Emotional Eating--Undereating to Overeating

My weight and my body shape/image has always (yes, always) been something that I have obsessed on. When I was a teenager and a young adult, it was about staying skinny. (what a funny word skinny...because literally, it was just skin over my ribs and you could see the top of my hip bones.) I thought in my head that that was attractive. Secretly family and friends were concerned for me.

One of my first recollections of my weight/body obsession is laying on the kitchen floor after my parents had gone to bed. I was in high school and my pattern was to drink as much water before going to sleep so I didn't feel hungry...but the pain. I would drink water until it hurt and I would lay on the floor until the pain passed. I could never share this with anyone because it seemed so "crazy." And it just kept me isolated and alone or lonely. I would skip breakfast or just drink yogurt and then not eat lunch so I had money for junk food later in the day. I would eat dinner, but I was partly vegetarian so I stayed with a lot of carbs and comfort foods.

The result of all my efforts was on graduation from high school, I was 5-10 and I weighed about 120 pounds! My first year in college I was totally vegetarian so my focus on what I was eating kept me away from why I was not eating....feeling empty and unhappy. Years later I discovered that the one thing I could control with my weight was me! That is my desire to have some control in my life while things at home (between my parents) were shakey and my not knowing who I was sexually, where I fit in.....my weight was what I could control. My shape, my waistline was what I focused on and, of course, the number on the scale. A size 28 waist and staying below 130 pounds on the scale.

Well, my waistline has exploded because of all the emotions that I have stuffed inside over the years. I have been doing a lot of work on the emotions and I will continue to uncover and discover more of the beautiful child within that was lost for so long. So this blog post is about my journey back to discover me and to create the home inside me that I have always been looking for and waiting for. As I have heard others say "We are the Ones that We have been waiting for."