Uncomfortable Emotions, Eating, and Happiness

There's an old saying that floats through the Overeaters Anonymous rooms: "It's not what you're eating, it's what's eating you", and I'm a big believer in that. I think that most of my food cravings come when I'm hurting, emotionally, or spiritually. A couple of other sayings related to that, seen on fridge magnets, are "The answer isn't in here" and "Face your stuff, or stuff your face". They all point to the importance of dealing with uncomfortable feelings so A) I feel better and B) so I don't eat. Interestingly, I only became aware recently that A) feeling better was the ultimate goal of all the therapy, support group meetings, writing and prayer that I've been doing.

Like most desperate compulsive overeaters, all I could see for the longest time was the goal of not eating like a crazy person. Only recently has it dawned on me that yes, that is a great and admirable goal, one that many of us struggle fruitlessly to achieve, but the ultimate goal is feeling whole, having a richer and fuller life, where food is not the point of living. You know, it's that eating to live, not living to eat maxim, and I think it's only starting to sink in. Obviously, I'm still having trouble with the compulsion to eat in an unhealthy manner. I was a dieter for most of my 40- some years on this planet, obsessed with losing weight, and I believed that if I could only be thin, I would be happy.

Well, if that were true, I would have been happy enough to stay thin all those times throughout my life when I had managed to lose large amounts of weight, instead of regaining the weight plus more each time. Through working the OA program and doing therapy I am now a healthy weight, but as Fran Kuffel so cleverly put it in the title of her poignant memoir Passing for Thin, I am only "passing" as a thin person. Inside I am still a compulsive overeater whose relationship with my emotions, and any sense of real hunger is tenuous at best.

Yesterday was fairly hectic, but I realized that in the light of my "binge-ette" three nights ago, I needed to spend a few minutes processing my feelings. And what I found was an old resentment that I had only partially dealt with a couple of weeks ago. So I did some writing on it, and today, I have to do some more, otherwise, I have learned at my peril, it will come back again to, frankly, bite me in the ass! Emotions are clever things, they always out. Even when I think, "I've dealt with that already!" it can come back. Just like the bhuddists say when they talk about life being not a straight line, but a spiral, where the same issues will often come back repeatedly in different guises or intensities. I guess by dealing with them, I can at least follow the spiral path, and not wear the same old circle in the grass, chasing my tail (or Oreos) over and over.