Christmas and Emotional Eating
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In 2001 I weighed 357 pounds, and in the seven years since then I have lost — and kept off — more than 100 pounds. People who share my struggle with morbid obesity know that this is a life-changing amount of weight to lose. I no longer worry about whether I can find clothes to fit, whether there will be a chair that is big enough when I go somewhere new, whether there will be an empty seat next to me on the plane. I can do cardio exercise and I walk for hours on end. Changing from a body size that is huge to one that is merely big means that most of the time I feel pretty normal these days; back when I was at my largest, I always felt like people were staring at me — the truth is, they were.
I have struggled with emotional eating since childhood. However, I was able to achieve much of my weight loss so far without directly taking on the issue of emotional eating. By gradually changing my lifestyle and building healthier eating habits I lost weight and maintained the loss even though I was still eating for reasons other than hunger.
This is the power of what I’ve dubbed the “tweaks system” — over time, with gentle and gradual lifestyle change, those of us who grapple with the twin issues of compulsive eating and hoarding can almost effortlessly change our lives for the better. Tweak by tweak, small positive changes incrementally become transformational.
Once upon a time, just the idea of trying to get to the emotional root of my issues with food caused me insurmountable anxiety. However, over the past year I’ve discovered that I’m finally ready to start to examine why I choose to eat for reasons other than hunger.
Today I was feeling raw and edgy and could not put my finger on exactly why that was. Novembers have always been tough for me. A number of times over the years the month of November has marked the beginning of a winter depression, and so I now make a point of getting as much sunshine as possible during the late fall and winter. (I’m blessed to be able to live in a warmer, sunnier climate than my native Canada!)
As I was sitting down to work today, I had a strong urge to eat even though I was not hungry. And I didn’t want to eat just anything — I wanted fruitcake. Ordinarily, I keep Christmas sweets out of the house until a few days before Christmas. Out of sight, out of mind. But this year is our first Christmas as expats here in Tunisia and I decided to make our family’s two Christmas favorites, mincemeat and fruitcake, from scratch to make sure that we’d have some traditional Christmas goodies in this Muslim country. The conventional wisdom is that mincemeat and fruitcake must be aged for at least a few weeks, so I got the preparation out of the way early.
This year was the first time I have made fruitcake as an adult. My mother made fruitcake several years in a row when I was a preschooler and it shocked me how vividly I recalled those times as I started in on the multi-day fruitcake process this year. I remembered standing on a kitchen chair as a three and four-year-old, stirring the fruit mixture with a huge spoon — my Mom made such a big batch that she had to soak the fruit in a laundry tub! The taste of the batter, the smell of the spices, the little baking rituals all came back in waves.
My father moved out when I was six. As I recall them, the Christmasses before he left were magical, and much of the magic was food: the fruitcake ritual, a huge box of my grandmother’s Christmas cookies arriving in the mail, tins of smoked oysters and Terry’s chocolate oranges in the stockings my mother stuffed for me and for Dad.
Kids of divorce know that holidays are never the same afterwards. My mother did her best but Christmas after Dad left meant an intensification of sadness, rejection and anxiety.
So today I thought about what that slice of fruitcake I wanted so much represented to me. Geneen Roth, a woman who has spent her life writing and leading workshops about emotional eating with tremendous insight, encourages us to try to think about the feelings we want those craved foods to give us. How do we want the food to make us feel?
What did I want from the fruitcake? Warmth, comfort, love, security, acceptance. A tall order for a slice of cake. But naming those desires is powerful. I want warmth. I want comfort. I want love. I want security. I want acceptance.
I’m not going to tell you that I didn’t eat a slice of fruitcake — I did. Change is as much about awareness and acceptance of our needs and feelings as it is about actually changing how and why we eat. I ate a slice of fruitcake and when I found that I was still raw, edgy and sad, I walked outside and sat in the sun.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/su-lin/
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