I’ve been following Drew Manning since his first journey of Fit2Fat2Fit where he gained a fuck ton of weight so he could experience, to the best of his ability, what it was like for someone who was obese to actually get the weight off. He’s now doing it again leading up to his 40th birthday.
There is something he said in today’s post that hit me really hard. He talked about eating your emotions and how he now understands that food can really help you feel better. Drew recently separated from his partner and I can only imagine how painful that would be. I do know that ice cream or Cinnamon Toast Crunch probably made him feel a little better in the times he was feeling low because those foods are engineered to light up a part of your brain that signals euphoria.
It also made me wonder if this time the journey would be different for him. I mean, of course, it will because each year of our life is different, but when something significant happens in your life when you’re feeding the brain chemicals that make you feel better it hits a little different.
I know for me when my dad passed, I ate the fuck out of my feelings. I gained 30 pounds in a month. I was eating fast food and then following it up with chocolate chip cookies, pie, and any other sweet I could get my hands on. It took me a year to get to a place where I could even think about losing weight and it was only when a friend was shooting a pilot episode for a TV show who said that he needed to lose weight for filming and that we both should really get in shape.
Unfortunately a fall out between us a year later led me to gain the 50 pounds back because I was emotionally eating through the break up of our 20-year friendship. As hard as it was to end that friendship, it was something that I needed to do for myself. It took me another two years to get to this place of I need to get my shit together, and it’s because of COVID and not being able to be in my house one minute longer.
I haven’t been in a place of emotional “distress” where I would normally turn to food but I would like to think that I’ve done enough work over the last seven months to be able to handle it when it does come up. We all know it will. Life likes to throw us curveballs.
