The Emotional Baggage We Carry Into Weight Loss

For years, I thought losing weight was mostly about food.

Eat less of the things that made me gain weight, eat more of the things that were supposedly good for me, move more and eventually the number on the scales would come down. When I lost more than 10 stone, it seemed to prove that theory. I changed what I ate, stuck rigidly to my plan and lost weight week after week.

The problem was that I was changing my body without really understanding everything I’d brought with me into the process.

I don’t mean “emotional baggage” in the sense that emotions somehow become physically trapped in particular parts of our bodies. I’m talking about the much more ordinary baggage many of us accumulate as we go through life.

The things people have said about our bodies. The diets we’ve tried and failed. The clothes we couldn’t fit into. The times we’ve been embarrassed about our size. Relationships that have affected how we feel about ourselves. Stress, loneliness, grief, trauma and the coping mechanisms we’ve developed along the way.

We don’t suddenly leave all of that behind when we decide to lose weight. I certainly didn’t.

Emotional Eating: Why we eat our feelings

I thought losing weight would change much more than my body

When I was at my heaviest, I attached an enormous amount to the idea of being thinner.

I didn’t only want to weigh less. Somewhere in my head, losing weight had become connected to confidence, happiness and finally becoming the version of myself I thought I was supposed to be.

I’ve written before about reaching my target after losing 10 stone and discovering that changing the number on the scales hadn’t magically sorted out my relationship with food.

It hadn’t removed everything that had happened before either. I was still me.

I lost 10 stone and still struggled with food

There were still things that upset me, things I struggled with and emotions I didn’t always know what to do with. I still had habits around food that had developed over many years.

I’d just become extremely good at following a weight-loss plan.

Looking back, I think I confused being able to control what I ate with having resolved why food sometimes felt so important to me.

They’re not necessarily the same thing.

Our relationship with food starts long before we start dieting

Food isn’t simply fuel, however convenient that would make nutrition advice.

It’s birthday cake and Christmas dinner. It’s the meal somebody makes when you’re upset and the takeaway you order when you’ve had a dreadful day. Food can be celebration, comfort, reward, distraction, habit and something to do when you’re bored.

Some of those associations begin when we’re very young.

Maybe sweets were a reward for being good. Perhaps clearing your plate was praised, even when you weren’t hungry anymore. Maybe food was one of the few treats your family could afford, so it became particularly special. Then we add our adult experiences on top.

For me, there have definitely been times when I’ve used food to cope with emotions rather than physical hunger. I didn’t always recognise it as emotional eating at the time. I simply knew that eating something nice made a difficult moment feel slightly easier.

The relief didn’t necessarily last very long, but sometimes a few minutes of comfort was enough for the habit to become established.

That’s very different from emotions being physically trapped somewhere in my body and somehow causing me to eat. It’s behaviour that developed because, at some point, it did something useful for me. Understanding that distinction has actually helped me much more.

What causes obesity?

Difficult experiences can change how we cope

This is something I’ve understood better as I’ve got older and had counselling and therapy. I’ve also written openly about having experienced domestic abuse and about the fact that things that happen to us don’t necessarily stop affecting us the moment the situation itself ends. Sometimes you develop ways of coping because you need them at the time.

That might mean avoiding certain situations, keeping your emotions to yourself, trying to keep everybody else happy or finding something that provides a little bit of comfort when life feels overwhelming.

For some people, food can become one of those things.

That doesn’t mean everybody who emotionally eats has experienced trauma, and it certainly doesn’t mean every person living with obesity has unresolved emotional problems. Obesity is far too complicated for explanations like that. It simply means our experiences can influence our behaviour, and for some of us that includes how we eat.

I find that considerably more useful than blaming myself for lacking willpower. If eating has become a coping strategy, repeatedly telling myself to “just stop eating” doesn’t address the reason I wanted the comfort in the first place.

Dieting gave me another suitcase of emotional baggage

Ironically, I think years of dieting added another layer. When you’ve spent a long time trying to lose weight, food can become loaded with rules and emotions of its own.

There were foods I considered good and foods I considered bad. There were days when I felt incredibly proud of what I’d eaten and others when eating something outside my plan could make me feel as though I’d ruined everything.

The scales could influence my mood far more than they should have. If I’d lost weight, I felt successful. If I hadn’t, I could immediately start analysing everything I’d eaten and wondering what I’d done wrong.

That’s a lot of emotional importance to attach to food and body weight.

At the time, I didn’t necessarily see a problem because I was losing weight and everybody was congratulating me. It’s only with distance that I’ve been able to see some of the less healthy behaviours and thoughts that existed alongside that success.

That’s one reason my approach to weight loss is different now. I still care about my health and weight, but I don’t want my entire sense of whether I’m doing well in life to depend on what the scales say on a particular morning.

Emotional eating isn’t a character flaw

This was a difficult one for me to understand. If I ate because I was upset, stressed or bored, my instinct was usually to criticise myself afterwards. Why couldn’t I have more self-control? Why did I need to eat that? Why couldn’t I just stick to the plan?

The trouble with shame is that it doesn’t necessarily solve the behaviour. Sometimes it creates another uncomfortable emotion that you then need to deal with. I’ve found it much more useful to become curious about what was happening.

Was I actually hungry? Had I eaten enough during the day? Was I exhausted? Had something upset me? Was I bored? Was I restricting myself so much that I couldn’t stop thinking about food? Sometimes I was genuinely hungry. Sometimes it was emotional eating and sometimes what I now recognise as food noise was part of the picture too.

Those things can overlap, which is why simplistic weight-loss advice can be so frustrating. “Only eat when you’re hungry” sounds straightforward until you realise that human appetite and eating behaviour aren’t always straightforward at all.

Food noise vs Hunger – how you know the difference

Losing weight doesn’t automatically unpack the baggage

I think this is something we don’t talk about enough. There can be an assumption that if weight is making you unhappy, becoming thinner will make you happy. I believed some version of that myself.

Losing weight did change things for me. I could buy different clothes, I became more active and there were physical things that became easier. I’m not going to rewrite my history and pretend losing 10 stone meant nothing simply because my perspective has changed since. What it didn’t do was resolve every insecurity or difficult experience that existed before.

If you’ve spent years believing you’re unattractive, becoming smaller doesn’t necessarily make that belief disappear overnight. If you’ve used food to manage stress for twenty years, reaching a target weight doesn’t automatically teach you another way of coping with stress.

You can lose weight without changing the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are. I think that’s part of what happened to me. I changed enormously on the outside while some of the things underneath needed much more attention than I’d realised.

What therapy taught me that dieting couldn’t

Counselling and CBT haven’t given me a magical relationship with food. I still have emotions. I still sometimes want comfort. I don’t calmly analyse every food decision like some perfectly enlightened nutrition robot. What therapy has helped me do is understand myself better.

Sometimes being able to recognise why I’m reacting strongly to something makes the reaction easier to manage. At other times, understanding where a behaviour came from allows me to decide whether I still need it.

That doesn’t mean digging endlessly through your childhood looking for a dramatic explanation for every biscuit you’ve ever eaten. Sometimes a biscuit is simply a biscuit.

For me, though, understanding my emotional eating and some of the experiences behind my coping mechanisms has been considerably more useful than repeatedly promising myself that I’d have more willpower tomorrow.

It has also helped me separate two things I used to combine: understanding a behaviour and excusing it. I can understand why I’ve developed a particular habit while still deciding I’d like to change it. Those ideas can exist together.

Finding other ways to cope doesn’t mean food can never be comforting

I don’t think the goal needs to be reaching a point where food has absolutely no emotional meaning. That sounds pretty miserable to me.

I want to enjoy birthday cake. I want Christmas dinner to feel special. If I’ve had an awful week and Stuart suggests a takeaway, I don’t want to conduct a psychological assessment before deciding whether I’m allowed one. Food is part of life.

The difference I’m interested in is whether food is one way I experience comfort and pleasure or whether it has become my main way of managing emotions I don’t know what else to do with.

That’s where having other options can help.

Sometimes I need to talk to somebody. Sometimes getting out of the house helps. Reading can distract me, as can doing something creative or simply going to bed because occasionally the terrible emotional crisis I’m trying to solve with snacks is actually that I’m exhausted!

None of those things is a guaranteed replacement for emotional eating. They’re simply additional ways of looking after myself so that food doesn’t have to do every job.

Weight regain taught me more than reaching target did

Regaining weight after losing 10 stone was difficult to accept. When you’ve publicly lost a huge amount of weight and people know you for it, regain can feel particularly complicated. It’s easy to imagine everybody looking at you and thinking you’ve failed.

For a while, I probably thought that about myself too. With hindsight, though, weight regain forced me to look at things I hadn’t really addressed when the scales were moving in the direction I wanted.

It made me think more about my relationship with food, why maintaining weight loss can be difficult and why obesity can’t simply be reduced to somebody being motivated enough.

I’ve subsequently learned about food noise, explored medical weight management, been through the bariatric surgery pathway and tried Wegovy. Every part of that has added something to my understanding.

My views about weight are much less tidy now than they were when I reached target. I actually think they’re healthier for being less tidy.

Not everyone needs to lose their emotional baggage before losing weight

There’s another idea I want to be careful about because I see versions of it online quite often. You don’t necessarily need to “heal yourself” before you’re allowed to work on your weight.

There isn’t some perfectly healed future version of you who will suddenly find healthy eating effortless. You can work on different things at the same time.

If you want to change what you eat, you can do that while also trying to understand emotional eating. If you want to become more active, you don’t need perfect confidence first. If you’re having therapy, you don’t need to wait until every difficult experience has been resolved before making other changes to your life.

Sometimes improving one area even helps another. What I would question is the belief that reaching a particular weight will automatically resolve everything else. I’ve tried that experiment already. It didn’t.

What if your relationship with food is really affecting you?

There is a difference between occasionally eating because you’ve had a rubbish day and feeling that food or weight is taking over your life.

If you’re regularly eating very large amounts while feeling unable to stop, severely restricting what you eat, making yourself sick, using laxatives or other methods to compensate for eating, or finding that thoughts about food and weight are causing significant distress, please don’t assume you simply need a better diet plan.

Eating disorders can affect people at any body size.

Your GP can be a starting point for getting help, and organisations such as Beat provide information and support around eating disorders and disordered eating.

Similarly, if difficult experiences from your past are affecting your mental health now, appropriate professional support can be much more useful than trying to solve everything through food or weight loss.

I’ve benefited from counselling and therapy myself, and I don’t see seeking that help as evidence that I somehow wasn’t strong enough to deal with things alone. Sometimes dealing with things alone was part of the problem.

I’m carrying less baggage now, but not because I weigh less

When I first thought about emotional baggage and weight, I probably would have imagined the goal was to deal with all my emotions so I’d stop overeating and finally become thin forever. I don’t see it that way anymore.

I still have difficult emotions. My past hasn’t disappeared. There are still things I’m working through and parts of my relationship with food that aren’t as straightforward as I’d like. The difference is that I understand more of it now.

Why I am open about my mental health

I’ve become better at noticing when I want food because I’m hungry and when I’m looking for something else. I’ve learned that food noise, physical hunger and emotional eating aren’t necessarily the same thing. I’ve also learned that losing weight doesn’t automatically give you confidence, happiness or a peaceful relationship with food.

Perhaps most importantly, I’m much less willing to reduce everything to willpower.

The emotional baggage we carry can influence how we eat and how we feel about our bodies, but it doesn’t mean emotions are physically trapped inside us waiting to be released. Nor does it mean every weight problem has a psychological cause.

For me, it’s simply another part of understanding the whole person behind the number on the scales. I spent years concentrating almost entirely on making that number smaller. These days, I’m much more interested in understanding the person standing on them.

If you found this helpful please share!