In Their Own Words: clients tell their stories

In Other Words: Carrie (from Eating Less)

I have always struggled with a tendency to comfort eat in times of stress. Comfort eating for me means reaching for foods which are high in sugar, particularly chocolate, and eating them in large quantities to satisfy an emotional need I can’t always put a name to. In my 20s I started to look for solutions.

I became interested in some books that took the approach that all food is just food. In our minds we should make no differentiation between good foods and bad foods, and we should preferably surround ourselves with copious amounts, by way of soothing ourselves. In addition, we should continually try to analyse our emotional reasons for comfort eating in an effort to use that self-examination as a distraction from eating when not hungry or from eating too much.

I tried to follow this advice for many years, but it never seemed to work. If I surrounded myself with sugar and chocolate, I only ate it, and my pattern of comfort eating continued unabated.

When I discovered Gillian’s book, I felt excited on reading it. It made a refreshing change from what I’d read before, and at last I felt I could really relate to what was being said. I found the answers I’d been looking for to get my chaotic eating under control.

The answer was not to indulge my emotional justifications for comfort eating. Nor was it to surround myself with high-GI comfort foods with the intention of persuading myself they were just another harmless food source. The fact that I knew I could still choose was important, to quell my rebellious approach to eating. My motivations were to get in control of my eating, even though everything else in my life might be chaotic, and to reduce stress.

The key messages of Gillian’s book that have helped me are: to regard overeating as an addiction which need not be indulged; to avoid buying in copious amounts of comfort foods which merely create temptation rather than familiarisation; and to understand that all food cannot be regarded as harmless. These messages are all contrary to what other writers have said and at last I understand why their methods didn’t work.

Having experienced a good deal of stress in my years as a single parent, it was crucial for me to understand the link between high-GI foods and the release of cortisol. I rarely choose these foods now. Instead, I choose nutrient-rich foods, including a lot of vegetables and fruit, to combat stress.

Having absorbed Gillian’s messages, something amazing happened. After 25 years of struggling with chaotic eating, I now have the control and enjoyment around food that I have yearned for.

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