"When we began to use food for its mood altering properties, diets as a distraction, or purging as a release, we were trying to help ourselves. We were trying to make ourselves feel better, to fill a need or fill a void or contend with circumstances that we were unable to change or control at that moment, suppressing our unsettling emotions or directing our attenting elsewhere by eating compulsively or dieting obessively was the best, or only, coping mechanism available to us and it worked. Time and time again throughout our lives, addictive substances and behaviors came to our rescue when there seemed to be no other avenues for relief."
-Susan Meltsner, M.S.W., author of Body & Soul
When we are children we each develop our own coping mechanism to function in a dysfunctional family. The tools that we use depend on several factors. Birth order, temperament, character, gender, personality, etc. Since none of us were born with a manual on how to handle life situations we adapt and learn from what is going on in our environment with our primary caregivers. If your parents were not very skilled in life then you are challenged to learn it on your own when you get much older. But their way of handling things is wedged deep into your subconsious especially if you have not done the work to change things.
For example, if your father is an alcoholic the chances of you becoming one as well are pretty high. But even if you decide that you will do things differently and not touch alcohol, the lack of healthy coping mechanism and the dependency on something external to deal with life is still in you. Your choice of poison may be food instead of alcohol. If neither of your parents had addictions, it does not mean that you will not have a problem with emotional eating. There are many other scenarios that stimulate emotional eating tendencies.
Some people use food at times to cope in certain situations. In fact, I know a widower who is normally healthy and fit, and when he lost his wife he gained a lot of weight. I gained much weight myself after a job loss especially because my former employer did not want to release the unemployment money for eight months which added much stress. Then a couple of years later I found out about my father's terminal illness and three months after he died. It was too much stress for me and I used food to cope.
It is normal to "sometimes" use food to soothe your emotions, just like you might have glass of wine on a rare occasion to relax after a very stressful day. The thing is that there are many people who use food to help them handle all of life challenges and all situations on a daily basis because they have no other tools for coping. So instead of dealing with the original problem head on, now they have to deal with having an overweight problem also.
" Long after our 'cure' became an illness that made our lives more unmanageable, we continue to automatically and habitually engage in the same behaviors because, at the most fundamental level, we thought we had to. We did not know what else to do. Even though we consciously hated our actions, our weight, or our lack of willpower and wanted to change it, we had unconsiously linked food, eating, dieting, or bingeing and purging to essential needs (safety, soothing, stability, some control over our own destinies) and vested our compulsive behaviors, and in some instances, our large bodies, with the magical power to fulfill those needs...almost all of us without realizing it or planning to, receive hidden benefits from our eating disorders, which is one of reasons they are so difficult to overcome until we find other methods to address the needs our eating and excess weight have been fulfilling, those needs will repeatedly draw us back into our addiction. It didn't occur to us that focusing all of our attention on our weight problems was a convenient way to avoid facing marital, financial, sexual, or loneliness problems that took more than a low-calorie diet to undue."
- Susan Meltsner, M.S.W.
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