A question to those of you who successfully gave up emotional eating

I’m a 32 year old female and even though I’m done losing weight and am pretty happy with my figure again, I noticed that in order to maintain my weight and, most importantly, my overall health, I finally have to get rid of my emotional eating.

I’ve literally been an emotional eater since childhood. My childhood was at times really hard and traumatizing and my only comfort was food. Sugar, to be exact. I drank a lot of cocoa and invested my entire allowance into sweets.

I’ve been to therapy for years but only recently, when I starteded a new, pretty stressful job at a Callcenter, I noticed what a huge problem my emotional eating is and always has been. Up until this point, I never took it seriously and if I think about it, I can only remember a handful of times where I didn’t eat sweets constantly, every day, an entire bar of chocolate at least.

These past few months, my eating habits have turned to absolute garbage. I’m currently on a very high-fat, high-sugar diet and I’m sure this must be effecting my performance at work. I come home from work to eat pizza, mcdonalds, chocolate and in the mornings I often buy myself a croissant from the bakery. Aside from an occasional apple, no fruits or vegetables whatsoever.

The paradox is that I LOVE healthy food. And I have been on a relatively healthy diet cooking-wise for many years, it all went downhill when I got severely depressed 2 years ago.

My depression is over, thank god, but the bad, emotional eating habits have stuck.

I’m determined to change this. And I’m pretty certain that I can do it even though right now, I think about chocolate every 5 minutes and I know the next few weeks will be hard. But I finally wanna end this crazy behavior by seeking out different forms of comfort than to stuff my face.

I’m confident I can go without buying sweets anymore for a week or two, but how do I go from there?

So, my question to those of you who have already successfully given up emotional eating:

How has your relationship to the kind of food you used to stuff your face with changed? Can you eat it in moderation now or do you have to avoid it at all costs, otherwise you’ll “relapse”?

Thanks for your help!

submitted by /u/acertaincalmness1988
[link] [comments]

source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/jdc2jl/a_question_to_those_of_you_who_successfully_gave/