Well, one of these is emotional overeating.
My desire when it comes to food is to continue to love food, but to have freedom from it. I think this concept is hard to understand at first, especially when you're in a bad relationship with food. When you're an emotional overeater, you love the taste of food because it seems to sate the compulsions or the anxieties you have, but you ultimately hate it, because it's your weakness. It has power over you.
So the concept of loving food -- really appreciating it, savoring it, enjoying it -- is completely lost on folks like myself who, as I said before, are in a bad relationship with food. We have a disordered relationship with food.
And that, my friends, is what I intend to share with you. My thoughts and revelations and insights and frustrations on my journey to food freedom -- scattered, erratic, and tiresome as they may be. I don't profess to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, or even someone with a lot of experience. But what I do have are my own experiences that are just as real as any book, diet study, or scientific journal you'll ever read.
My food freedom story is still being written. But like any story, it's the sentences that make up the paragraphs that make up the chapters that make up the volumes (if you're reading Tolstoy) that matter -- that define the story.
So, in order to avoid being completely cryptic, I will share my first tidbit of knowledge, which is based off of my own individual experience with struggling for food freedom. It may not apply to you, but I assume it does. I don't think I'm that much of an anomaly.
Forget about losing weight.
Yep. I said it. I went there. But I'm serious. This was crucial to me. My frustration with food had to become a battle for freedom -- not for weight loss. While your whole focus is on the changes you want to see in your body, you can't focus on how your body feels or what it needs.
When I've tried in the past, I was able to lose weight. However, I was not anywhere closer to freedom from overeating than I was when I was at my heaviest. I just made a place for it. You could say I "counted around it," meaning that although my calorie intake was spot-on (usually), I was just as consumed with food and ultimately continued to overeat. Because of this, I was a lot more unhealthy, even though I was shrinking physically.
Forgetting about losing weight is hard. Especially for those of us (myself definitely included) that want to be thinner, fitter, and to feel better about ourselves. But it is our only hope of real freedom... because, weight? It's a worldly struggle, and largely a very self-absorbed one.
For me, I had to choose not to struggle against the impossible task of pleasing my self-image or caring so much about how I look or what So-and-So thinks about the way I look. Nope. The battles I choose to fight are for freedom.
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