Permission to Not Have It Together
A quick note before this one: what follows is my personal experience with my own health and my own journey—not medical advice, and not a stance on what you should do. I'm not a doctor, and I'm not telling anyone to take or not take any medication, GLP-1s included. Your health isn't mine, and what's worked for me isn't a prescription for you. Just sharing what's true for me.
Let me set the scene for you: FREE dozen Krispy Kreme donut promotion when you download the app. There were 3 extra people at our house (5 adults total). We all did it.
We had 5 dozen donuts at my house.
5 dozen.
That’s 60 donuts.
You know what my absolute weakest spot was?
…Donuts…
Not pictured: the last dozen in the back seat of the car, in my lap.
I think I single-handedly ate between 2 & 3 dozen on my own. No one else in the group has a big sweet tooth. I wanted maybe 2-3 single donuts, but once I stopped, they made me so happy and nostalgic, and safe. Yeah you read that right. Donuts make me feel safe.
What I actually felt, sitting there licking icing on my fingers, was that I missed my grandpa. He used to take me to Krispy Kreme all the time when I was a kid, and even ten years after losing him, there's a hole in me that his love used to fill. I wasn't craving a donut. I was craving him. That was the moment I stopped thinking of this as a discipline problem.
Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. Stressed after work, I'd open the cookie dough and not really notice until I scraped the bottom of the container or my stomach hurt. Anxious before my husband got home, I'd swing through the Chick-fil-A drive-thru for a milkshake, drink it in the car, and never say a word about it. I wasn't out of control around food. I wanted calm and belonging, and food was the fastest way I knew to get something that felt like it.
Here's where I'll be honest about something people expect me to have an opinion on: no, I'm not on a GLP-1, and I don't plan to be. Not because I think they're bad. They've changed lives, and for people who medically need them, that's a genuinely good thing. For me, taking one would've meant taking the easy way out of something I needed to actually go through. I have a hard time expressing emotions in general, if I'm honest, and this was never purely a food issue. It's tangled up with how I process feelings overall. Skipping the hard part would've meant skipping the actual work, and I wanted the skills, not just the quiet.
So the actual work has looked like this: checking in with myself when I feel a pull toward food that has nothing to do with hunger, and writing it down when I can. That's what surfaced the patterns in the first place—much the same way a food journal shows you what you're eating, mine started showing me what I was feeling right before I reached for something. The office birthday cake used to wreck me every time, not because I wanted cake, but because some scarcity-brained part of me was convinced I'd never get free cake again if I skipped it. I've got one friend I can actually talk to about this, and a few books that have helped more than I expected. I'm not a therapist, and this isn't a replacement for one. This is just what's worked for me, and I'm sharing it in case it helps someone look a little deeper at why you pour that glass of wine every night, or scrape the bottom of the ice cream carton after the kids are in bed.
I wish I could tell you it's solved. It's not. Last Friday, work was dead and I kept craving snacks out of nowhere—boredom, not hunger. I only had my planned food with me, so that's all I ate, just a little earlier than usual. Small win, and I noticed it as one. Then this past weekend I visited my hometown, which is emotionally and mentally taxing for me in ways I won't get into here, and I fell off. There wasn't real food in the house, I hadn't packed anything of my own, and I forgot the protein bar I always carry. I ate way too many Chips Ahoy cookies. Chocolate and a Chick-fil-A milkshake still soothe something in me that a salad never will, and they still pull me away from what I actually want for myself. Both of those things happened in the same week. That's what this actually looks like—not a straight line, just an honest one.
I think there’s value in sharing vulnerability, so I try to be open about my journey with emotional eating. I might never be perfect, and that’s okay. I don’t expect to be. I just want to continually work on my health, continue to understand my patterns and where they came from. I value the struggle of self-improvement.
If any part of this sounds like your night, you're not broken, and you don't need a prescription to prove that to yourself. You might need some help recognizing some patterns and educating yourself, but that’s why we have community and people to support you. Sometimes the answer really is just doing the hard thing.
I'm still doing it too.
love you all,
-bk