Anger is my Trigger

When it comes to emotional eating, anger is my biggest trigger. The other emotions don't really cause me to turn to food -- sadness, happiness, stress, etc. -- I've been able to concur all those situations when it comes to mindless or uncontrolled eating. But anger is a different story.  I get the whole "F-It" attitude and don't care if I'm eating out of emotion or not.

I'm working on ways to combat the anger-eating situations. One of the keys would be to not be around food when I know I'm anger. My house is pretty safe so if I turn to food in anger when I'm at home I'll be faced with a bunch of healthy food choices. But if I'm "out and about" somewhere it's not as easy to control. Hitting a convenience store or grocery store is too easy if I'm already out there.

Thankfully I'm a pretty laid back person and it take a LOT to set me off. So this isn't an issue I need to deal with very often.  But today after work I had some major anger going on. I was seething and nobody to vent to. A little while into my drive home, thankfully, my mother called and she got an earful.

But I was still upset when I had to stop at Walmart for a few things. UhOh! Danger Zone! Last time I went to Walmart when I was angry I came home with a package of Oreos and a bag of Doritos. Yeah. Bad news, right? But even though I was still angry, the conversation with my mom had taken me down a notch.  I went into the store, did my shopping and checked out without buying anything bad. I came home and made a nice salad with chicken for dinner and didn't eat anything bad or out of emotion. Finally! There's a first for everything, right? So glad I held on to the control tonight.

I'm still dealing with some anger (it'll take a while for that to go away, I think) -- but I've also got a sense of satisfaction going on for resisting the urge to feed the anger with food.

~Pam