Ketchup…..I Mean Catch Up
This post is long overdue. I’ve been meaning to write….but I let myself get caught up in me. I have so many things I want to talk about, and yet I don’t really know what to say. The weeks since my last post have been stressful and hard. My anxiety is through the roof…and my self esteem has been hiding in a hole in the cellar. My eating has been OUT OF CONTROL. Maybe we should talk about my eating.
When I am stressed, or lonely, or anxious, or excited, or [insert a plethora of other emotions here] I eat. When I eat, I gain weight. I have polycystic ovary syndrome which makes me crave sweet foods (some people crave salty…..I’m not that lucky….or maybe I am since salt makes me swell up)…..but I also have diabetes and need to keep my blood sugar under control. Sometimes I eat mindlessly and never feel full, other times I eat until I am so full I’m sick. Sometimes I get so busy during the day that I forget to eat and then I over compensate when I get home from work. Then I feel bad about myself and try dieting….I can’t tell you how many diets I have tried. So. Many. Diets. Nothing works, I feel restricted and sad.
My therapist calls it binge eating. I usually refer to it as emotional eating. I recently learned that they are the same thing. All I know is that I need to get my eating habits under control and figure out how to have a better relationship with food. Enter Dialectical Behavioral Therapy for emotional eating. My therapist recommended that I join this therapist lead group. Last week I had a meeting with the group facilitators to decide if the group would be a good fit for me. I’m starting in September and it runs for 13 weeks.
What I really like about the group is that it will teach me skills to recognize my emotions and find different alternatives to dealing when them other than turning to food. The guidelines for sharing in the group are to:
refrain from weight talk including judgement, losses, or gains
refrain from food judgements, including good food/bad food
refrain from diet talk
The facilitators also recommend that during the course we don’t participate in any sort of diet or eating plan. The goal is to help us to have a healthy relationship with food. I’ll let you all know how it goes. In case you are interested, this is the book we will be using (it’s 13 chapters, hence the 13 weeks):
