Mostly everyone on this planet enjoys food. “Mostly” because we all know that one insipid person who doesn’t. Who “just eats to survive.” Um. Yeah, gross. I’m familiar with this fact because one of these people is my ex-boyfriend. Obviously, I was doomed from the get-go.

Among the actual fun camp are the people who adore food and the experience of eating but can stop when they’ve had enough. They’re capable of leaving delicious food on plates and forks and bowls and it’s forgotten into oblivion. They recognize when they deem they’re good and immediately get back to doing whatever else they’re doing that has nothing to do with eating. Talking, engaging, picking stuff up on the floor, doing dishes, watching TV, working. Food and thoughts of it have left the building. Good for them.

Then there’s the other team, the one I’m on: the emotional eaters. The basis of what constitutes being an emotional eater is using food to fill a void in your soul you believe is unattainable of filling without the food. Because you’ll die if you don’t eat dark chocolate or even that extra piece of broccoli. Even if you’re full. There’s the clincher – as emotional eaters, we use food to fill us up emotionally even if we don’t need anymore food. We eat when we aren’t hungry.

Think about this. In the moment, it’s what we believe we need to survive. Because we all need to eat, and obviously, we should, three times a day. But when we surpass what our bodies need, all we’re doing is hurting ourselves, leaving ourselves, and not treating ourselves with tenderness. When we’re full from a meal but need to eat that chocolate cake or WHATEVER even though we know it’s going to hand us a bowl of feel-like-shit from the moment it’s over until tomorrow morning when our face and bodies look like they’ve been inflated with a helium tank. When we’re doing a task and then it gets WAY TOO HARD for us to handle and we think we need a bowl of nuts or carrots or grapes to get through it. When someone says something that enters our hearts like a knife and the only thing that will press control+alt+delete on that stab is a brownie.

That thinking is distorted. Because in those moments food NEVER does what we want it to do. It doesn’t save our life; in reality, it makes us feel exponentially worse in our bodies and consequently in our brains.

It’s a spiral, too, because we keep coming back for more. Our train of thought is that yesterday life got hard and food was going to be my savior but instead it made me not sleep well and gave me a pregnant stomach all day long and I subsequently skipped my workout, but today it’s going to be different. Today it’s actually going to save me. We give in, and then we’re right back where we started. Trapped. Straight-jacketed. Suffocated.

When we use and abuse food in an attempt to quell our emotions, it’s like going back to that boyfriend that treats you like garbage. The one whose words and actions say he doesn’t want to be with you. Who makes you feel like shit, empty, and like you wanna crawl up in your bed and die or go hide under a rock in a mystery forest for the rest of your life. And yet, the next day, we’re right back at his door, finger on the doorbell, waiting shamefully and awkwardly for what we know will await us and what we think is essential for our survival.

It’s not.

Once we realize this, we can reign our freedom back in. Once we get the strength to go to the other side, we find that our power has been there all along. And once we grasp it, it’s hard for us to let go of it again.