Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

For the last four months, I have been steadily losing weight. I’ve been keeping my dopamine levels high without eating sugar and watching myself. I’ve learned a very important lesson in these last few months.

It’s never about the food. It’s about WHY I want to eat the food.

Whenever I start to feel uneasy or discontent, then I know that something is wrong with me emotionally. I’m scared about something, or maybe I’m worried about something. The fact that I might be tempted to eat an entire bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups isn’t about the candy. It’s about my emotional state.

This is a lesson that has taken me YEARS to learn. I’ve always known that I’ve eaten for emotional reasons, but I was never successful at stopping the never-ending eating compulsion. I am finally able to feel that feeling of hatred for myself and recognize it for what it is. I’m upset about SOMETHING and it has transmogrified into self-hatred and self-destruction, thus, the peanut butter cups.

The WORST part is that I can’t really teach someone else about this. As much as I might try to talk about it here, that feeling that starts the binge is different for every person. I can’t teach you how to recognize that feeling because I’m sure it manifests itself differently in you. In fact, it might not even manifest as a desire to binge. It might manifest as lack of hunger or the unstoppable urge to cut yourself.

It makes me feel so hopeless as a writer for Starling Fitness, because I feel like I’m healing and I don’t know how to pass on that healing.