A few days ago, I was really sad.
There were some things happening in my relationship, and I was genuinely hurting.
So I went into the shower, sat down, and cried.
I didn’t try to talk myself out of what I was feeling.
I didn’t try to convince myself everything was fine.
I just sat there under the water and let myself be sad.
Eventually I got out.
And sometime later, something struck me.
I hadn’t thought about food.
At all.
There hadn’t been an internal battle happening in that shower where one part of me wanted to eat something and another part was reminding me that I wasn’t actually hungry.
I hadn’t thought, Don’t emotionally eat.
I hadn’t had to distract myself.
I hadn’t even wanted anything.
Food just…
wasn’t there.
And that’s different.
I didn’t want food and successfully resist it.
There was nothing to resist.
When I realized that, I had this moment of:
Wait.
When did that happen?
Because emotional eating used to be such a normal response for me.
Sad?
Food.
Stressed?
Food.
Ashamed?
Definitely food.
Overwhelmed?
Well, clearly this situation calls for something delicious.
Food could change the channel for a minute.
It gave me something else to feel.
And yet here I had been, genuinely hurting, sitting alone in the shower crying…
and food never even entered the room.
So naturally, once I realized this, I started trying to figure out what the hell happened.
Because if you’d asked me a few years ago how I was ever going to stop emotionally eating, I probably would have assumed there needed to be some big breakthrough.
I’d figure out why I did it.
I’d learn better coping mechanisms.
I’d diligently practice those coping mechanisms every time I wanted to eat my feelings.
And eventually I’d graduate into one of those emotionally healthy people who apparently goes for a walk when she’s upset.
Except that’s not what happened.
At least I don’t think it is.
I can’t point to a moment where I fixed my emotional eating.
I didn’t make a plan to stop.
I didn’t replace it with some specific technique.
I didn’t even realize it was disappearing.
But now that I’ve noticed it’s gone quiet, I can look backward and see some things that have changed.
For one thing, I’ve gotten a lot better at feeling bad.
Which is perhaps the least impressive personal development achievement I’ve ever announced.
But I mean it.
I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to get away from uncomfortable feelings.
Shame especially.
When something happened that made me feel ashamed, my brain didn’t just let me feel shame.
It made the shame mean something.
I’m worthless.
I’m failing.
This is who I am.
And then I needed relief from all of that.
Food was really good at providing relief.
Not permanent relief, obviously.
But immediate relief?
Absolutely.
It gave me somewhere else to go.
Lately, though, I’ve been practicing something different.
I’ve been trying to notice the stories my brain tells me without immediately becoming them.
Especially shame.
I can feel shame without becoming shame.
And maybe somewhere in there, I also learned that I can feel something painful without immediately needing to make it stop.
Because that’s what happened in the shower.
I wasn’t doing anything.
I wasn’t fixing myself.
I wasn’t journaling.
I wasn’t meditating.
I wasn’t repeating affirmations.
I wasn’t even going for the emotionally healthy walk.
I was sitting naked on the floor of my shower having a terrible time.
Growth!
But maybe it actually was.
Maybe I hadn’t actually found a better way to deal with the feeling.
Maybe I’d just finally stopped trying to get away from it.
I was sad.
So I let myself be sad.
And nothing had to happen next.
I didn’t have to fix the feeling.
I didn’t have to get rid of it.
I didn’t have to eat it.
But I think there’s another part of this too.
Because it isn’t only the way I respond when something hurts that has changed.
Something underneath all of that has changed too.
I think the place I’m starting from is different than it used to be.
I’ve been deliberately working on gratitude.
I’ve been trying to notice what’s good instead of letting my brain automatically search for what’s wrong.
And I don’t mean I’ve transformed into some relentlessly positive person who wakes up every morning overcome by the miracle of being alive.
Things still piss me off.
I still get hurt.
Clearly.
My brain still knows all the old roads and occasionally tries to drag me straight down them.
But things don’t seem to knock me down as easily anymore.
There’s more good underneath everything.
More gratitude.
More moments where I actually notice that my life is good while I’m living it instead of waiting for something to go wrong.
And I wonder how much that matters.
Because maybe emotional eating wasn’t only about what I did when something painful happened.
If I was already living closer to shame, frustration, restriction, or feeling like I wasn’t enough, maybe it didn’t take much to push me into a place where I desperately wanted relief.
Now I think I’m starting from somewhere different.
Which doesn’t mean bad things don’t hurt.
They do.
But maybe there’s a difference between being in pain and living from pain.
That sadness came into my life.
It hurt.
I sat in the shower and felt it.
But it wasn’t home.
And I didn’t need food to take me somewhere else.
There’s also something else that has changed that feels almost embarrassingly simple.
I eat.
Like… actual food.
Regularly.
And I’m grateful for it.
I eat breakfast.
I eat lunch.
I eat dinner.
Sometimes I have something sweet at night.
And I genuinely have moments where I feel grateful that I don’t starve myself anymore.
That sentence probably tells you quite a bit about how I used to approach weight loss.
For so long, food existed in extremes.
Restrict it when I was being “good.”
Want it desperately when I couldn’t keep restricting.
Use it when I felt bad.
Feel bad because I used it.
Try to regain control by restricting it again.
And around and around we go.
Now?
I eat.
And maybe that matters more than I’ve realized too.
Because I’m not spending all day creating a physical and emotional need for food and then wondering why my brain won’t shut up about it.
Food isn’t something I’m constantly trying to earn or avoid or compensate for.
Recently, I actually tried tightening things up again.
I started paying closer attention to calories and played around with intermittent fasting.
And I noticed something almost immediately.
Food got louder.
I started thinking about it more.
There was more calculation.
More awareness of when I could eat.
More attention on food in general.
And I could feel that old sense of restriction creeping back in.
So I stopped.
Which is a surprisingly big deal for me.
There was a time when I would have assumed that if I wanted to lose weight faster, the answer was obviously more control.
Try harder.
Eat less.
Be stricter.
But this time, I noticed what was happening.
Food was getting louder again.
And I didn’t want food to be loud.
So I backed off.
I went back to what had already been working.
Breakfast.
Lunch.
Dinner.
Something sweet sometimes.
Walking.
Living my life.
And strangely enough, after being stuck at higher weights for long stretches, my weight has slowly started dropping again.
I’m happy about that.
Of course I am.
But the scale almost feels like the least interesting part of what’s happening.
Because I think something much bigger has been changing underneath it.
I’ve gotten better at letting feelings hurt without treating them like emergencies.
I’ve gotten better at noticing shame without immediately letting it tell me who I am.
I’ve been practicing gratitude and starting from a place that feels a little less like I’m constantly waiting for something to go wrong.
And I’ve stopped spending my days trying to control food.
I don’t know which of those things mattered most.
Maybe all of them did.
Maybe there are pieces I still don’t understand.
I don’t want to look backward at something that happened slowly and turn it into a neat little formula just because formulas are easier to write about.
That’s not how I experienced it.
There wasn’t a day when I woke up and announced:
Congratulations! I no longer emotionally eat!
It was quieter than that.
Which makes me wonder how many other changes happen this way.
We spend so much time watching ourselves while we’re struggling.
Counting the days.
Watching for progress.
Wondering why we’re still doing the thing we said we’d stop doing.
And maybe sometimes the change keeps happening after we’ve stopped staring at it.
Until one day something hurts.
Really hurts.
And you find yourself sitting in the shower crying.
Then later you realize:
Wait.
I didn’t want food.
Not I wanted food and didn’t eat it.
I just didn’t want it.
I was sad.
Food had nothing to do with it.
I don’t know exactly when food stopped being the place I went when life hurt.
Looking backward, I think maybe I’ve been working on it without realizing I was working on it.
Not by getting better at controlling food.
Maybe almost the opposite.
A few days ago, life hurt.
I went and sat in the shower.
I let it hurt.
And food never even entered the room.
Somewhere along the way, I think I stopped needing it to.