How I Finally Made Peace with Food After 10 Years of War

The Beginnings of my Food Struggles

I’m not exactly sure when my struggle with food began. It seems to trace back to my early childhood, perhaps when I started consistently finishing my plate to seek attention from my parents.

Or was it when one of my elementary school peers called me a “sumo”? Memories intertwine, and I wonder if it was during middle school, as I gazed at myself in the mirror, loathing that rounded face and a body that wasn’t even overweight at the time, but simply less slender than that of my friends.

Or maybe it was in the ninth grade when I decided to go on a diet and managed to stick to it throughout the year. This diet threw me into an endless, vicious cycle: dieting, giving in, experiencing bouts of binge eating, returning to the diet, and then eating even more.

Food became an ambivalent companion, alternately comforting, unhealthy, manipulative, and punitive. Meanwhile, my body became a burden I carried everywhere.

I was never overweight, yet I consistently dieted from age 15 to 25, struggling with bouts of binge eating throughout that period.

As I entered the workforce, the episodes gradually decreased, but emotional eating lingered: I was still in a perpetual ‘diet’ mode (or rather, ‘watching what I ate’) constantly, nibbling when I got home from work or whenever stress overwhelmed me.

Every piece of chocolate, every meal eaten out triggered endless rumination, an internal dialogue, an endless self-flagellation after usually ‘giving in’.

Every culinary ‘temptation,’ whether it was the alluring scent from the bakery or a box of chocolates, triggered an avalanche of thoughts, cravings, and guilt.

At times, I felt abnormal, as if a lurking monster inhabited the shadows within me, waiting for the slightest opportunity to destroy me. The rest of the time, I pretended this difficulty didn’t exist. I didn’t believe I had an illness or a problem; I simply thought I was too indulgent and lacked willpower.

Everything changed on that day in 2020 when I could finally put a name to this complex relationship with food: emotional eating.

Emotional Eating

In a YouTube video (nowadays unavailable), back in 2020, I heard about emotional eating for the first time. It was both a shock and a blessing.

A shock at the moment because just hearing the content creator describe her lack of control with food made me feel ashamed and inadequate. She hit the nail on the head.

Emotional eating is when we’ve developed the habit of eating rather than feeling uncomfortable emotions.’ It was a blessing because it was the breakthrough that finally disrupted the carefully constructed machinery I had set up for over twenty years.

Gradually, I delved into the subject. I learned that the first step is to observe one’s emotions to counteract the mechanism.

However, I have a problem: I don’t feel any emotion when I eat. It’s more of a compulsion, an uncontrollable urge during which I’m incapable of self-observation. After a while (and a lot of intuitive writing), I have an epiphany.

Foodfighting

I realize that many people around me are affected by emotional eating: who hasn’t succumbed to chocolate after experiencing strong emotions?

However, in my case, it’s different. I don’t feel any emotion when I eat because my ‘crises,’ sometimes intense, are disconnected from emotions. Some occur belatedly: instead of experiencing emotions in the moment, I harbor them, and they explode when faced with temptation. But mostly, they happen without any emotional connection because I’ve simply developed the habit of eating without hunger.

Ten years of relentless struggle with food, diets, and hating my body have completely disrupted my relationship with food. I think about food 24/7. Hence the regular crises when the pressure becomes too much. And the ensuing guilt that triggers the next crises.

In other words, I believe that the term ‘emotional eating’ isn’t strong enough to describe this constant battle (and therefore, the advice given on this matter won’t work for me). I coined a different term for it: ‘foodfighting.

How I Made Peace with Food

If you remember Dumbledore’s words about fear of a name only increasing fear of the thing itself, the opposite holds true as well: by finding a name for my issue, I begin to solve it.

The journey has been long and winding, filled with books and small steps. I began by trying to eat while being mindful of my sensations. I remember that moment as if it were yesterday: I brought my packed lunch to work but decided to sit by the river. I had salad in one container and the rest in another. Trying to eat mindfully a crisp, flavorful leaf of salad… it moved me almost to tears!

The next part of the journey involved getting to know my hunger better, trying to listen to it more, armed with a notebook to jot down everything. Then understanding my satiety, unraveling why I disregarded it. After that, delving into the emotions that drove me to eat… which wasn’t an easy task, but regular writing helped me slowly uncover them. Finally, I ventured onto the much more challenging terrain of accepting my body and who I was.

Of course, I had to weave this amidst an intense job that consumed fifty hours a week and my personal life. It took me about a year to consider that I was done with the foodfighting, but even if it had taken me ten years, I would do it again without hesitation.

The process allowed me to explore a part of myself that was more vulnerable and intimate than the one I knew, to find solace on many levels, but also to muster the courage to launch a podcast on the subject and turn it into a book, ‘Foodfighting’ (co-written with a psychologist), which played a significant role in my career transition.

In short: no regrets.