Some people wear their feelings on their sleeves. Food addicts often wear them on their stomach, hips, and thighs. Isn’t that special?

Everything in life is a temporary situation. It’s important for those of us who battle food addiction to remember that.

Right now, I feel like a walking commercial for Lipozene. I had an accident, went through a painful three months and ate my way through it, figuring I could just burn it off again after my knee surgery.

The surgery will probably happen eventually but for right now, a year after the accident, I’m fat. And I’m old–not real old but a young senior. Is that one of those oxymorons? When you’re a fat, old, food addict, life sucks. Temporarily.

Those are the times when I just have to say, “I’m fat and that’s that. And stop asking me if I’m okay”.

We get ourselves into overeating and emotional eating messes, and feel like it’s the end of the world. It’s just the food addiction sprinkling a little shame around and making you feel pathetic. That way you’ll eat more.

Bringing myself back to this present moment means admitting I jumped off the wagon and I need to face the music. First the facts, and then the music.

Yes, I am a food addict. I do have a food addiction. Sometimes I don’t have the slightest desire to give in to it. I have an eating plan, not a diet, that works for me when I follow it.

However, I have not recovered from my knee injury and will probably have to have surgery. Until I do, I won’t be able to enjoy some of the non-food joys of life so I have to admit where I am and be okay with it.

I’m fat and that’s that, and stop asking me if I’m okay. I don’t have time to humor you by acting pathetic. I need to get on with my life. 

Emotional trauma makes me eat. It soothes me but it’s –right–temporary. I’m not trying to be normal. I’m just trying to be me.

Emotional eating is a problem for many people. Food addiction is a problem for many people. We all have emotions, and everyone expresses emotion differently.

We get stressed and we behave a certain way. I get nervous and I eat. It’s as simple as that. It’s easy, it’s fast, and it works, temporarily.

When all that energy builds up inside me I feel like I’m going to explode.  You might want to take cover. And don’t ever miss a chance to exercise your sense of humor. Did you know laughing is good for your abs?

Accept me or not. I know who I am and who I am becoming and it’s okay if you don’t get it because I get it. And, by the way, I’m okay.

Isn’t self-talk great?!

Yes, absolutely! Don’t be fooled by the way some psychiatrists discount psychotherapy by calling it “talk therapy”. Many psychiatrists believe that medication is the best option for everyone.

Baloney! It’s the quickest way to get you out of their office and onto drugs. Drugs can’t solve everything. Temporarily removing a symptom of emotional eating or food addiction is just a fix. 

When you’re down so low that your body cannot right itself chemically, a prescribed medication by a doctor who is thoroughly familiar with your case, not just your symptoms, can help your body achieve a hormonal balance again.

If drugs could fix every health problem, then you would not have to keep taking them once the problem was fixed. For food addicts, our fix is food, easily accessible and with fewer side effects than drugs.

You stuff food in your face, overeat, ease your lousy day with food, food, and more food and all you get is fat. Then the problem just gets bigger and so do you and so does it, and so do you, and so on and so on. 

There is a reason people become food addicts. Most of the time, emotional eating is a symptom of something we’ve pushed deep down inside because we can’t deal with it.

After awhile, we don’t even think about the emotions that drove us to the behavior categorized as food addiction. We don’t remember the event, but we still feel the results of it.

Things that happen to us in our lives that lead us to not simply overeating, but gorging ourselves to the point of pain, nausea, or gross discomfort,  cannot be ignored forever.

Psychologists listen, they are very well trained and they know what’s going on. They are not the same as psychiatrists; they do not prescribe medication because they are PhD’s, not MD’s.

If you seek help from a psychologist for your food addiction, they can help you get to the bottom of the feelings that are causing the behavior. If they think that medication is needed, they call in a psychiatrist to prescribe it.

Most food addicts are not medical cases. Some eating disorders are. Binging and Purging can cause serious bodily harm, as can anorexia. If there is a chance that the behavior could cause death, usually that’s a medical case.

However, if you are stuffing down your feelings, talking  it out can help a lot. Food addiction isn’t just overating, or occasional emotional eating.

Food addiction is real, and it won’t go away until the thing or things that caused it go away.

The sense of emptiness, loneliness, longing, isolation, and shame that most food addicts feel underneath it all will be released one day.

But first, you have to let go of what caused all those feelings to gang up on you until you couldn’t fight back anymore so you just started eating as a defense.

Therapy can help you speak about those hidden areas of your life and accept them as part of a whole picture, not just a horrible, shameful thing that makes you eat until you are sick because you don’t know what else to do.

You have to learn what else to do for your food addiction besides feeding it. Then you can give yourself a chance to choose something different.

Emotional eating, food addictions, and all that goes along with them, are something that some of us have to deal with–for now, but not forever.

In a moment, now will change. When it does, you can too. Talk about it. Identify your food addiction. Give it a name, and see it for what it is.

Psychologists, mental health counselors–they are resources. Take advantage of the services they have to offer.

Look until you find one you trust enough to talk about your food addictions, and about your life, and you will be amazed at the outcome.

Every day  I battle my food addictions. Today I won the battle. It felt good.

I went to the Red Lobster with a friend of mine and got a breadbowl soup. Since it comes with a salad and grilled shrimp, I can never finish it, so I take what is left of the bread home with me.

When I get home though, I usually eat the bread right away. I don’t keep bread at home because it lures me into overeating. The trigger emotion is usually emptiness, and emotional eating takes over. My food addiction kicks in.

Today was different. I had lunch with a very special friend of mine that I don’t get to see very often. It is the kind of friendship everyone  needs and deserves, someone who is not judgmental and lets you be yourself.

Today, when I got home my mind was saying all the same things, and I heard the same self-talk but no food addict tendencies, no desire to engage in emotional eating, so stuffing down feelings of isolation.

My mind was screaming at me to eat that bread, but my heart was happy. I wasn’t hungry and no argument my mind could muster could change that.

Today I didn’t give in to my food addiction. I just had a really good visit with my dear friend and stuffed myself with the fullness of life.

It was a great day. I hope yours was too.

It certainly is true for me. Like many food addicts, I battle with my weight. I have made great strides, especially during the last decade, but my unique trigger is sleep deprivation.

Sometimes I just cannot sleep. Being the kind of food addict that I am, I have gotten a little “fluffy” lately. “Fat” sounds too cruel if you haven’t had a good night’s sleep. The more sleep deprived I am, the higher my risk of emotional eating.

Most diet and nutrition professionals, or bariatric physicians, might think that being fat is the worst part of having a food addiction. But the worst part is not being able to regain control easily after you jump the line.

Emotional eating sounds pretty lame to anyone who has never done anything more than pig out on ice cream when they broke up with their boyfriend or girlfriend.

With a food addict, stress does things to your body that causes you to behave in ways that people who have an occasional bout with overeating would not comprehend.

Dr. Susan Lark says that when you don’t get enough good quality restorative sleep , two particular hormones are affected. One is leptin, which is supposed to let you know when you’re full, and the other one is something called ghrelin, which stimulates the appetite.

When our hormones are out of balance, overeating is not uncommon. It’s not just overeating because we’re gluttons or emotional eating because we had a bad day. It’s much more intense and complex.

It is a physical response to a hormone imbalance in the body that causes the liver to go wacky so you can’t metabolize glucose properly.

The bottom line is you start snacking on high-carb foods that work against your body. For food addicts, it’s even worse. We go out farther on the limb and it’s harder to get back.

I read that magnesium is important for women when it comes to sleep. I don’t remember where I read it but the article advised men to keep a bottle of magnesium on the nightstand for their wives.

I think I’ll try that tonight after my Frutaiga nightcap. If you have any non-drug remedies for sleeping through the night, please feel free to share.

Any sleep tips for women or men given to overeating, emotional eating, or food addiction would be welcome and greatly appreciated.

Thank you, and sweet dreams.