How many times have you tried to lose weight?  How many times have you been successful only to regain the weight you had lost plus some?  If your answer is “too many times to count”, you may be an emotional eater.

What is emotional eating?  Simply put, emotional eating is using food to “stuff down” feelings and emotions you don’t want to deal with or that are causing you pain.  And you won’t find yourself stuffing those feelings down with carrots and salads. No, you find yourself at the nearest fast food establishment buying processed, fat laden, sugary foods that leave you feeling euphoric and medicated.  Psychologically those are the foods that give you the numbing down that you’re looking for if you’re using food to manage emotions you don’t want to face.

See if any of these sound familiar: 

• The minute you feel stressed, you grab a candy bar or a bag of chips
• You eat when you’re not hungry. One way to know true hunger is if whole, living foods sound great to you when you want to eat. If you only want processed, fatty foods, chances are you’re eating from either a food addiction and/or an emotional need
• You find yourself thinking about food every time you get angry, hurt, lonely, sad, stressed, etc.
• You don’t even recognize true hunger any longer
• When life gets tough, you head straight to the refrigerator

For the Christian, emotional eating can be very deceptive because in many churches, eating too much isn’t frowned upon like drinking too much alcohol or taking illegal drugs.   I consider emotional eating to be the “acceptable drug of choice” for many Christ followers because it simply isn’t talked about too often from church pulpits. Nevertheless, emotional eating can keep you bound in detrimental habits just like alcohol or drug use and sometimes it’s even harder to break this addiction.  After all, you have to eat. Food is part of your daily life. So completely eliminating it isn’t an option. Victory must come while learning to partake of food. The alcoholic can stay completely away from alcohol, the drug addict can remove herself from drugs completely, but the emotional eater must find freedom while being surrounded by food every day.  And that can be a challenge.

For the emotional eater, diets never work for any length of time because the internal issues aren’t brought to light when you’re simply following a diet.  You can even experience success for a period of time. But once the diet is over, those emotions are still there, and the habits were never addressed that created the emotional eating in the first place.  And once the emotional eater is back into her old habits, the weight comes back, the heart hurts because of the feelings of failure, the body image suffers because you hate the way you look and feel as an emotional eater.

What’s the answer if you see yourself as an emotional eater?  It starts with coming to understand who you really are in Christ, and what belongs to you because you’re in Him!

II Corinthians 5:17 says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature.  Old things are passed away; behold, all things become new.” Selah…pause and think of this.  Really, really think of what this scripture is saying.

•     You’re a new creature.
•     Old things are passed away.
•     Because of Jesus, you are free and can learn to walk in that freedom
•     You can lay this weight of emotional eating aside because of Christ in you.

You don’t have to keep striving to lose weight.  You can rest, learning how to live in what has already been given to you.  It’s yours now.

Here’s to freedom,