Are you *emotionally* overweight? (guest post)

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When was the last time someone said something to you that Totally. Blew. Your Mind?

It happened to me this summer.

Here’s the story.

I was sitting next to a woman at a meeting, and we begin chatting about our children (of course).

She shared that her 14 year-old daughter had recently met her long-lost father who, after more than a decade of being ghost, resurfaced with a burning desire to be a Real Father.

The woman was, understandably, cautious. The daughter was, naturally, thrilled.

They invited the father to the daughter’s upcoming 8th grade promotion ceremony and hoped for the best.

It soon became apparent that he was (still) unreliable, (still) selfish, and (still) making empty promises. Incredibly, after years of ZERO contact, he expected to be called Dad, shown affection and consulted about plans.

The daughter was heart-broken. After a lifetime of missing her father and hoping he was, deep-down, a Good Guy, she had to face the reality that he was an immature, selfish, demanding whiner. Talk about anger, betrayal and disappointment.

I asked the woman what advice she had given her daughter.

I told her not to eat her feelings. She had already put on Worry Weight before he even came to town.

Whoa… that is not what I had expected her to say nor was it the advice that I would have given my own daughter (at the time).

We all know about emotional eating.

Instead of confronting our feelings and emotions, we eat to distract or soothe or protect ourselves.

Intuitively, the idea of emotional eating makes sense, but I had always thought of feelings as abstract and not real, concrete, tangible things that you could, say, eat.

My mother used to assign each of her gray hairs to something one of her kids had done.

“I got this one when your brother jumped off the roof,” she might say. Or, “See this one? It’s from when you stayed out all night.”

If we imagine that our emotions are like gray hairs sprouting from our heads, those “extra” pounds are not so mysterious after all.

They are anger, depression, loneliness, fear.

Worry weight.

Are you emotionally overweight?

What do you do with your emotions?

Do you eat them? If so, are they hanging out in places that you would prefer they did not?

I know that I am carrying around a few heavy emotions of my own: sadness at my sister’s death last year; worry about my daughter away in college; anger at my ex-husband for… things.

I thought I had been doing a great job dealing with my emotions, but now I wonder if they have just been turned into these last twenty pounds I can’t seem to lose.

If I face my emotions, will I lose the weight?

Because here is the thing: I want to be emotionally light. Buoyant. Lifted. Free.

Of course, I would be thrilled to drop twenty pounds, but what I really want is Peace, so I have decided to focus on my emotional health and treat my emotions as treasured objects in need of repair and attention.

  • I will face them not eat them.
  • I will acknowledge them not drink them.
  • I will examine them not smother them in gravy.

It is a work-in-progress, and it hasn’t been easy, but I do feel better.

And, yes, I have lost a few pounds.

  • What do you think of the woman’s advice to her daughter?
  • Good? Helpful? Harmful? Would you tell your own child not to “eat her feelings?”

 

 

Angela Tyler is an author (Queen Mother), educator and mother of two. Angela inspires and educates women to embrace their fitness super powers and fall in love with their scales (really!).

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Comments

  1. I used to know a woman who told her (extremely thin!) daughters “Fatty Patty doesn’t get a date,” when they would eat something she deemed unhealthy or too much. It was awful! This kind of goes along those same lines. However, I definitely agree that if not dealt with, those emotions go somewhere. I’m pretty sure I run mine out… 🙂

    • ???
      That doesn’t go along the same lines as the blog story at all. Your friend was encouraging her daughters to go hungry for the sake of appearance. The woman described in the post is advising her daughter, truthfully, that emotional eating/self-soothing with food/using food AS A DRUG is a slippery slope and she should learn to deal with life’s challenges and disappointments constructively.

      • I agree with you about teaching her to face her emotions constructively. There are many different ways to handle the stress of emotions, and eating is one of the ways (for good or for bad!!). I read an article that studied over 1000 people that were overweight or obese, and studied their eating habits. An EEQ (Emotional Eating Questionnaire ) was given to each of the participants, and the EEQ results showed that people that were classified as highly emotional eaters had less weight loss and higher fluctuations in weight. This type of fluctuation can be very unhealthy mentally, emotionally, and physically. Emotional eating can become a very serious problem if it gets out of hand.

        The link to the article is: http://wwws.moreheadstate.edu:7564/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=63914e90-a268-4626-8c47-3f384f1d3c48%40sessionmgr4003&hid=4214&bdata=#db=a9h&AN=96859585

    • So if the daughter were older and had a disappointment befall her (break up, work issue, etc) and the mother told her “Don’t go drown your sorrows at the bar,” would that be wrong? The mother advised the daughter, correctly, to not use food as a drug when she’s upset or sad. Problem?

  3. I used to be emotionally overweight.

    Sometimes I still am, but I’m coming to the realization that food isn’t going to solve me problems, and crying over them instead of trying something to rid of them isnt’ going to help either.

  7. What I really want is peace too.
    I remind myself I wont find that at the bottom of a fro yo carton.

  8. I’ve never really heard of the phrase Worry Weight before, but I totally get it. While others may not agree with me, I think that mom did the right thing {just like I believe 99% of parents do their best every single day}. And who knows how much further the conversation went? Maybe that conversation led to her daughter feeling that she could come to her mom with her emotions before confiding in a bag of chips.
    Great post!

  10. While i might advise her to not eat her emotions, i am not so sure i could then go on to tell her she had already eaten her worry and now needed to lose weight. She knows her daughter best, though, and maybe that’s what the girl needed to hear, so she would know whether the child would have a tangible idea what her mom meant because she explained it that way.

  11. Interesting! I wish that my Mother had known about this and taught it to me. As kids we were fed at every emotion. To get over sadness, to get over fear, to coach and cajole… have a cookie, you will feel better. ARGGGGH… how many years has it taken me to get beyond that? And my older sister never has and passed it to her kids…and my younger brother has done the same thing. I probably would have too if I had had children of my own. Sad cycle.

  12. I think it was good that that mother recognized her daughter was using food emotionally, but hopefully had a deeper discussion about it rather than just telling her not to use food that way. Since it’s such a complex practice to eat or restrict to deal with feelings, simply telling her not to do it could easily lead to guilt and more emotional eating if she was already far into it.

    That being said I think it’s such an important topic to discuss with kids, because it happens unconsciously and can become a lifelong behavior to struggle with.

    I tend to try to control things to deal with my emotions either through food, running, or intellectually by researching and gathering information. I would say most eat emotionally at least sometimes, and it’s not necessarily harmful unless it impacts functioning in some way.

  13. I agree with Michelle that it’s good the mother acknowledged the daughters eating behavior (although I probably would not have phrased it that way), however there really needed to be a bigger discussion .

    I am definitely an emotional eater. I don’t eat more, I eat differently. I go from a proper paleo diet to eating cake, pizza, and soda – all the things I would have found comforting as a child.

  14. hmmmm. Depending on the relationship between parent and child & the tone in which it was said, this would be good advice or terrible advice. What makes me lean more towards “terrible” is the “worry weight” comment.

    We should definitely teach children to process and deal with emotions. We should teach children not to eat their emotions. But the difference is the motivation behind this lesson. You shouldn’t eat your emotions because that won’t make the emotions go away. It will only smother them & create a myriad of other unhealthy relationships between food, emotions, self-loathing and weight. You should not eat your emotions because it is better to deal with them is a more mentally healthy way. I feel this is the healthy motivation behind not eating your emotions.

    To me, the unhealthy motivation is, “don’t eat your emotions, because that will make you fat & no one likes a fatty.”

    Help children learn to process their emotions for their MENTAL benefit. The physical benefits will come too.

  15. It’s important to develop healthy coping mechanisms to life’s stressful events, because they *will* happen.

    Going for a run beats drinking or overeating any day of the week…

  16. Years ago, I had already acknowledged that stress and worry made me more susceptible to eating poorly, then I had a conversation with a woman who was talking about her own emotional eating and what she said really resonated with me.

    She said that she ate to avoid feeling, because feeling itself was uncomfortable. I expected to eat emotionally if I was feeling sad, lonely, or stressed; but the truth was that I would also eat my feelings if they contained happiness, joy, or excitement. Just feeling was uncomfortable, eating would numb those feelings until maybe just a feeling of self-disappointment (which was comfortable and familiar) was left behind. I can relate to that.

    Strong emotion makes me uncomfortable. Eating was a way to squash that discomfort. Then exercising was, but that was taken to unhealthy extremes as well. I am still learning to confront my feelings, to know that to experience them will not destroy me. Knowing my emotional triggers help in huge measure because now I absolutely know that I will be feeling discomfort, not hunger and feeding discomfort doesn’t really work out . In fact, feeding discomfort, when named, feels MORE uncomfortable than just confronting what I’m feeling.

    Hope this little ramble makes sense, but it has been the key to me confronting what was standing in my own way the whole time my health journey seemed untenable.

  17. Well said. It’s all about acknowledging our emotions and facing them, rather then shutting them down and feeding ourselves food. It’s tough to experience those first few emotional upheavals but it does get easier.

  18. Worry Weight…i never heard about this phrase but completely get it! a very nice post and worth-thinking 🙂 i m not a mother so its better if i have no idea about her advice, i ll think more about this 🙂

  19. My sister is totally emotionally overweight. She can’t stop eating whenever she’s upset. It’s kinda hard to talk some sense into her.

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