What's Eating You?

by Janice
(Carmel NY)

It's hard to remember when it began, the obsession with food, the inability to feel satisfied no matter how much I ate. Everyone in my family seemed preoccupied by food. The family joke when we would go to a wedding that had one of those enormous buffets was, "Is there enough for us?"

As a teenager I would eat breakfast, eat again on my way to work, have a food break, then lunch, then an afternoon food break, then eat on the way home to dinner. After dinner I would eat three sandwiches, then go out with my friends and cap the night off with 2 or 3 slices of pizza. Seriously. And I weighed 118 pounds, so everyone hated me. Not really, but even back in the 60's and 70's when food issues weren't so ubiquitous, this was not normal behavior.

Fast forward 35 years later and after a particularly bad day at work, I went to the supermarket, bought a pot roast, cooked it, made mashed potatoes, veggies, the whole works, then proceeded to have 2 helpings followed by 2 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. When I sat down, exhausted from the tension of the day plus all the food, it hit me like a ton of bricks. This was anger eating. I'd heard about this, but never thought it pertained to me. But I realized that I was so angry at my boss I was ready to quit and my binge eating was directly related to this.

And then I thought about my life and all its challenges and how maybe, just maybe, all those years of overeating was related to my unexpressed anger. I won't go into the details of my past, but do want to urge anyone, particularly younger women, if they suspect they have issues with food and difficulty expressing anger appropriately that they seek help before spending a lifetime, as I did, being obsessed by food. I've finally at age 63, gotten the monkey off my back by realizing that what I was eating was really what was eating at me!!!