How I finally made peace with food after 25 years of war

I don’t know exactly when my struggle with food began. It seems like it dates back to my early childhood, maybe way back when I started systematically finishing my plate to get my parents’ attention. Or was it whenone of my elementary school friends called me sumo ? Memories intertwine, and I wonder if she was in middle school, looking at myself in the mirror and hating that round face, that body that wasn’t even overweight back then, but just less slender than my friends’. Or maybe in third grade, when I decided to go on a diet and I managed to stick to it all year.

He threw me a vicious circle without end : go on a diet, crash, have a binge attack, go back on a diet, eat even more. Food has become an ambiguous friend, by turns comforting, unhealthy, manipulative and punitive. My body, on his part, became a burden that I carried with me everywhere. I was never overweight, but I dieted steadily from age 15 to 23, suffering from bouts of overeating throughout that period.

When I entered the workforce the attacks gradually diminished, but the emotional hunger persisted: I was still in diet mode (or rather, I did it “Attention”) constantly, snacking on the way home from work or when stress overwhelmed me. Every square of chocolate, every restaurant meal triggered infinite ruminations, an internal dialogue, an infinite flagellation after having, in general, “cracked”.

Every culinary “temptation”, be it the inviting scent of the bakery or a box of chocolates, it unleashed an avalanche of thoughts, desires and guilt. Sometimes I felt like I wasn’t normal, like there was a monster lurking in the shadows inside me, waiting for the slightest opportunity to destroy me. For the rest of the time I behaved as if this difficulty did not exist. I didn’t believe I had an illness or a problem, but simply that I was too greedy and without willpower. Everything changed that day in 2018 when I was able to say a word about this complex relationship with food.

Emotional food

In a video on YouTube (now nowhere to be found), in 2018, I heard about emotional eating for the first time. It is both a cold shower and a blessing. Cold shower right now, because just hearing the videographer describe his lack of control over food made me feel ashamed, worthless. She hits the mark.

“Emotional food, it’s when we get into the habit of eating instead of feeling unpleasant emotions. » A blessing, because it is the trigger that will finally set in motion my gears that have been skillfully put in place for over twenty years. Little by little I am learning about the subject. I learn that the first step is to observe your emotions to counteract the mechanism.

Except I have a problem: I don’t feel any emotion when I eat. It’s more of a compulsion, an irrepressible need during which I can’t observe myself. After a while (and a lot of intuitive writing), I have an epiphany.

Food fight

I understand that there are many people around me affected by emotional eating: who hasn’t craved chocolate following a strong emotion?

In my case however it is different. I don’t feel any emotion when I eat because my “attacks”, sometimes intense, are not related to emotions. Some happen later: instead of experiencing the emotions, I hide them in a corner and explode when I am faced with a temptation. But for the most part they take place without any connection to an emotion, because simply the habit of eating without hunger.

Twenty-five years of fierce struggle with food, diets, hatred for my body, meant that my relationship with food was completely out of control. I think about food 24 hours a day. Hence the regular meltdowns when the pressure becomes too much. And the sense of guilt that derives from it and which causes subsequent crises.

In other words, I consider it the term “emotional eating” is not strong enough to describe this constant struggle (and therefore the advice given on this topic will not work for me). I’ll invent another one: food fight.

How I made peace

If you remember Dumbledore, who said that the fear of a name only increases the fear of the thing itself, the opposite is also true: finding a name for my problem I begin to solve it.

The path was long and tortuous, dotted with books and small steps. I started by trying to eat while being aware of my sensations. I remember this moment as if it were yesterday: I had brought my bowl to work but I had gone to sit by the river. I had the salad in one box and the rest in the other. Trying to consciously eat a crunchy, flavorful salad leaf… almost moved me to tears!

The rest of the trip was about setting off to satisfy my hunger, to try to listen to it more, armed with a notebook to write everything down. Then from my satiety, to understand why I ignored it. Then the emotions that made me eat… which was not an easy task, but writing regularly helped me, little by little, to discover them. And eventually, I ventured into the much slipperier terrain of accepting my body and who I was.

Of course, I had to intersperse this with a busy job that took up fifty hours a week and my personal life. It took me about a year to consider that I was done with food fighting, but even if it took me ten years, I’d do it again in a heartbeat. The process allowed me to go to meet a part of me more vulnerable and intimate than the one I knewto calm me down on multiple levels, but also to find the courage to launch a podcast on the topic and make a book out of it, Food fight (written in collaboration with a psychologist), which played an important role in my reconversion. In short: no regrets.

Ingrid Lemmer recounts her struggle and in her book provides the keys to finally making peace with food Food fightpublished by Prime Edizioni.