Overeating and Overweight: My Relationship with Food and My Body #AtoZChallenge

Welcome to day 15 in the A to Z Challenge. The O is, for whatever reason, a difficult letter. I didn’t have an inkling what I was going to write about until today and then made up my mind several more times. I finally settled on two O words: overeating and overweight. Today, I am going to describe my struggle with emotional eating.

I remember when I was as young as five stealing candy from my parents. So did my sister, but I was always the one initiating it and taking the most. My parents thought it was funny.

Despite this, my diet was relatively healthy until I enrolled into mainstream secondary school at age thirteen. Then, my eating quickly got out of hand. I ate sausage rolls every single day. I also bought large amounts of candy every week, which I’d eat in one sitting. My parents noticed, but other than giving me a bit of a talking about it, they didn’t help me change my behavior.

I don’t really know why I overate in the first place. It was more of a habit, an addiction perhaps, than that it was tied to clear emotional distress. Of course, I suffered chronic stress, so that may’ve contributed.

I had some ritualistic behavior around food too. I didn’t know a thing about calories, but I wrote down everything I ate. This was often ended with a piece of self-hatred. It was true t hat I ate too much, but I made no attempt to change it other than by berating myself for it.

I was curvy from early secondary school on, but always maintained a healthy BMI somehow. This didn’t change till sometime in 2012. I rapidly started gaining weight and continued to gain weight until the summer of 2017. Then, I tried to lose weight. I lost about 10kg and then started gaining again. I haven’t been weighed in in several months and am pretty sure that, though I am not where I was in mid-2017, I’ve gained some considerable weight.

I honestly don’t know how I feel about this. I don’t like the way my body looks and the fact that I am at increased risk for illness and premature death. However, in a sense, I’m too lazy to really do something about it. It’s true that, once again, I experience a ton of stress and I think about overeating on a daily basis. However, I can resist the urge most days. I don’t eat the whole can of peanut butter or something. In this sense, I have the willpower to keep from bingeing. I would really love to get myself to stop doing it altogether. Since tomorrow is my usual shopping day, I am resolving here not to buy myself candy this week.