Emotional Eating

I thought that I would post some of the information & things I learn / gain from the sessions i will be having with the Bariatric psychologist to help others here with the same issues.

The first thing she asked me to do was to keep a Nutrition-Emotion Journal. It is a sheet of paper with a graph on it (I made a bunch of copies, because I know I will need them). The goal is to figure out when & why I eat sugary foods (I could have told her : When?-all the time & Why?-because it is yummy... but she wanted more specifics)  The heads across the top are-
-Date ( I am going to fill in the time because think I am an evening eater- I may be wrong)
- Situation/  Trigger  Where was I ? What was I doing?
-Thoughts- What was I thinking about before I ate?/
-Feelings  How was I feeling before I ate?/
-What did I eat? How much?

I won't be seeing her for another month or so- I will post or blog about it after the fact, plus what i learned from doing the Journal & if it was helpful.

 Thanks for sharing. I think I may just do this as well. I am far from wls but won't hurt to look at the issues.

Keeping track of what you eat, when and why sounds like a great idea.
 
I have kept a food diary since June 4, 2008, 8 months before I had my R N Y. It was then that I decided to take control of my life because I had waited years to get to see Dr. B. and there seemed no end in sight. I lost over 50 pounds before I ever got in to see Dr. B.
 
I found that by religiously keeping track of every morsel of food that I put into my mouth I was able to better control my sweet eating behaviour. For me if was tempted to eat a Vachon cake I'd think "Humm I have to write this down and I know I shouldn't eat it" If I did eat it and recorded it I felt bad enough about it that over time that secound thought was all I needed to avoid eating it.

If you choose to keep a food diary it will be of no use if you lie about what you eat. The only one it is important to is yourself. LOL Believe me when I say no one else is interested in what you eat. I still keep a food diary because I can and sometimes do get offf track. The difference now is if I eat carbs or sweets I dump. Still though I do get off track and must rein myself in.


I would find it difficult to write down my emotional state everytime I put something into my mouth. I don't think I am that much in touch with my every emotion that I could accurately say I ate this because I was feeling lonely or upset. My main reasons I think is simply because it tastes good and I like it. LOL

A food diary is a great tool, but the emotional eating diary is for those times when I crave sweets. I normally don't have a problem controlling other foods, but sweets....that's another story. I am a sugar-aholic. I have all the symptoms of a an addiction with my drug of choice being sugar.

Update- I am really resisting this process. I really don't want to give up my drug of choice, or face the reality of my sweet addiction! I don't know why this surprises me, but it does.

I grasp what you mean by emotional eating most of all on Sundays. I called Mom every Sunday and Wednesday mornings for the past 6 years. I can and often forget the Wednesday morings because it is in the middle of the week but Sundays are a different story. I always called Mom ater Corrrie was over on Sundays. Mom died this past September and I know I am still grieving her loss. I feel this more acutely on Sundays. I know everyone says it but she was my absolute best friend and most ardent supporter.

I cannot eat or smoke away the sadness anymore and that's all I want to do. When I get sad or upset I still go to the fridge or the cupboard. I stand there with the doors open trying to find something to eat and I eat. Problem is I get physically full before I get emotionally placated and I am left with this empty spot I can't fill with food.  I think it may be time to get in touch with the dumont crew and get in to see the team physcologist . (sp)There must be some other way to deal with this. Unfortunately going for a walk is not an option for me and distractions only works for a short time.

I wish I could offer you a solution, but I have not figured it out myself. My reaction to documenting my emotional eating has been to "forget" to document  incidents and to eat even more. It's like my emotional stability & therefore my addiction is under attack. I really didn't expect this to happen. I have controlled my sugar love any times- of course, I have always failed in the long run.  She was not asking me to change anything, just to get in touch with my feelings around food.

Your mother just passed away a few months ago. Grieving takes a full year to complete the stages of grieving. That doesn't mean that you will magically stop grieving after a year. It means that you start really adjusting to life without that person. My mother died when I was 15, & there are times when I feel the hole left my her death. I was very close to my sister. She died 22 years ago. I still miss her every day of life. The difference from the first year of loss is that I think about her as a whole person- sweet memories, & imagined conversation in my mind that you can have with someone you knew that well- not just my loss & grieving.  Things still trigger times when I am grieving all over again. Loss usually triggers an emerging of past losses. All this to say- give yourself a break. You have every reason to grieve. The world seems to expect people to bounce back after the funeral. That is not reality & it is  inhumane to boot.  I'm not saying that emotional eating is OK,  I'm saying that finding another way to grieve is good, but give yourself permission to grieve at the same time.

Thank you for responding Charlene. Of all the souls on this site, I knew you would reply. I also know that you have lost a lot of loved ones so I knew you would understand the sense of loss too, I could not even imagine losing my mom at 15. I needed her so much all of my adult life, I can not even imagine how you coped raising you children without her there. 

This is drivung me nuts. I was a nurse for a million years. I know well the 5 stages of grieving and working on the floors and in an er I saw my share of grief over the years, Mom was elderly and sick so her passing was not completely unexpected. I should not be this affected for so long. At least that's what I tell myself. ......But at 10 am on a Sunday morning when I used to call her, self does listen to reason and I spend most of the rest of the morning crying my eyes out. 

I guess I should just give myself permission to grieve and accept it for wjhat it is, Grief and just go with it until it stops hurting so much. It might be a bit easier if I were near home but home is almost 2000 miles due north and I seldom get home.

Thank you for yur response and you are right. Sometimes it takes a year or even longer to get past this.
 

I repeat- give yourself a break,,,,When I was a  newly minted social worker, my sister was diagnosed with lung cancer.. We were best friends & she was my big sister & replacement mother all in one. She was 15 years older than I.  She never realized that she was my hero too. Six months later she died. It was the hardest thing I have ever been through. I didn't leave her side, except to attend my son's 11th birthday for her final 3 days.  To increase the stress, 5 weeks before that day, we had closed on the purchase of our first home , my 18 month old had emergency surgery,  my  Godmother died, & my husband was suspended from work. Talk about your week from hell.  (I never seem to be able to tell just part of this story- it just rushes back).  Finally, I will come to my point- (bet you thought I would never get to it!!)   Having just studied death & dying a-la Kubla-Ross, & being a professional, I thought that I could control the grieving process & maybe even skip a step...say depression?. WRONG!   Who the heck did I think I was? Every last soul who experiences a  loss has to grieve and it is a process that cannot be rushed. You can get stuck in a stage of grieving, but you can't ru**** You must experience it all to heal.  If you try to ru**** or skip a step, you will just get yourself in emotional trouble. Grieving takes about a year. It takes about a year because you have to experience everything that happens in a normal year, without your loved one. I lost a much loved aunt last June. I have gone to her house on Christmas Eve for the last 30 years- I cried & cried Christmas Eve & much of Christmas Day. She was not my mother, but 6 months later I was still grieving- if you were not still grieving for your mother, I would be very surprised. Experience with death, may teach you a lot about how you grieve, teach you to present yourself to the world better, and you learn that you will survive it, but you still have to go through the grieving process. The bargaining, the anger, & the depression. as you know, it is not a straight line. It is not a clean process- step 1 then 2 then 3 etc. It's more like step i,2,1,2,3,1,3,2,3,4,3 etc Then 2 years later  something happens & BAM you are back at step 1 for an hour or a few minutes......
I know that you know all this, but I think that you need to hear it to remind you that you too are human