Emotional Eating

I've had a really long week, full of emotional and physical stress from closing on a house and then moving my mom's things into it.  I'm pretty good at sticking to a low carb, real food diet, except when I'm stressed.  I mark on a special calendar when I eat sugar or wheat products, and it's almost always when I'm stressed out. 

This is actually something I don't hear much of from the low carb community, and especially not from the paleo folks.  Yes, if you eat low carb real foods, you won't feel as hungry as you would if you were eating junky processed carbage.  But it's not all about physical hunger.  I don't know about you, but there have been a lot of times in my past where I would eat when I wasn't hungry, and even continue to eat long beyond the point of physical satiety.  Heck, I've even binged so hard that I made myself miserably uncomfortable, and I wanted to keep eating.

I'll admit that this doesn't happen nearly as often now than it used to, but it does happen.  Like this weekend, after spending hours moving all of my mom's furniture, my hubby and I went out to eat.  I started out by eating something with sugar sweetened barbeque sauce on it, and finished by eating a sickeningly sweet dessert.  I knew in my head that it was bad for me, and I knew that I shouldn't eat it, that it would do nothing but make me feel bad and make my heart start racing.  And yet I ate it anyway.  It was like my reward for all the hard work I'd done. 

Other times, I eat sweets when I'm sad or lonely, almost as if I expect the food to make me feel happy.  And it probably does while I'm eating it, but the moment it's gone I feel sad again.  Maybe that's how a binge starts.  You have to keep eating to continue to feel happy.

 Why don't we talk about this more?  I really feel like it's an important topic, and we should be helping people with this problem.  Maybe the community feels like it shouldn't even exist because LC diets are so physically satisfying.  But we eat for more reasons than hunger.