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Source article: How To Be Happy: 10 Timeless Principles for Lasting Happiness

Make sure to put this up on your work desk as a daily reminder!

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Related Posts

• How To Be Happy: 10 Timeless Principles for Lasting Happiness
• Apply 80/20 to Your Life Now in 3 Simple Steps
• How I Moved On From A Heartbreak – Part-2: Heartbreak and Sadness
• 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You)

Quick announcement: Our LA meet-up for PE readers is ON, and it’ll be this Saturday, Jan 14, 1:30pm at Sage Organic Vegan Bistro! We’re expecting a big turnout for the meet-up this time (16 people so far)!

For those of you in west coast / Los Angeles, I want to meet you! Please RSVP right away if you can make it. If you RSVPed but can’t come for some reason, please let me know right away so I can plan accordingly. Look forward to seeing you guys very soon!

Are you happy? How happy would you say you are, on a scale of 1-10?

Our society today is entrenched in low levels of consciousness of fear, desire and pride. Despite the increasing affluence of people in our world, it seems people are more and more unhappy today. From unhappiness with work, unhappiness with their life, unhappiness with the world, unhappiness with themselves. If you think that the people around you seem quite unhappy, let me tell you that this is a common issue everywhere in the world – be it countries/cities I’ve been to in Asia, in Europe, or in America.

In light of this epidemic, I’ve created a guide on how to be happy. The mark of a good life is one that is filled with happiness. If you’re not happy at all, then what’s the point of doing any of this to begin with?

I see this as a timeless guide, with 10 of my universal, timeless principles to achieve happiness. May you find these 10 principles useful in your quest for happiness. Know that at the end of the day, happiness comes from within, not from outside. This is why the guide focuses on intrinsic, permanent steps to achieve happiness, rather than extrinsic, surface-level tips which only have a temporal effect (such as listening to music, going shopping, etc).

Here goes.

#1. Attend to Negative Emotions / Thoughts; Don’t Repress them

Many of us in the modern society today do not know how to properly deal with our emotions. Just look at what most of us do when we are unhappy/angry/upset/stressed/fearful. We either (a) sleep it away (b) eat it away (emotional eating) (c) drink it away (alcoholism) (d) smoke it away (e) bury ourselves with other things, usually work and/or (f) ignore those emotions altogether.

So what happens when we do not deal with our negative emotions appropriately? Our emotions / thoughts are unaddressed and get repressed. It may look like the unhappy emotions / thoughts are gone the next day, but no, they are never gone – they are just buried beneath the surface.

It’s a matter of time before they re-emerge in the future – usually when we face a situation that triggers latent memories. During which we can either respond via avoidance again, hence repeating the cycle all over again, or by dealing it the right away this time. To do the former is to live an unconscious life, no different than a sleepwalker. To do the latter is to take the path of courage and start living consciously.

How should we deal with unhappy emotions / thoughts then?

1. First, unload your mind, especially if the incident just occurred and you’re faced with a big influx of negative emotions. I find the brain dumping exercise very helpful for this purpose. Meditation also helps in calming your mind. It’s okay to use destressing methods like playing games, taking a break, taking a walk, venting, listening to music, etc – as long as you return to the issue at hand after you are done destressing.
2. Identify your source of unhappiness via asking yourself: “What’s making me feel unhappy?“. The answers can be very revealing. If you’re someone who has never questioned your emotions/unhappiness before, this will point you in the right direction, because rather than take your emotions as they are, you’re now making an effort to understand them. If you are a conscious individual, with high awareness of your emotions, this will bring you a step further.
3. Create a list of steps that will help you address the source of your unhappiness above. See next step.

#2. Take Action on What’s Making You Unhappy

I’d say I’m by and large quite a happy person. It’s not because I don’t feel unhappy emotions. Like everyone, there are times when I’m unhappy. There are times when I’m angry too. And there are times when I can be downright miserable.

What do I do during these times? Do I let myself sink in the negative emotion? No, I don’t. That’s pointless and a waste of my mental energy.

What I do is this – Whenever there is something making me unhappy, I fix the issue right away, in a 3-step approach. Firstly, I identify the issue at hand. Secondly, I locate the action steps that will resolve it. Then, I execute those steps immediately.

A simple example : I was recently in New York City (Nov-Dec ’11), as part of my US travel. While NYC is terrific and I love the city, its winter climate is too cold for me, since I grew up in a tropical country (Singapore). It got so cold that I would much rather stay in than go out. It was quite miserable.

Rather than let the situation perpetuate though, I checked the weather in west coast, and realized the southern west coast has a much conducive climate for me. So during Jan ’12, I traveled on to Los Angeles, California, where it is much warmer. Problem solved, and I became a much happier person.

There have been many other situations where I wasn’t happy and took action to address them:

• Quitting my previous job because it was not my passion
• Parting ways with my best friend because our friendship was no longer making us happy
• Working on my relationship with my parents because it wasn’t where I wanted it to be
• Working doubly hard on growing Personal Excellence (thereafter reaching 1 million pageviews a month) because it wasn’t growing as fast as I wanted it to
• Addressing my emotional eating issue because it was causing me so much anguish, both in life and in terms of staying true to my weight loss plan.

Likewise, if something is bothering you, fix it. Don’t let your unhappiness linger, because your happiness should be your #1 priority. Below are some tips:

1. Fix the issue right away. No point waiting. The longer you wait, the more unhappy you are.
2. Focus on what you can effect, not what you can’t effect. This includes (a) things in the present (b) your thoughts and actions. Not (a) things in the past or things that have yet to take place yet or (b) thoughts and actions of other people.
3. Remember that every problem has a solution. You are only limited by the confines of your mind. It’s up to you to expand your frame of thought and find the best-fit solution.
4. Once you have done everything within your control, let go and let things run their course. You have already done what you can. Now it’s up to the others and the universe to do what they must.

#3. Update Your Belief System

If the problem still persists despite having done what I can to fix it, or if the source of the unhappiness is irreversible (for example, death of a person or changing the past) or something out of your span of control (such as other people’s thoughts or actions), then it’s a cue that something is wrong with my framework of thought.

For example, in How I Moved On From a Heartbreak series I wrote back in 2010, I shared G’s non-reciprocation of my feelings for him left me broken up on the inside. I had subconsciously concluded from his non-reciprocation that something was wrong with me, that I wasn’t good enough, and that I was doomed not to meet anyone else in the future.

However, I later found out my unhappiness was misplaced, as I elaborated in Part 3: Forgiveness, Closure and Moving On. The conclusions I had made were not true. I had wrongly defined my worth based on whether he wanted to be with me or not, when my worth was independent of this event. I had also wrongly concluded I wasn’t able to meet anyone else, when all it meant was he just wasn’t the right guy for me. Realizing the falsehoods behind the beliefs naturally removed the unhappiness.

The best beliefs to have are the ones that empower you. If there is something that’s making you unhappy, there is no point holding on to the thought, because you are just making your life miserable. This doesn’t serve you, nor the others around you. It calls for an internal reflection and an updating of your belief system, where you dissolve disempowering beliefs and adopt empowering ones. Be sure to read:

• Ask Celes – Is It Possible To Let Go of Unhappy Past Forever?
• Day 25: Your Beliefs of Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program
• 30BBM Day 26 – Letting Go

#4. See the Positive vs. Negative Side of Things

Have you ever heard the phrase: “Behind every dark cloud is a silver lining?”. What it means is, no matter how dire a situation may seem, there is always a positive side.

For example, below is a list of things most of us would regard as negative, especially if they occur to us.

• Arriving late for a meeting
• Slipping on weight loss plan
• Failing a job interview
• Getting laid off
• Breaking up with partner
• Facing a difficult situation

What if I were to tell you there is a positive side to every single one of the situations above?

Situation typically seen as negative occurrence -> Positive side(s) of the situation

• Arriving late for a meeting -> (1) You now know the boundaries to stick to if you want to be punctual (2) You learned the importance of being punctual, albeit via the hard way.
• Slipping on weight loss plan -> You are now aware of a new pitfall of your weight loss plan, which means one step closer towards your goal.
• Failing a job interview -> (1) Troubleshooting the interview will help you learn things to avoid in your next interview (2) What you learned from this encounter may well help you secure a better job after this.
• Getting laid off -> (1) Free time to reflect over what you want to do in life (2) You can now embark on new opportunities – From working in new companies, to taking on new roles, to exploring new career paths, to possibly starting your business
• Breaking up with partner -> (1) Being relieved of a relationship which was not working out. It takes 2 hands to clap. If your partner was not happy in the relationship, you could not have been much happier yourself. (2) You now get to meet new people, and possibly meet someone who is a much better match than your ex.
• Facing a difficult situation -> (1) Dealing with this will help you develop strength and wisdom (2) You get to learn and grow much more than those who have never dealt with this before.

Some people may comment that I’m being overly optimistic with what I wrote above. But I’m not. What I wrote above is fact, not fiction. I know of multiple people who have failed job interviews with good companies, only to secure jobs with the companies of their dreams after that. I know of many people who had painful break ups, only to enter the relationship of their dreams after that. I myself have been in multiple difficult situations before, which helped me gain tremendously (in strength and wisdom) as a result.

Everything in life has a positive side to it. Once you realize that, it is up to you to identify the silver lining and expand on it. After you do it for a few times, you’ll realize that the entire situation has been the silver lining all along.

Here are some tips to spot the good things in each situation:

1. Recognize there is always something good to be gained from each situation. It’s up to you find that.
2. What experiences have you gained from this incident? Everything you experienced, both good and bad, would not have taken place if not for this encounter.
3. What lessons have you learned? You would never have gained these lessons if not for this encounter.
4. What does not kill you will make you stronger. What soft skills and hard skills have you developed from this?
5. Every problem comes with its set of opportunities. What opportunities lie before you now as a result of this problem?

#5. Let Go of Expectations (and Focus on Intentions)

Focus on your intentions, not narrow definitions of your intentions. I found a lot of things that made me unhappy in the past was because I had very specific, narrow definitions of how things should be. And when I focused on my intentions vs. specific definitions of how they should manifest, it made me a lot happier. The most important thing – what I wanted would then come true after that, and in spades.

For example, I used to narrowly define my ideal family relationship as one where there is open communication. However, the relationship between me and my parents (since young) was one where there was little to non-existent communication. No matter what I did, I could not attain my desired relationship, as I shared in Part 2: A Pervasive, Widening Gap. Not only did this make me miserable, it also made my parents unhappy, because I would constantly resist what they did, since I thought they didn’t care.

It was only after a long, drawn out struggle that I realized I had approached the situation wrongly. What I really wanted was a loving relationship with my parents, and I thought open communication was the way to go. But the ironic thing was that my parents had been trying to express their love for me all this while, albeit in their special way. I was just not able to see it because I was so hung up on this one expression of love.

Attaching myself to my higher intention for a better relationship with my parents, vs. my specific definition of what an ideal parent-child relationship should be, helped me to attain a better relationship with them. I no longer resist my parents’ lack of openness since that is just the way they are. My non-resistance also made them more ready to express their love for me.

Realize that: (1) every goal we have reflects an intention we want to manifest (2) there are countless ways this intention can be manifested.

Hence, do not get hung up over the 1 definition of your goal. Continue to have goals and to pursue your goals, but stick to your higher intentions, not set definitions of how you want those goals to manifest. Once you do this, you will realize that you now make faster progress than ever, and it was your narrow definitions that had prevented you from moving forward initially.

#6. Be Grateful For What You Have

Do you know that no matter where you are right now in life, there are always people who are worse off than you? And no matter how bad things may seem, things can always go much worse?

For example, someone who complains about having a small house should look at the homeless man on the street, who has no home to speak of, no place to seek refuge even in the cold winter. Someone who complains about having just lost his/her job should talk to the guy who just lost his limb from a car accident. Someone who complains about his/her parents being naggy should speak to a recently orphaned child, who has no parents to speak of.

So, take stock and be grateful for the things you do have. Be grateful you’re not dealing with worse situations. Be grateful you are alive. Be grateful for your senses. Be grateful for the people in your life. Be grateful for the air you get to breathe every day. Be grateful for the problems you get to face.

Even if you may think you have nothing, you are very much wrong, for you will always have you and your higher self.

Read:

1. How To Start When You Have Nothing
2. 60 Things to be Grateful For in Life (bonus article in Personal Excellence Book, Volume 2)
3. Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program, Day 15 – A Day of Gratitude
4. Be a Better Me in 30 Days Challenge, Day 11 - Day of Virtue: Appreciation

#7. Think of Your Ideals vs. Problems

Most of us tend to turn our energy to our problems. However, such an approach puts attention on the negative and reminds us of things we don’t want, which breeds more negativity. Not exactly an effective path towards happiness.

Here’s a better way – Rather than wear yourself out with liabilities, think in terms of ideals instead. Always ask yourself: “What is my ideal vision?” (Day 2 of Live a Better Life in 30 Days).

This is my favorite question which I always pose to anyone who seems bogged down by his/her problems. And it never fails to light a spark in the person’s eyes, after which he/she begins talking excitedly about what he/she wants, not seemingly able to stop.

There are 3 important benefits of focusing on ideals vs. liabilities. Firstly, it gets you thinking of possibilities rather than limitations. Secondly, helps you to get clarity of what you want, which makes it easier to achieve your 100%, ideal life.  Thirdly, by thinking of your ideal vision, it puts you in a positive mental state, which, by default, already makes it easier to address any challenges in your way.

That’s not to say that you ignore your liabilities and pretend they don’t exist. It means you don’t let them tie you down anymore, but remain mindful of them

For example, if you have a $100k debt to clear, don’t focus on that – be aware of the debt, but focus on wealth-generation opportunities. If you are working in a job you don’t like, focus on the ideal career you do want, and how you can create that. If you just lost your job, focus on the new jobs you can now pursue. If you are surrounded by negative people, focus on the positive, new people you are going to meet. If you are single and constantly getting into bad relationships, focus on your ideal relationship you would like to have, and the qualities you would like your ideal partner to have.

#8. Live a Purposeful Life

Living a purposeful life, one where you have an empowering life purpose and noteworthy goals, paves the way for a happy life.

Have you established your life purpose? If not, perhaps now is the time to do so. I’ve written a lot on this subject, which I recommend you to read:

• Are You Sleepwalking Your Life Away?
• How To Discover Your Real Life Purpose (7-part series)
• How To Know What You Want To Do In Life
• Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program, Day 16: Life Purpose

As you define your life purpose, you want to set life goals, because they bring out your highest potential. Read the following on goal setting:

• 6 Important Reasons Why You Should Set Goals
• ESPER: 5-Step Successful Goal Achievement Framework (7-part series)

#9. Recognize happiness is a choice

One of the most stressful points in my life was back when I was in my previous job.

At that time, I was denied of bigger projects by my manager even though I had delivered my work without fail and was exceeding expectations. It had nothing to do with my performance, but simply my (lack of) seniority in the company. I felt unfairly boxed in by my position, and was extremely frustrated. What was the point of staying on if I wasn’t allowed to grow? I was unhappy with my manager, with the situation, and with my life. Repression was the word of the day.

It was during this darkest period, as I cried to myself while I was showering, that I realized that no matter how painful the situation may be, I always had a say in the matter. I could either lament about the sorry state of my life, or I could make the best out of what I was given. I could either struggle in this pain, or I could tap into it and forge it into strength. I could either see this as a liability, or turn it into an opportunity. I could either be unhappy and miserable, or I could be the happiest person in the world.

So I chose the latter. And since then, whenever I’m caught in a situation which makes me feel unhappy in any way, I would go for the latter. I know no matter what happens, no one can rob me of my happiness. My happiness is my choice

The same goes for you too. Are you caught in a situation outside of your control? Are you letting it affect your feelings? Are you going to let it drag you down, or are you going to smile and turn it into gold?

Read: You Always Have a Choice

#10. Don’t think “What if”, but “Next time”

You know how many of us like to go “what if” whenever things don’t go our way? “What if I had done this instead?” “What if I had done that instead?” “What if … this? “What if … that?”

Well, who cares? And what does it matter? No amount of “what if“s is going to change the reality.

On the other hand, what will help is this: “What can I do such that this doesn’t happen next time?” This will help you learn from what has happened, so you can make things different – be it preventing the same problem from happening, or taking a different course of action so you create a different outcome.

So instead of thinking “what if“, start thinking “next time“. The former is entrenched in the past, while the latter is forward-thinking. The former is disempowering, while the latter is empowering. It will make a world of a difference.

Concluding Note

I hope you found this guide useful. Please share it with others if you found it helpful. Let’s spread the art of happiness to as many people as we can.

Here is a related article worth reading: 13 Helping Points When Things Don’t Go Your Way. This one teaches you how to deal with the daily setbacks in life.

This guide has covered my 10 universal, timeless principles for happiness. Now, do you have your specific tips to be happy? Please share them.

Related Posts

• [Pic] The Happiness Manifesto
• Apply 80/20 to Your Life Now in 3 Simple Steps
• 10 Reasons You Should Meditate
• How I Moved On From A Heartbreak – Part-1: My Journey With Love

1. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 1: Food as a Symbol of Love
2. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 2: Deep Entanglement
3. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food
4. 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You)
5. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating
6. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 2: Rebuilding a Healthy Relationship with Food

Do you have a healthy relationship with food? Do you eat in line with your daily needs? Do you eat when and only when it’s needed? Are you able to stop eating when you have met your daily needs?

Or do you have no hold over your eating behavior? Do you find yourself battling back and forth when it comes to food? Do you eat something you don’t find healthy, because you can’t control your eating? Do you use emotionally charged words to describe food, even though food has no feelings for you?

If you answered “yes” to the first set of questions and “no” to the second set, that means you have a highly healthy relationship with food.

On the other hand, if you answered “no” to the first set and “yes” to the second set, that means there’s room for improvement in your relationship with food.

I used to have an intensely twisted relationship with food, due to how I was brought up. I shared this at the start of the series, so if you haven’t, read it here: My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part-1: Food as a Symbol of Love. In Part 4, I shared 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating, which you would find familiar if you are an emotional eater.

Today’s guide will get you started on removing emotional eating from your life. As this is a long guide, I’ve split it into 2 parts, representing 2 critical parts of the solution. Part 1 will teach you how to tackle the causes of emotional eating. I’ve developed a simple 4-step process to unbuckle emotional eating from your life.

As additional reading, I recommend you to read How To Break Out of Recurring Patterns in Life, exclusive article in Personal Excellence Book, Volume 2 – especially since emotional eating is pretty much a pattern we face in life.

With your (emotional) eating triggers removed, Part 2 will help you to (re)build a healthy relationship with food.

Overcoming emotional eating may not happen overnight, but as long as you keep working on it, you will achieve a 100% healthy relationship with food – sooner than if you put it off to tomorrow.

Read each step in detail and apply what you read. I can only share the methods; you have to be the one to act on them. The power to overcome emotional eating lies in you. Good luck.

How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 1 – Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating

Step #1: Identify your emotional eating triggers

If you want to address emotional eating, you need to first know what’s triggering you to eat, even in times of non-hunger.

Let’s do a quick exercise. What were the last few times you felt an urge to eat (outside of hunger), be it whether you gave in to the urge or not? Write them down, now, before you continue reading.

…

…

…

Done?

When I first did this exercise a couple of years back, it was very revealing. Rather than deal with emotional eating like it was some invisible enemy, which was something I did for a long time with little results, it helped me concretize the problem. For the first time, I became conscious of the things that were firing me off to eat. And some of them were interesting, too.

Just to share a partial list of my answers:

1. When I felt stressed (usually by work)
2. When I made myself do something I didn’t want to do
3. When I saw other people eat
4. When I received good news
5. Whenever I saw food in general or passed by a food stall
6. Whenever I saw specific types of food (which then gave rise to food cravings)
7. Whenever I was offered food
8. When I was in a celebration/occasion/event
9. When I returned home
10. When it should be time to eat, such as breakfast/lunch/dinner time
11. When I went offtrack in my diet by eating something that wasn’t in my ideal diet
12. When I came across food which I had never eaten before
13. When I felt bored
14. When it was night time
15. …And many more

Being able to distill my triggers to these situations was the first step in overcoming my emotional eating condition.

In the ideal world, our relationship with food should be one where we eat only when we feel hungry and we stop eating immediately once we are full (vs. eating to finish the plate etc). We do not eat based on any extrinsic factors (such for as a celebration, or stress, work, boredom, to feed a feeling of depression, etc), but based purely on intrinsic factors (i.e. whether we’re hungry or not – which I will share in the next part of the series, Rebuilding a Healthy Relationship with Food).

While knowing the trigger alone wouldn’t stop that trigger, it made me more conscious of what was happening. Rather than reach out for food without awareness (no different than a sleepwalker in life), at least now I knew there was something driving the behavior.

It was important in helping me get a hold of the issue, which up until then had been elusive and shrouded in ambiguity.

Step #2: Understand why you eat under those situations

If you look at the list of triggers you wrote in #1, they might look perfectly normal to you. To (want to) eat when you come across those triggers – what’s wrong with that?

The thing is they may seem normal to you, but that’s only because you’re looking within your reality. It takes no more than comparison with other people, people who have truly healthy relationships with food, to know that your triggers fail to stand after some probing.

Example #1: Eating Cake during Parties

For example, at a birthday party. One would think that eating cake is part and parcel of the event. At least I used to. I would always look forward to the cake, and I would try to have more of it if I could. To me, eating the cake was compulsory – it didn’t matter how bursting full I was – I definitely had to have it. And after I ate it, I would feel happy. (though the happiness would be fleeting, as I mentioned in 12 Indicators of Emotional Eating.)

However, I would sometimes meet people who wouldn’t take up the offer to eat the cake. “Why not?” I would ask. “Because I’m not hungry”, was their reply.

While I would think they were missing out at first, it got me thinking later. In my mind, one just had to eat the cake whenever there was cake. Otherwise, the celebration wouldn’t be complete. When I dug into this, I realized it was because I was taught that cake was the essence of every birthday celebration, and it was imperative (not even negotiable) to have the cake.

But was it true though? No, absolutely not. I had meshed up eating and enjoying oneself as the same thing in my mind, but they were 2 separate things. One doesn’t require food to enjoy him/herself – in fact, one shouldn’t need food to enjoy him/herself. If anything, with food out of the picture, one can finally immerse in the situation on an authentic level, since food was just serving as a distraction/filler before.

Example #2: Eating Whenever I Returned Home

Another example would be my past trigger to eat whenever I return home. It was an instantaneous trigger too. Whenever I got back home, I would immediately think about eating – right away – regardless of whether I was hungry or not. I could well have taken an extremely full dinner right before I came home, and the thought to eat would still surface.

When I questioned why, I found out it was because since young, my parents would always buy food for the family when they came back home. My brother and I would then tuck in happily. If I didn’t eat, my parents would nag incessantly (and in a somewhat angry and frustrated tone, too) until I went to the kitchen. “The food would get cold” and “Don’t go hungry – Eat first”, would be their replies.

Hence in my mind, I had linked returning home with eating. If I didn’t eat when I came back home, I would feel incomplete.

But obviously, that wasn’t the case. Returning home was a separate activity from eating. There was no reason for me to eat just because I was back home. I should be eating based on my caloric needs, not anything else! Resolving this helped me unchain the notion of eating from going home.

I could go on and on with multiple examples, but it would be the same thing – whatever trigger it is, it bears no relation to eating, and was only conditioned as such due to how I was brought up.

Probe Into Your Triggers

Now, it’s your turn.

1. Refer to your list of triggers from Step #1.
2. Pick any trigger from your list, and ask yourself the question: Why do I think of eating when this happens?
3. Write down the answers that follow. Usually they are some rhetorical, non-helpful replies, like “Because it’s normal” or “Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be“. Well, we know better. There is always something driving our thoughts.
4. Don’t stop there. Challenge your initial answers from #3. Ask again: Why do I think of eating when this happens? After a few tries, you should start getting some new answers.
5. Keep asking “Why?“ until you reach an answer that is linked to an occurrence from your past, something which fully explains how you came to link eating with that trigger.

Step #3: Detach eating from these triggers

Now that you found the (real) reason why that trigger makes you think of eating, now unchain eating from this trigger.

How do you do that? By:

1. Understanding how the link was formed in the first place (i.e. what you did in Step #2). This link was formed because there was a point in your past when you were conditioned to eat during that circumstance, and it’s up to you to identify what that past event(s) were, so you come to full consciousness about it.
2. Recognizing this link is incongruent with reality. Look for counteractive evidence that proves this belief is false. Draw comparisons with people who have completely healthy relationships with food (if you know of anyone), and see if this is how they would think/react. If they truly have a 100% healthy relationship with food, they wouldn’t share the same thought.

For more on breaking disempowering beliefs, read:

• How To Create Real Change In Life: Address Root Cause vs. Effects
• Day 25 of Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program on Beliefs

If you did (a) and (b) correctly, you should eventually realize that thinking you have to eat in the face of trigger X was mere a false belief that existed only in your mind.

In reality, they are two separate things. The only thing that should be linked with eating is if we need to eat (due to physical needs), since that is what food is truly meant for – not anything else. Your emotional eating triggers have no place in your life at all.

Example #2: Craving for Eggs

Random food cravings is a tell-tale sign of emotional eating (Read: 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating). I used to have lots of weird food cravings, especially for junk food.

One example of my food cravings was eggs. I would eat them whenever I could. (This was before I became vegan.)

During my 21-day fast, there were a few days when my mom prepared hard boiled eggs. I remembered feeling a craving when I saw the eggs. They just looked very tempting and I felt I had to eat them. Normally I would just eat them, but since I was doing the fast, I held back. As a result, the craving remained, and it kept popping up when I saw the eggs.

(At this point, fasting critics would argue it was because I was “starving” myself, that I was suffering from exhaustion, and that my body was trying to let know the perils I was in via craving for “nutritious” eggs. Vegetarian/Vegan critics would argue that my diet was lacking, that ultimately one would need eggs/meat/etc to have a complete and wholesome diet, and I should return to eating eggs/meat/whatever.

The thing is, I had read enough about both topics to know that neither is true. I’ve also found for myself that a lot of times what we think is a physical phenomenon really isn’t, and that it is instead linked to our mind. If we dig deeper, we would find a real explanation that has nothing to do with what one might initially think.

So rather than buy into cop-out rationalizations, I delved deeper.)

Feeling bizarre with myself, I asked myself: “Why am I thinking of eating this?”

My subconsciousness replied: “Because eggs are full of goodness. They make you better.”

I persisted: “Why? Why do I think eggs are good? Why do I have to eat them?”

The next reply blew the mystery wide open. I received the response in the form of a childhood memory.

Since young, my parents would cook hard-boiled eggs during special occasions (like birthdays, religious festivals, Chinese New Year, etc), and color them with red dye on the shells, a popular Chinese practice. My parents would tell me to eat at least one egg for good fortune.

This was why I always felt I needed to eat eggs whenever I see them, particularly hard boiled ones, and particularly the yolk. Eggs were like precious treasures. In my mind, the more eggs I ate, the more good fortune I would have, and the better I would be.

Again, this was a false perception. Eggs are eggs, and good fortune is good fortune. Eggs may be used to convey good fortune, but they are not the same thing. In my mind, I had mashed up the 2 things as one, when they aren’t.

After I uncovered the root of this belief, my craving for eggs automatically disappeared. Now whenever I see eggs, I have no cravings whatsoever. (If anything, I feel bad because I think about the poor chickens who are bred in abusive conditions in farms (think Food Inc) only to have their offspring ripped away from their life.)

Step #4 (if needed): Resolve the triggers themselves

Sometimes, we turn to food in the face of certain situations because we are unaware of how to deal with them the right way, which led to food/eating coming in as a makeshift solution.

Hence, detaching eating from the trigger isn’t enough – we have to address the trigger directly.

Example #1: Stress Management

For example, I was a heavy stress eater in the past. I would eat whenever I felt stress.

In retrospect, it was because I was unaware of how to deal with stress. Stress was the equivalent of being helpless, both of which were completely foreign, unfamiliar emotional states to me. I had always had control in my life, from knowing my vision, to having goals, to achieving my goals. To me, it was completely unacceptable to feel stress or helplessness, because it would suggest weakness.

Hence when faced with stress, I would be like a deer caught in the headlights. My brain would be in a state of total, internal frenzy, like a robot made to execute a command it was not programmed to handle. In an act of desperation, my subconsciousness would trigger me to do what seemed the most intuitive – get rid of the uninviting emotion, and usher in a positive one.

And the best way to do it? Via eating, since I had another concurrent (false) belief that food was love (which I had to separately address).  Before I knew it, I would be munching on something, and I would feel the same as before the stressed kicked in – happy, positive,  upbeat. It would happen so quickly that I was never aware that I was a stress eater, until I dove into my emotional eating issues this year.

So in addressing this trigger fully, I worked on my stress coping mechanism.

Recognizing Stress is Merely Just Another Emotion

Firstly, I recognized that stress/helplessness is just an emotion, just like any other emotions. There is no need to fear it, nor resist it at all. By resisting it, I would only let it persist.

So a few weeks ago, I decided to face my emotions fully for the first time in my life. Instead of turning to food for salvation after yet another trigger (leading to stress), I decided to acknowledge my emotions. Even if the idea of losing control felt unnerving, I told myself it was okay, and there was no need to be in control.

So I readied myself, and opened my heart so I could feel every bit, every ounce of my emotions. Like how a flood of water would rush in after removing a dam, I could feel panic, anxiety, and even fear washing over me, on top of the original emotion. I felt overwhelmed for a few seconds there.

However, it took no longer than the few seconds before I suddenly felt okay. That despite having these emotions just pass through me,  and even coexisting in the same space as me, I was perfectly fine, happy, and at peace, all at the same time. With that, my subconscious desire to eat (to offset the negative emotions) disappeared right away.

Tackling the Issue Head On (vs. Turning to Food)

Secondly, I realized if I was stressed, I should be trying to (a) understand what’s causing the stress (b) break down the stressor and tackle it right away. Not by covering up the stress with food, which was merely a temporary fix. Not by eating then returning to deal with the situation, which was a roundabout solution because I couldn’t handle the feeling of stress in the first place.

So I learned to do just that. Nowadays, if I ever face any situation that triggers unnerving feelings, I would identify the source and tackle it right away. If the situation is too big for me to handle, I will break it down into smaller parts, then deal with it step by step.

Example #2: Dealing with My Diet Slip-ups

Another of my common past triggers would be to eat when I went offtrack in my diet.

For example, I would eat whenever food was offered to me, even if I had no desire to eat it. I would feel bad about it later on, beat myself up over it, then return home and binge on a whole load of crap food after that – when the original “slip” was not even a fraction as bad as I had made it out to be.

If anything, my bingeing was what aggravated the situation, not the initial slip.

The reason why I would do that was because I was angry at myself for compromising when there was no need to. That instead of standing up for myself (in this case, my ideal diet) and saying no when I needed to, I would repress myself to match the situation. Hence, out of (subconscious) anger, I would punish myself, through eating.

In dealing with this, I learned to forgive myself, to take things one step at a time, to be kinder to myself and stop being so self-critical, to take ownership over my meals (as I shared in Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food), to say no to food, among others. These helped to permanently resolve the issue/trigger.

Address Your Trigger

Look at the trigger in your list, and think over the following:

1. Why have you been turning to eating/food in the face of this trigger?
2. How are you going to tackle this trigger in the future, when it arises?

Final Step: Repeat steps #2-4 for all other triggers

Whew! Now that you are done with one trigger, it’s time to repeat the steps for the other triggers.

Depending on how severe your emotional eating situation is, you may have quite a few triggers to work through. Since emotional eating is often a deeply embedded issue, with roots going back to as early as say, childhood, it can take some time to completely weed through all the triggers that’s causing it.

That’s okay though. There’s no rush. Simply work through it slowly, step by step, one step at a time. Every time you get the chance, pick out an emotional trigger to process. In time to come, you’ll suddenly realize there’s suddenly nothing triggering you to eat (outside of hunger). That’s the day when you have broken free from your emotional eating triggers, and about to enter a new, healthy relationship with food.

In working through my emotional eating issue, I had to process a couple dozen emotional triggers, at least – I probably had one of the most twisted relationships with food anyone could ever have, so you’re definitely not alone in your current situation! It took over 8-9 months for me to finally become fully at peace with food, from after my initial 21-day fast (which was a very powerful experience for me, as I had shared in my fasting review and Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food).

The way to know if you have fully resolved a trigger is to see if you will turn to food when you face the exact same conditions. If you still feel any urge or desire to eat, that means it has not be completely worked through yet. Simply repeat Steps #2-4, especially Step #2, until the urge completely dissipates. You will reach a point when that happens, and you are at neutrality when that trigger occurs.

And do that for all the other triggers, until you no longer feel triggered to eat, except in cases where you truly need to feed yourself (to meet your physical needs). When that happens, you would truly be at a completely neutral relationship with food.

Give yourself a huge, huge pat on the back. Enjoy your brand new, healthy relationship with that which has been immensely perverted in our society today. You have now been truly liberated from the confines of food and eating, and I’m extremely proud of you for that.

Next Up

It doesn’t end here though – after you removed the root causes of emotional eating, you don’t want other things to come crashing in and violating your new found relationship with food. Continue on to Part-2 of this guide on how to rebuild your relationship with food.

This is part-5 of a 6-part series on emotional eating, the perversion of food in our society today, and how to overcome it.

1. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 1: Food as a Symbol of Love
2. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 2: Deep Entanglement
3. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food
4. 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You)
5. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating
6. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 2: Rebuilding a Healthy Relationship with Food

Related Posts

• How To Stop Emotional Eating, A Crucial Guide, Part 2: Rebuilding a Healthy Relationship with Food
• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 2: Deep Entanglement
• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food
• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 1: Food as a Symbol of Love

1. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 1: Food as a Symbol of Love
2. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 2: Deep Entanglement
3. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food
4. 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You)
5. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating
6. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 2: Rebuilding a Healthy Relationship with Food

Emotional Eating

What is emotional eating? It is eating to feed your emotions, vs. your body. It is sometimes known as stress eating, because many emotional eaters eat in response to stress (though stress is not the only trigger – happiness, sadness, among other emotions can be triggers too).

Emotional eating is the result of an unhealthy relationship with food. Instead of seeing food as what it is, i.e. something you consume for survival (like air and water), you misconstrue it into something else. You become attached to it, give it emotions, personify it, and make it out to be something it isn’t.

Compulsive overeating or compulsive eating, (also known as binge eating), is an aggravated form of emotional eating. This was the problem I experienced, as shared in Part 2: Deep Entanglement. It happens when (1) the original emotional eating issue is not addressed (2) the triggers for emotional eating are aggravated, leading to an increased need to eat to feed the emotion(s).

Given time, an emotional eater switches from merely eating in response to emotions, to massively overeating in response to emotions, since he/she is unable to get salvation from his/her original consumption. While not always the case, compulsive overeating often comes with poor body image and low self-esteem.

Emotional / Compulsive / Binge eating is more prevalent than you might think. Believe it or not, nearly 2.5 million adults in United States today suffer from compulsive overeating, with probably many more unreported cases.  Because of how our society has wrapped itself around food, almost all of us have a skewed relationship with food, whether we acknowledge it or not.

12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating

There are many kinds of emotional eaters – some eat in response to a negative emotion, while some eat in response to a positive emotion. Below are 12 indicative signs of emotional eating:

1. You eat when you are stressed. When you have things to do (work / studies / exams), you reach out for food subconsciously. Especially when you’re up late at night and by yourself, though it can happen in the day and in front of others too.
2. You eat as a response to your emotions. You eat when you feel sad / annoyed / disappointed / angry / lonely/ empty / anxious/ tired / bored. It’s a reaction so subconsciously embedded that you don’t even think about it. You just automatically reach out for food whenever you experience those emotions.
3. You seek solace in food. When you feel down, you seek out “comfort food”. You bury yourself in food like ice cream, cake, chocolate and cookies, even though they are absolute junk and have zero nutritional value. For some reason you can’t quite explain, they provide you with comfort.
4. You have trouble losing weight (due to the way you eat). Even though you want to lose weight and you know the technicalities behind losing weight such as the foods and quantities you should eat, you have trouble sticking to your diet. You can’t seem to stop yourself from eating as and when you want to (see next sign).
5. Your eating is out of control (You can’t stop yourself from eating). You eat even when you are not hungry, and you continue to eat even when you should have stopped long ago. Your desire to eat seems to have taken a life of its own. At times you would even go out of the way just to get food or to satisfy a particular craving, even though you may not be hungry at all.
6. You eat to feel happy. You are emotionally dependent on food, relying on it for happiness. You derive positive emotions from eating, even though it’s nothing more than a neutral activity to help you live, just like breathing, drinking water, and passing waste. Note this is entirely different from appreciating food as you eat it, which I’m all for. This is about eating specifically to derive the feeling of happiness, which creates a lopsided relationship.
7. You eat when you feel happy. You see eating is a necessary companion to happy emotions, just like how people eat to celebrate good news.
8. You are fascinated with eating / food. You love food. You love to eat. When you’re not eating, you can’t help but think about food. You long and crave for it. When you’re eating, it’s like you’re in wonderland. Eating and food draw an intense level of interest from you. Interestingly, none of your fascination is reciprocated by food nor eating.
9. You use emotionally-charged words to describe food / eating, like “sinful”, “decadent”, “guilt-ridden”, “love”, “lust”, “indulgent”, “enticing”, “craving”, “tempting”, etc, even though food is a non-living thing, incapable of feelings nor returning your love/hate.
10. You eat even though you are rightfully full. No matter how much you eat, no matter how full you feel, you never feel quite satisfied. Whatever satisfaction you get from eating is momentary, and you return to eating after a while to recapture that emotion.
11. You think of eating even though you are rightfully full. Even after you’ve had your fill, you continue to think of food. You think about what to eat for the next meal right after you’ve finished eating. You obsess about X, Y, Z food, and when you can eat it. You can’t wait till it’s time to eat again. You think about how satisfied you’ll be when you finally get to eat. You count down to the next meal time.
12. You have random food cravings out of the blue. Sometimes, you get urges to eat certain food, which you can’t explain yourself. And it’s not even that you’re hungry. It’s just a craving which you must satisfy, else you’ll feel unhappy for the day.

Related Posts

• How To Stop Emotional Eating, A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating
• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 2: Deep Entanglement
• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food
• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 1: Food as a Symbol of Love

1. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 1: Food as a Symbol of Love
2. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 2: Deep Entanglement
3. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food
4. 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You)
5. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating
6. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 2: Rebuilding a Healthy Relationship with Food

A Quiet Cry for Help

During my battle with emotional eating, there were several times I tried to talk to a close friend about it. I was frustrated and needed someone who knew me, to hear me out.

Unfortunately, my good friend, who had a normal relationship with food, was not able to empathize with the situation. When I shared my suspicion that I had an issue with food, she told me I was theorizing the situation into something bigger than what it was. She said it was just a matter of being conscious of my food choices and not eating when I was nearly full, which were things I knew long ago.

Not able to get the support I was looking for, I stopped talking about the issue with her, or anyone for that matter. My conclusion was that if even a good friend couldn’t understand what I was going through, then no one in the world would ever understand.

I eventually found other good friends whom I could speak to about the problem, but for that period of time, I felt pretty upset that there wasn’t anyone I could talk to about what I was going through. I felt alone in the problem – helpless, dejected, and forsaken.

Quiet Madness

There were many nights when I would do nothing about my emotional eating and just go with the flow, via bingeing my emotions away and hiding in the comfort of food.

But every once in a blue moon, I would regain consciousness for a brief second and wonder “What the heck am I doing?”. I wanted out. As I mentioned in Part-2: Deep Entanglement, I was caught in a loop of eating, overeating, feeling bad the next day, then eating, overeating, and feeling bad the next day. The exact same situation and exact same feelings, if not worse. I felt I was not moving on in life.

I wanted to overcome the problem, because it was a blockade in my development. Not only was my emotional eating thwarting my desire to live healthily, it lowered my self-esteem where body image was concerned. Also, a good deal of my emotions and energy were wasted every day on emotional eating, which l could easily invest in other areas of my life.

So I worked on it. Because the issue was linked with other, equally compounded issues (such as low self-esteem and poor body image), progress was slow. Many days, I would slip back into bingeing mode, though I grew more conscious each time. And each time I ate to feed my emotions and/or binged, I would grow more weary of it. It gave me the impetus to resolve the issue once and for all.

Resolution – Becoming at Peace with Food

After a long while, I finally became at peace with food. 2011 marked the year where I dug deep into my emotional eating issues and unbuckled myself from the chains of food, one at a time.

There were a lot of things I did and realizations which helped me to move on. I’ve highlighted the key ones below.

Resetting My Relationship with Food (via Fasting)

Because my emotional eating issue was heavily compounded, problem-resolution methods like brain dumping and self-introspection were of little help. I was like a fly wrapped in a thick spider web, unable to get anywhere.

Water fasting helped immensely in clearing that web and giving me a new start. Through my 21-day fast, which I wrote publicly on Feb 2011, I cleared out a lot of polarized, false beliefs I had surrounding food. (Which I shared in my overall fasting review, if you are interested.)

Some beliefs were absolutely ridiculous, such as a deep-seated fear that I would die right away if I ever stopped feeding myself, or that I should feed myself as often as possible, otherwise I would not be loving myself. I didn’t even know I had such beliefs until I did the fast.

The 21-day fast gave me a precious opportunity to examine my relationship with food. So were the subsequent 7-day fasts I did in April and May, and 1-2 day fasts I did every 2 months thereafter. Each fast helped me come to new realizations surrounding my emotional eating issue.

Even then, fasting was only a start. I could abstain from eating without any problem, but food is something we have to consume to survive. Abstinence was not a permanent solution; if I had to turn to fasting each time to reset my relationship with food, I would only be jumping from one crutch to another. I had to find a way to integrate food back into my life, where the relationship would be a healthy one, not one of emotional dependency.

Developing New Eating Cues

I found one of my problems was eating based on irrelevant cues. Say, when there was food available. When others were eating. When I passed by a food stall. When it was lunch/dinner time. When I felt like eating. When I thought I should eat. When I was offered food. When there was still food left.

Of course, none of these factors had anything to do with whether I should eat or not. My irrational eating would make me binge thereafter because I was angry at myself for eating even when I didn’t need to.

When should I eat then? I developed 3 guidelines to help me decide when I should eat or stop.

The first one is intrinsic hunger cues. I would eat only when there is a sensation of hunger in my stomach. This is a slightly warm, acidic, empty, and at times, gurgling, feeling. I would eat when this arises, and stop when my stomach is halfway full.

The second one is via caloric count. I would eat to match my caloric needs for the day. This is a precise, foolproof method, since it determines how much energy my body needs each day.

The third is my nutritional needs. I would eat to match my nutritional needs as per my ideal diet, such as the proportion of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats I should take in, sufficiency in vitamins and minerals, adequate water, and ample fruit and vegetable servings.

These 3 methods helped me get a hold of my reality of hunger, which had been highly distorted after all these years. I changed from eating all the time, based on subconscious triggers, to a eating pattern that was more grounded in my needs. It brought stability where eating was concerned.

Understanding My Eating Triggers; Breaking Subconscious Beliefs

On top of developing new eating cues, I processed my emotional eating triggers, one by one. These were subconscious wirings that fired me off to eat in spite of non-hunger.

For every situation, I would dissect it and identify the subconscious beliefs making me eat. I would dig into those beliefs to understand them. Resolution of those beliefs typically resulted in breaking of the pattern. I knew until I dealt with them at the root, they would not go away.

(For those interested in removing disempowering beliefs and building empowering ones, check out Day 25 of Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program on Beliefs. Also check out How To Break Out Of Recurring Patterns In Life, exclusive article in Personal Excellence Book, Volume 2.)

For example, I noticed I would eat every time I came home, without fail. When I looked into the trigger, I realized it was because I would be tired after a long commute and food was my way of rewarding myself. Of course, it was unnecessary. There were other ways of rewarding myself, such as with a good rest. Food was the least form of reward because it would thwart my dieting efforts.

I would also be triggered to eat whenever I went offtrack on my diet, because I would feel bad for my “failure”. I would want to eat out of self-punishment, just to thwart my healthy living efforts. The loss of control over my eating patterns was debilitating. I addressed this by developing new eating cues (see above), removing self-enforced pressure to “perform” in my diet or “look” a certain way (which was part of the pressure behind my diet), and allowing myself to go offtrack in my diet.

Yet another trigger would be when I made myself work even though I was tired. I would eat so I would stay awake. Or when I made myself do work I didn’t want to do (such as writing an article on A when I would much rather write an article on B). I realized I was eating to compensate for pushing myself against my will. What helped was when I stopped making myself do things, and instead listened to my intuition on what to do next – which led me to a more impactful outcome than before.

I had a truckload of emotional eating triggers, but I didn’t let them stop me. I simply worked through them, one by one. Each time a trigger arose, I would examine and work through it slowly, until it got resolved. It took a while (8-9 months, in fact) to iron them out, but they eventually dwindled from a massive web of triggers, to a small handful, to eventually none.

Taking Ownership Over My Meals

I realized I often ate more than I desired or ate food I didn’t want to because I didn’t take ownership over my meals. For example:

• If I was in a restaurant, I would order mains over sides, even if I preferred the sides, because I would feel like a sore thumb for eating only sides. I was afraid of eating too little (even if I wasn’t hungry), because it would suggest I wasn’t taking care of myself.
• If others were eating, I would feel obligated to join in and eat too.
• If people prepared a meal for me, I would eat what they cooked, because I would feel like I let them down otherwise.
• If someone offered me food, I would feel obliged to take it vs. rejecting it, for the same reason.
• If I was in a restaurant/cafe (with others or by myself), I would order food even if I didn’t want to eat, because I didn’t want to be an noncontributing patron. (Though I could easily order just mineral water or get something to go.)
• If I was in a restaurant/cafe that did not have food I want (be it vegan options or healthy preparation methods), I would compromise by ordering the better of the lesser food options, say vegetarian food or less unhealthy food. (Though I could just opt not to eat and buy my food elsewhere.)
• If there was something I had not eaten before, I would want to try that, even though I could go for healthier, better options. Otherwise, I would feel like I was missing out on the experience. (In reality I was missing out on better health and a happier life.)

Clearly, I was letting my environment determine my eating decisions. I was not standing up for my truest intentions. Because of that, it would result in emotional eating, which would then lead to bingeing later on, because of my emotional eating (it was a circular problem).

In stopping this cycle, I had to learn several things, including learning to say no, detaching the actions from the intentions of the person offering me food, detaching social perceptions that came with eating/not eating, removing self-imposed expectations that I should eat just because others were eating, among others.

At the same time, I also learned to pack my meals / bring fruits out if I anticipated going without food for some time, consult my intuition before I make my food choices / eat, plan my meals in advance, decide when/what I want to eat, eat only things I truly wanted to eat, order sides over mains if I only wanted to eat sides, among others.

All of these helped me take ownership of my meals and stand up for my ideal diet, which in turn helped me stand up for myself.

Learning to Deal with My Issues vs. Turning to Food

I was using food as an avoidance outlet, though subconsciously so. Looking back, whenever I felt feelings of low self-esteem, inferiority regarding my body, overwhelm, or sadness, I would seek solace in food.

Instead of solving the problem, I would eat my unhappiness away. In place of that, was a false feeling of happiness, which would no sooner disappear after I was done eating.

The reason why that happened was because I found those problems too big for me to handle. This was why I (subconsciously) turned to food as my crutch.

My quest to break free from emotional eating eventually made me cognizant what was happening behind the “slips” and late night binges (which was becoming worse and worse). Every time I “slipped”, I would binge even more than in the past.

It would take several rounds of bingeing and self-hating before I finally decided “this was it”. I was sick and tired of repeating the same thing over and over again. Not only was I suffering the consequences of overeating, I was killing my soul every time I did it. It certainly didn’t resolve the originating problems either (e.g.,  overeating wasn’t going to address feelings of low self-esteem), which would reemerge when the same conditions were in place.

I started to look into my eating triggers (as I shared above), which led me to discover problems I didn’t know I was hiding from. Each time I emerged, I would work through them, one by one. Eventually, this removed my emotional dependency on food.

Listening to My Heart

Developing a stronger connection with my heart helped tremendously in tackling my emotional eating issues. Rather than do things because I think I want to, I began to consult my intuition, and let it guide me.

For example, let’s say I’m in a restaurant. I would order based on what my heart goes for. So if I want this steamed spinach roll that is smaller in portion but cost more, I would order that, rather than go for the lunch special that costs less but isn’t what I ideally want. Or say, if I’m working on my site. I would write based on what my heart is telling me to write, rather than what I think I should cover. Or even, if I’m out with friends and some of them want to go to X location, I would check what my intuition wants and go with that.

Interesting, the more I followed my heart, the more aligned I became, as a person. I noticed whenever I went against my heart, I would get triggered to eat, as if my higher self was trying to tell me something. Looking back, it was because I was hurting my soul whenever I went against my true intentions. And since I subconsciously saw food as love (which was an issue in itself – see next point on “Seeing Food as What It Is”), I would eat to fill up that void (which of course, was not a real solution).

Seeing Food as What It Is

Last but not least, I began to detach my emotions from food, and see food as what it truly is – food.

Previously, I had been making food out to be so much more than what it was. I had seen it as a companion, a best friend, a pillar of support. It was there to comfort me when I felt down. It was there with me when I celebrated happy times. It was a never-changing constant I came to count on whenever I needed it.

But since food is a non-living thing, it was incapable of reciprocating any of my emotions. I had entered into a one-way relationship with food, where I would “love”, “crave”, or even “detest” it, and none of my intents would be returned in any form. In reality, I was just battling with myself. If food was a living being, it would have thought I was crazy.

After I demystified food, and recognized that it was/is just a composite of ingredients, just something to fuel my body, and not a friend, buddy, or symbol of love as I had made it out to be (fasting helped me a lot in demystifying this notion), my views on eating and food became more rooted in reality. No more turning to food out of irrationality. No more personification of what is not even alive. No more giving of my power away to something that is not me.

In Conclusion

It has been one heck of a train ride, one immensely eye-opening journey, and one which I’m happy to be able to put behind me today.

While it hasn’t been easy working through the intricacies of my emotional eating issue, I’m glad to have finally made it through.

What helped immensely has been my constant efforts to work through it. That no matter how many times I responded to my problems via eating, no matter how many times I binged despite of my better wishes, I would return to troubleshoot the situation later.

One by one, the problems got resolved. Step by step, I gained a hold over my eating. And eventually, the invisible voices that would trigger me to eat, even when I didn’t need to, disappeared. And in place of that, was a sense of peace where eating was concerned – something I never thought was possible.

I hope the sharing of my emotional eating journey has been helpful to those of you who are emotional eaters. I want you to know that like all situations in life, emotional eating is very much resolvable, and it’s up to whether you want to address it or not. I’m here to help you do that.

Continue on to Part-4 of the series, where I’ll share the top 12 indicative signs of emotional eating, which will help you identify the extent of your emotional eating issue, along with 7 hidden implications of emotional eating.

Related Posts

• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 1: Food as a Symbol of Love
• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 2: Deep Entanglement
• How To Stop Emotional Eating, A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating
• 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You)

1. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 1: Food as a Symbol of Love
2. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 2: Deep Entanglement
3. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food
4. 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You)
5. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating
6. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 2: Rebuilding a Healthy Relationship with Food

Dependency on Food

My childhood conditioning made me very dependent on food. Every time I did something, I would need food as a companion.

For example, whenever I was stressed, I would reach out for food automatically. Be it finishing an assignment, studying at the last minute for exams or doing work, I would immediately reach out for food, which would then fuel me on my to-dos. If I didn’t have food, I wouldn’t be able to finish what I intended to do. I would either fall asleep or be stuck, like a deer caught in the headlights.

Even when I was not stressed, I would reach out for food too. I could be playing games, watching a movie, watching TV, chatting on the phone, or hanging out with friends, and I would feel the need to eat. I would feel weird, or even angsty, otherwise.

And the times when I felt happy, eating would come to mind as well. Say, when I received good news, when I got things done, or even when I just felt happy in general. Eating seemed like a natural activity to follow up those situations.

An Emotional Eater

I didn’t know this then, but I was eating in response to emotions, not because my body needed it. A part of me did notice I ate more (both in quantity and frequency) (a) than others did (b) than I should. But I thought perhaps I had a big appetite, or I needed more food for my fast metabolism, or something like that. I didn’t suspect anything.

The realization I was an emotional eater finally sunk in during Jan 2011. I had put myself on a raw food trial in Live a Healthier Life in 21 Days Challenge (21DHL), and I was doing well, in terms of my adherence to the diet. I was sticking to nutritious fresh fruits and vegetables, and it was increasing my mental clarity. I also needed less sleep as I would whenever I was on my raw trials.

However, I noticed I would subconsciously reach for more food, even though I was already full from the fruits and vegetables I just ate. While I would do this in the past on other diets, I never saw it as an issue as the food I snacked on was usually junk food, which were hardly filling. I thought perhaps I was still hungry.

But with fruits and vegetables, they were highly voluminous, and I would feel extremely full after eating for a while. Even though I had no intentions to eat anymore, I kept getting subconscious triggers to eat.

It was then that I realized my eating was outside of my control – as was a lot of my eating in the past. There were clearly subconscious wirings making me eat, despite me not wanting to. While in the past I thought they were under my control, because I would succumb to the intention to eat, it became clear to me that I would still have eaten anyway even if I tried not to.

My desire to eat had taken a life of its own, and it was no longer within my control.

In retrospect, all the reasons I made up to justify my eating in the past, such as ”Oh, I’m eating this because I really want to eat this.” or “I’ll eat this one last time and restart a healthy diet tomorrow.” or “Why deprive myself of things I want to eat? I should do what makes me happy.” or “I don’t think I ate enough today – I better eat more.” or “Eating will make me feel better, so I’m going to eat now.” or “Since I’m working, I deserve to eat as a reward.” or “Since I’m watching a show/movie, I should indulge and let myself eat.” etc, were merely excuses to cover up my emotional eating issues.

So I would eat, in response to my emotions. Typically I would get triggered to eat when I had a lot of work to do, though  my emotional eating would arise even in times of happiness or leisure. Whether it was boredom, stress, anxiety, excitement, or happiness, I would eat as a way of calming those emotional states.

After eating, I would feel happy and satisfied. If I didn’t eat in response to my eating urges, I would feel angsty and not be able to do anything else.

Eating… A Fleeting Satisfaction

Eating soothed me. It had a calming effect on me when I wasn’t calm. It made me feel content when I wasn’t contented. It made me feel happy when I was plagued by unhappy thoughts.

Before I ate, there would be anticipation as I thought about how I was going to eat soon. I would be excited about the food I was going to have.

Then as I consumed the food, there would be a surge of happy emotions, as I savored my bites. This was likely a combination of euphoria due to addictive agents used in the junk food (if I was eating junk food), and an illusionary fulfillment due to my warped beliefs surrounding food.

This satisfaction would last throughout the eating. For a while after I finished eating, I would be content.

But the satisfaction would be short-lived. It wouldn’t be long before I found myself reaching out for food again – even if I had eaten a fair bit. Sometimes I would feel like eating again after half a day, before meal times. Sometimes I would feel like eating after just a few hours. Sometimes the urge to eat would arise after a few minutes.

It was not quite right. It almost seemed like my desire to eat had little to do with physical hunger. How could I be hungry almost right away after I was done eating? Could I be going crazy?

I was exasperated.

From Emotional Eating, to Compulsive Eating, to Compulsive Overeating

I gradually evolved from being an emotional eater (eating in response to emotions), to a compulsive eater (where I would constantly feel like eating), to a compulsive overeater (where I would eat beyond the point of being comfortably full).

My emotional eating became bingefests, in my attempt to calm my emotional states.

While my emotional eating could be triggered by anything (from happy emotions, to negative emotions, to boredom), I found my binges (deliberate attempts to eat to the point of extreme fullness) were usually triggered out of anger (at myself) or feelings of depression (usually stemming from low self-esteem).

For example, if I fell offtrack in my diet by eating something I shouldn’t have, I would retaliate by eating obsessively, as if I was punishing myself. I would think, “Since I already ate that cookie (for example), how does it matter if I ate 20 more cookies? Might as well just eat myself to death while I’m at this.“.

I would also binge when someone gave me credit for doing well on my diet, even though I wasn’t (such as if I overate the night before or if I ate something I shouldn’t have). Or if the person commented I was eating little when I knew it wasn’t the case (with my secret binges). I would feel that I didn’t deserve the comment and I was living a facade, and then retaliate by bingeing.

Another example would be when I felt conscious about my looks. If I ever felt fat or ugly, I would drown myself in food. I would think, “Since I’m already so fat, what’s the point of being conscious of my food intake? Might as well overeat to oblivion.” or “All these efforts are pointless. I’m never going to achieve my ideal look. Let’s just eat and forget about this. The fatter, the uglier, the better.”.

Even comments that I was thin, if made in a period when I had binged or fallen offtrack on my diet, would make me binge. I would think that I would have been way ahead in my diet plans if I hadn’t gone offtrack, and turn to food to mend my sorrows.

As you can see, my emotional eating was heavily compounded due to issues with body image. This was because eating, weight, and image were tied to one another – a slip in my eating habits would trigger a domino effect.

However, even if I had no issues with body image or weight whatsoever, it still wouldn’t erase the fact that I had emotional eating issues, due to the way I was brought up, as I shared in Part-1: Food as a Symbol of Love. Emotional eating was a very serious problem that was causing me a lot more anguish than I realized. To live a life where I was at the mercy of food, constantly thinking of eating – and feeling angsty if my desire to eat was not met – it was no different than being a slave of food.

Bingeing… Alone, and During the Night

Bingeing wasn’t something I was proud of. It represented a loss of control, a moment of weakness, incompetence, an emergence of a dark side of me I never knew was there (or didn’t want to know).

Hence, my binges typically happened at night, when I was by myself, safe in my room. I would secretly plan for time alone so I could binge to my delight.

There was a warped perception in my mind that if I ate alone, *and* if I ate at the end of the day (say, late at night), the food wouldn’t count into my daily caloric intake. The bingeing and “loss” of control would also not count as my “real” self, or my “real” life, whatever that meant.

The bingeing was a part of my life which I saw as totally separate. There were times when I would be satisfied with myself for sticking to my plan in the day, then eat freely at night.

So in the day, I would be extremely “well-behaved” in following my diet plan. I would eat proportionately, sometimes even lesser than others. Sometimes people would even comment I was eating little, that I was very “disciplined” in my food intake.

Of course, that was not true at all. They didn’t know what was happening behind closed doors.

Night time, when I was by myself, was when things would change.

Massive Eating Sprees

During my binges, I would eat like crazy, no holds barred.

There would be all kinds of food in my home, so getting food wasn’t a problem. Even if there wasn’t enough food, I would even go out, late at night, just to buy food to binge. There would be provision stores open till late. Even if not, there was a 24 hour McDonald’s less than 10 minutes’ walk away from my home back in Singapore. Or in worse case scenarios, there were always 24 hour food delivery services, though I never had to turn to that.

My binges had no limits. I could eat all kinds of food, from snacks, to small bites, to proper meals. The objective was to eat as much as possible, in a bid to offset my unhappy emotions. I could easily finish up the food at home during each bingefest (which would be a whole lot).  It was as if there was a bottomless pit in my stomach.

Food-wise, my binges were typically of crap food. The crappier, the better. Some examples would be chips, chocolate, ice cream, bread with peanut butter, pastries, cake, fries, fried food, fast food, and highly acidic coke/diet coke to top it off.  These food would be dense in calories, nutritionally empty, and perfect as a tool for self-punishment. Even when there was healthy food in the house, I would deliberately avoid them and go for the unhealthy food.

Clearly, I was abusing my body terribly with the bingeing.  I would stuff as much as I could until I couldn’t take it anymore. At the end of it all, my stomach would hurt from all the food I had eaten.

Intense Feelings of Shame, Anger and Self-Hate

After each binge, I would feel massively grossed out. Sick would be an adept word to use.

A lot of times I would go to sleep right after I was done because I didn’t want to face myself or the world anymore. I would be deeply ashamed of the atrocity I just committed. I would want to hide in my bed and disappear into my dreams.

Many times, I would tell myself the upcoming binge was the last one, except it never was. It would somehow continue the next day or after a few days, after something set me off into eating again.

In the period I was a compulsive overeater, I had an intense phobia of weighing, especially if I had binged in that period. No matter what the scale would say, I would berate myself for it, because I knew it could be so much better if I had not binged at all. Weighing was akin to judgment day.

I would avoid social outings and appointments sometimes, especially if I had binged the day / few days before. Beyond being conscious about how I looked (I would feel I was growing too fat from my binges, even though I probably looked no different than usual), I felt I could not face the world because I had let myself down by bingeing. I would cook up some excuse and not go out.

I was ashamed, self-inferior (where my looks and weight were concerned), sorely lacking in self-esteem, angry, and intensely in-hate with myself.

These feelings of shame would trigger me to binge further. It was a self-enforcing cycle. I would binge out of self-punishment and self-hate, which would lead me to feel utterly disgusted with myself, which would then lead to more bingeing.

I felt I was living in some kind of nightmare that would never end.

Longingness For It To End

Towards the later years of my emotional eating journey, I just wanted it to end.

Physical Implications of Overeating

Physically, it was worrying. Extra calories and implications on weight aside, overeating was clearly detrimental for the body.

There were times when I would observe myself bingeing and feel genuinely worried, because my eating was clearly out of control. After each binge, my stomach would feel pained. My stomach walls would feel stretched from the excess food that I ate despite being beyond comfortably full.

I couldn’t help but think I was going to die from bingeing someday, unless I did something about it.

Mental Weary

Mentally, I was worn. I was tired of playing tug-of-war with food.

To constantly be triggered into eating, then resist myself because I didn’t need to eat, then cave in and eat later on, then feel bad for eating more than I should – it was tiring. It was as if I had a wiring that was loose in my mind, because I couldn’t stop my desire to eat. There was a voice that kept telling me to eat. It was as if I was a robot on crack.

Towards the later years, I got so tired that I didn’t even care anymore. I would just let myself binge when the triggers came, then deal with the aftermath the next day.

An Emotional Drain

Emotionally, it was draining.

While my bingeing started off gratifying, I would feel highly unhappy after that. As I shared above, I was feeling intense feelings of self-hate, inferiority and disgust from my actions. I was utterly miserable.

I also became less happy during the binges. The eating was no longer gratifying like in the past. If anything, I felt more and more miserable with each bite I took.

The yoyo-ing of emotions from up to down, and from down to up, and the constant resorting to food to sustain a feeling of happiness which was fleeting to begin with, was not working out for me.

Spiritual Damage

Spiritually, I could feel the bingeing episodes were eating away at my soul, bit by bit. It was clearly an action that was not in line with my highest vision for myself.

There were times when I was bingeing, when I could feel a little girl inside, weeping and pleading for me to stop. I could hear her saying I was going to die soon if I didn’t.

Even while I was inside my warped reality with food, I could see I was more obsessed about food than others around me, and the obsession was abnormal.

I wanted to get out of this loop of eating, waking up and feeling  bad, then eating again, and repeating that cycle the next day. I wanted to get out of this hellhole.

It would take a while before I finally worked through my issues with food and broke out of this decade-long struggle.

Read on in Part-3: Becoming at Peace with Food, on how I overcame my struggle with emotional eating.

Related Posts

• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food
• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 1: Food as a Symbol of Love
• How To Stop Emotional Eating, A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating
• 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You)

1. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 1: Food as a Symbol of Love
2. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 2: Deep Entanglement
3. My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food
4. 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You)
5. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating
6. How To Stop Emotional Eating: A Crucial Guide, Part 2: Rebuilding a Healthy Relationship with Food

How would you describe your relationship with food?

I would describe mine as a highly unhealthy one. For a very long time up until recently, I had the worst possible relationship one could ever have with food.

My Journey with Emotional Eating

For the longest time, I was very, very heavy emotional eater. I would eat based on my emotions (be it happy, sad, or boredom), not physical hunger. While not a definite consequence, it resulted in my tendency to overeat compulsively, also known as bingeing.

My emotional eating issues formed when I was a kid, as a result of societal conditioning, media conditioning, and the way food was used as a proxy for love in my family. I grew up, heavily tangled in a series of warped beliefs surrounding myself, food, eating, and last but not least, love.

In my teenage years, up till very recently, I would constantly eat out of self-hate, low self-worth, (misguided) self-love, and self-enforced pressure. I was engulfed in a deep, painful struggle with food and eating, to say the least. The past 10 years of my life has been one where I descended in a long, downward spiral of darkness and misery due to my emotional eating condition.

In the later years of the struggle, as I dipped into the darkest pits of emotional eating imaginable, I bore a quiet hope that I would one day be free from this entanglement with food. That I could just get food and eating out of my mind, and rebuild my diet and health on a clean slate. That I would have a completely healthy relationship with food, where I would only eat as and when I needed to.

Today, I’m glad the struggle is finally over. I’m finally at peace with food. No more eating outside of my caloric needs. No more eating when I’m not hungry. No more eating based on emotions. No more eating to feed my emotions. No more random triggers cuing me to eat when I shouldn’t be eating. No more madness surrounding eating.

This new 6-part series on emotional eating shares (1) my struggle with food and eating (2) how I worked through my emotional eating issues, one by one and (3) how you can gain salvation from it, as long as you set the intention to do so.

If you are an emotional eater, I want to let you know that no matter how bad things may seem, you *can* break out of this seemingly unresolvable mess. It *is* possible for you to bid goodbye to any twisted relationship you have with food today *and* attain a completely healthy relationship with it, if you want to. But you have to first acknowledge you *do* have an emotional eating issue, because until you do, you will keep going back-and-forth in a mental battle with food.

If you are not an emotional eater but you know someone who *might* be, please share this guide with him/her, because it may well be the missing link he/she needs to put an end to his/her problem.

This is my story with food, eating, and at the end of it all, myself.

Growing Up – Food as a Symbol of Love

The Beginnings

For as long as I knew, I would eat to fill myself emotionally, rather than driven by physical need.

I believe it all started when I was a kid.

My parents doted on me (and my brother) immensely. They probably loved us more than they ever let on.

However, they never expressed that with words. With Asian families, love is rarely communicated verbally, but via actions, symbols, and mediums. In my series on improving your relationship with parents, I shared how verbal communication was a rarity in my family, partly due to language barriers, partly because it wasn’t the language of love.

In my family, it so happened food was that medium in which love was conveyed.

My parents would ensure my brother and I were well-fed, above all else. Eating was considered a joy. The more we ate, the better. While my parents extolled on thriftiness, they never held back when it came to spending on food. They, especially my dad, loved to buy/prepare/cook food for the family, because it made them feel they were fulfilling their duties as parents.

Scarcity of Food

Thinking back, their valuation of food was probably due to its scarcity during their time. My parents were born in the 1950s. It was the post war times, when the (Singapore) society was not as affluent as it is today. They often spoke of tough times they had growing up.

For example, my mom grew up in a household with 7 children. There were many mouths to feed and not enough food to go around. There would be times when she would go without food, because the needs of the males (her brothers) took precedence over the females. To be fed was a joy; To be overfed was a luxury.

My parents also recognized that while we were living in a first world country (Singapore), there were hundred millions of people around the world stricken with poverty and famine. Hunger and starvation were real issues plaguing a large portion of the word population. Born in the wrong time, wrong place, it could well be us going without food or water.

A Family Culture of Food; Food as a Symbol of Love

Hence, raising me (and my brother), my parents’ main concern was always food. They would express their love by checking we were fed; ensuring our breakfast/lunch/dinner were taken care of; cooking for us; buying food; stocking up the household with food.

That, was their language of love.

Whenever they see me, they would ask: “Have you eaten? Are you hungry? Do you want to eat anything? Do you need me to buy food? Do you need me to cook anything? What do you want to eat?”

When it came to cooking, my parents, especially my mom, would prepare gratuitous amounts of food, much more than what was needed. For example, when cooking vermicelli, my mom had a habit of cooking a huge wok which was enough to feed 20-30 people, even though it was just the 4 of us eating. It was either we finish that or have the food go to waste. Usually we’d do the former.

During meal times, my dad would always check if I was eating fine. He would say, “Eat more.” (regardless of how much I was eating). He would pile food on my plate, and refill when I was done.

If I was to ever reject their offer to buy food/cook, or not eat the food they prepared, it would be as if I rejected their love. They never said that, but I would feel that way. Their face would grimace into a permanent frown, which would remain the whole day/night until I finally ate something. They would also remind me once every 10-15 minutes to eat until I ate. And when I did that, they would finally ease up, as if tension had left their body.

At night, my mom would ask us what we wanted to eat the next day, and occupy herself with breakfast, lunch and dinner plans for the family. It was the same thing the next day, every day.

During weekends mornings, my parents would go to the local market and buy a large assortment of food for breakfast. From carrot cake, to peanut pancakes, to rice cakes, to Chinese noodles, to fried dough sticks, to steamed buns, to roti prata (all popular local food), to McDonald’s, we could pick what we wanted and eat to our heart’s content, while enjoying quiet family time in the early mornings. These were the happy memories.

On the weekend afternoons, my parents would bring us out to IMM (a mega mart) to stock up on food supplies. My parents would ask me to pick out any food I wanted in the aisles. I remembered being very enamored by the variety of food, always wanting to grab the flavors I had not tried before. There would also be this donut kiosk with mini-donuts fried on the spot. I always loved to see the “making of” process as my parents ordered some for us.

Occasionally, we would have KFC, Pizza Hut, local Chinese cuisine and more, as special treats. Sometimes, we would eat out as a routine family outing, which was always something to look forward to.

My parents would also keep a look out for what I liked to eat, and buy more of that. For example, growing up, they knew I liked steamed buns with red bean filling, chocolate, donuts, and curry puffs. (I don’t like any of them now. Now that I’m on a healthier diet, I find these food quite disgusting.) They would go out of the way to get my favorite food. I would then eat them in happiness and gratitude.

Then after I became vegetarian, my dad would buy vegetarian spring rolls and dumplings from the supermart and cook them for dinner, so I could have more food choices for dinner (since the rest of the family are not vegetarians).

Throughout the week, my parents would stock the household with every food imaginable from biscuits, cookies, pastries, confectionery, bread, candy, chips, chocolate, ice cream, to instant noodles, because they didn’t want me nor my brother to go hungry. It was like every child’s dream house, like the one in Hansel and Gretel.

My parents would buy every food in bulk, because they had a habit of stocking up. If ever we ran out on 1 item, my parents would immediately get more the next day or the day itself. Hence, there would always be something to eat at home, regardless of the time of the day.

The above was what I was exposed to growing up, for every day in my life. I would eat every day, as much as I wanted, as freely as I desired.

As much as my parents had the purest, absolute best intentions from their heart, these childhood activities, along with societal and media conditioning, would embed me with some highly twisted beliefs surrounding food and eating.

I would grow up with these distorted beliefs, which would layer on one another every time I undergo an experienced that affirmed them. This created a huge web of twisted, erroneous beliefs surrounding food and eating in my mind. These would later lead me to experience a large amount of pain and suffering in my early adulthood, where food and eating were concerned.

Related Posts

• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 3: Becoming at Peace with Food
• My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 2: Deep Entanglement
• How To Stop Emotional Eating, A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating
• 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You)