Hey friends, I hope you’re doing well! As you know, we love using our little corner of the internet to inspire, encourage and challenge you. I hope that as you read our blog posts and hear our heart, that you know our website to be a space that helps you and motivates you to be the best version of you that you can be.
There is no one else in the world that is like you. You have a unique role in life that only you can fill and that is why we are so passionate about encouraging you to be you and even at times challenging you to be better. Not to compare ourselves to others, but to be a better version of ourselves so that we can better do what we were put on this earth to do.
We have shared posts in the past about our fitness journey and the things we like to do to push ourselves to be healthier. I feel like I will always be on a journey in my fitness. I don’t think I will ever reach a point to where I feel like “I have arrived” and I believe that’s good because otherwise I would become complacent or not strive for improvement. We should always be striving for improvement, right?!
So as we are approaching 2 years of marriage, my husband and I have also seen that we have gained more than just love and happiness in our marriage. We’ve also gained some unwanted weight lol. This past month we started to really buckle down on our eating habits and our fitness routine. We decided we needed to put some goals in place so that we can work towards them and achieve them. As you know, losing weight is usually a “both / and” kind of deal. It’s not just about exercise, but it’s also eating better. Without doing both well and consistently, it’s hard to attain the goal.
For me, the exercise part is a breeze. I enjoy working out and training my body. I feel so good afterwards and it’s really fun when Aaron and I workout together. What I really suck at is eating healthy…consistently. Sure, I could do it for a meal, or a day. But why is it that if I want to see results I have to do it like everyday?! Lol. It’s soooo hard.
As Aaron and I have been going along on our plan to lose this marriage weight, we’ve been eating well for 3 days and then messing it up for the next couple days. Haha. We just love to eat, guys. And while I believe food should be enjoyed, I also know that we should have a healthy balance and mindset when it comes to food. So I sat down to kinda coach myself a little bit and assess why I was having such a hard time being consistent. (I’ve told you guys before that because of my tennis background, I coach myself often lol).
It sounded something like this,
“C’mon Quimi, you gotta be consistent, remember? It took you months of consistently eating badly to gain this weight, you can’t expect it to fall off in just a few days of healthy eating. You gotta stay focused. Don’t just eat because it will taste good or feel good.”
That’s when it hit me. I wasn’t always eating because I was physically hungry. Sometimes I was eating to meet an emotional need. And they weren’t even super extreme emotions. They were subtle and it wasn’t even something I thought about, it was just an impulse to reach for food.
Emotional Eating
It’s kind of weird how food can make us feel a certain way.
- Food can comfort us and console us sometimes, right?
- It can give us something to do when we’re bored – I mean how often do you just grub on something in front of the TV and eat too much cuz you were just bored?
- It’s a social activity, so sometimes we just eat to be social and not even because our body needs the food, right?
- How about when we’re stressed? How many times have you ended a stressful day with overeating or over-indulging?
- Sometimes we even use food as a reward. I don’t always think that’s wrong, but if we train our minds to think about food that way, it could become a bad habit.
- Anger can often cause emotional eating as we look for something to calm us.
This is a good food rule to live by: Don’t eat if you’re reaching for food because you’re stressed, angry, lonely, tired, sad or bored.
That sounds difficult because it means we have to actually think about what we’re feeling, right? Haha. It’s true though. We need to be able to discern the reasons why we have unhealthy eating habits and be able to separate emotion from food.
For me, once I realized this, I was talking to Aaron about it like I had an epiphany. I realized I was sometimes eating the wrong foods for comfort. For some reason, bad food makes me feel better than healthy food does lol. But the truth is, food shouldn’t be something I receive emotional fulfillment from. That’s not healthy. Food is fuel for my body. That’s it. Food is fuel for my body. The moment I let that sink in, I decided to remind myself of that every day and start grocery shopping with that in mind and start eating with that in mind.
Just like anything else in life, this is a journey and we should be patient with ourselves. As we assess our eating habits and separate food from emotion, we can start taking steps towards viewing food appropriately – as fuel. When we view food as fuel, we won’t reach for the bad food as much because we realize our bodies don’t function at their optimum level if we fill it with unhealthy foods. That’s been huge for me.
So I want to encourage you to take a look at your life and the way you eat. Emotional eating is a real thing. Let’s set healthy mindsets around food so that we can give our bodies the correct fuel they need. I will post a follow up post to talk about how to stop emotional eating and how to overcome emotional eating. In the meantime, let me know your experience with this. I would love to hear your thoughts or any tips you may have. We’d love for this space to be a free place to share weaknesses and strengths with one another so we can build one another up. We believe in you!
Great write up! Thanks.