over your reactions.

"Keeping a food journal will allow you to step back and look at the patterns in your eating from a subjective standpoint. It will allow you to determine if you are consciously or subconsciously reacting to stressful situations, negative encounters, lonely nights, or purely out of boredom. We must also realize that we are not reacting to the “external” world around us but instead our own interpretations of that world. By the same token, we are choosing to put the food into our mouths - nobody and nothing else is forcing us to do it. We must hold ourselves responsible and break this destructive pattern.

"The bottom line is you must choose and recognize that you are worthy of having a healthy, happy life and that includes a healthy happy body. Know that you good enough and that you deserve the best. Once you identify your triggers you will be able to consciously decide to replace the destructive behavior with a healthy alternative. If there is an issue at hand that you can’t handle on your own, then get help from a professional; there is no shame in reaching out for help. Once you take ownership of your choices and actions you will be ready to make a lifestyle change that will lead to a permanent results.”

Image: LifeDynamix

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