Emotional eating: Part 1

I waver on whether I should attend the CCEF conference on Addiction in November. I have my own addiction that I’m dealing with and it’s ruining my mental health like nothing else right now.

Food.

Especially sweets.

I’ve been keeping a record of everything I eat and while most of it is not terribly bad, it’s either the portion sizes that kill me or the delicious 5-scoop caramel strawberry brownie sundae from Friendly’s or a few helpings of those 200-calorie Krispy Kreme donuts. It also doesn’t help that I live across the street from a bakery that’s been named one of the best in the Philly area.

I grew up skinny and petite for the majority of my life and gained the usual “Freshman 15″ (or in my case 25) when I attended college at New York University. I did an incredible amount of walking each day — an average total of at least 75 minutes — and still somehow managed to gain weight. I didn’t occur to me at the time that 2 full plates of food from the cafeteria with several scoops of ice cream needed to be phased out of my diet.

By the time I attended a small Christian college in Florida, I was sitting at 150 lbs. (For a 5’4” female, this is considered slightly overweight.) During the nearly 2 years that I attended that college, I rarely ever rode in a car, which resulted in a drop of 20 lbs. Mind you, I still hadn’t changed my eating ways.

Fast-forward to August 2005, the month of my wedding. After a year of Paxil (3 months) and Lexapro (9 months), I hovered around 169-170 lbs. This was the largest I had ever been in my life. I never really realized that I’d gained all that weight. I was always pretty comfortable in my own skin. Sure, my jeans didn’t fit me as well as they used to but that was OK; it just gave me an excuse to buy new clothes!

Then, my family — pretty harsh critics, according to my husband — labeled me F-A-T. I never saw fat until they said it. The next time I looked in the mirror, I saw they were right. When I grinned, a double chin suddenly appeared. Saggy breasts hung in place of my once perky chest. Triple-fat rolls had now replaced the tummy that if I’d sucked it in just right, they’d look washboard. My lowest love handle drooped over my string bikini underwear like a fading flower.

Stretch marks also began to appear. They showed up looking like extremely red rashes. It was like watching my capillaries slowly attempting to burst out of the seams of my skin. The marks finally made permanent rest stops on my inner biceps and inner thighs.

A few months later, my max hit 180 lbs. To a lot of women, especially those who have been obese or overweight for a long time might pooh-pooh my weight problems. For a girl who — when her growth spurt had ended — fluctuated between 110 and 125 lbs, this was devastating. Unfortunately, it probably wouldn’t have been as bad if her family members hadn’t taken the liberty of pointing that out. Especially since she needed to be “skinny” for her wedding.