Eat Me

I often wonder what it is that makes me eat when I’m upset. I call it eating my emotions, which may be more true than I let on while I’m trying to be all clever.

It’s true, though. If I’m upset, I eat. Perhaps it’s an eaters way of drowning the sorrows. I feel bad, ice cream tastes good, therefore if I eat enough ice cream I can tip the scales of good and bad more in favor of the good by the shear volume of the ice cream goodness.

But it never really is good enough for that, is it? All it does is make me sick.

Which leads me to my next hypothesis of emotional binging, that of the Puke Factor.

If I feel bad and I can’t get it out in other ways, am I overeating to the point of nausea in order to make myself sick enough that I have a physical manifestation of my emotions? I feel pukey, therefore I should want to hurl? And would that get the badness out? Like when you drink too much and you know if you could just get it out, you would feel so much better?

And yet it doesn’t work that way either, does it. Because it doesn’t feel better, it just makes you sick. Now I’m sick and sad.

Is it the food as a drug thing?  Nine times out of ten when I’m reaching for feel-good food, it’s something sweet.  Am I looking for that sugar high to cover up the emotional low?   But that’s just like sweeping the dirt under the rug; it’s still there and pretty soon it makes a lump that no amount of stomping will flatten. Plus, we all know that what goes up must come down.

The truth is that I don’t eat to the point of nausea or throwing up.  Not anymore, anyway.  There are times when I’d like to, but common sense wins out and I just can’t be that self-destructive.   That doesn’t mean that I won’t go buy donuts after a particularly gnarly fight with my husband, but I’m not going to eat the whole box.  I’m not even going to eat the three donuts I said I would because really, what would be the point?

Still, even though I’ve made it past the point where I eat myself into oblivion, finally, at this stage in my life, I haven’t been able to get past all of the emotional eating because I still bought the donuts.  I still ate two donuts.

And I wonder how long it’s going to take, and who I have to kill, to get past that part?