Emotional eating.

I am trying to learn how to control my emotional eating.

According to the Mayo Clinic article I just posted below couple of the trigger factors of emotional eating are unemployment and financial pressure. Thankfully I am employed at school and also for the summer I shall be working as a front desk person at a gym near my parents, where I be living for the summer. Neither jobs pay much, but since I am not going to have to pay a rent I shall be financially worry free until further notice.

Other trigger factors are health problems, bad weather, and fatigue. Again thankfully I am in good health, knock on the wood, and trying to lose weight to prevent future health problems, thus this is not an issue for me.

I live in the upper hemisphere, lol, where currently there is spring and shall be followed by the summer, so bad weather is not going to be an issue for me until further notice, lol.

As for fatigue, I have every intention of sleeping at least 8 hours a night, because one of the reasons for weigh gain is sleep deprivation. So I doubt that fatigue is going to be an issue for me until the classes start again in September.

So the factors that are going to affect me are work stress and relationship conflicts. For me work stress translates into school stress, which I really can't do much about, I think! For example yesterday when I was stressing over my grades, for nothing, I was very nervous and no amount of pep talk calmed me down. But thankfully the school stress situations are not that many and there are far in between, so I should be OK in that regard.

Which bring me to relationship conflicts; that effects me big time. Currently I don't have a boyfriend and have no desire to date, but there are friends/acquaintances that get on my nerves. So I figured I should declutter my life and give up on those friendships.

I have one best friend that I text/email/call a few times a day and meet a few times a week, even if it is just for a few minutes for coffee. That should be enough friendship for me for now.

I do have lots of good friends that I haven't kept close touch with lately. So I am going to reach out to them and bring them closer to me.

Hopefully these reconfiguration in my relationship should eliminate my emotional eating because of the relationship conflicts.

I actually think the reason I have gained a lot of weight in the past eight months has been because of my relationships with my school roommates! I opted to live on campus with three other first year graduate students from different disciplines. At first we were very civilized and friendly. We hangout together often, ordered pizza and watched movies. Then one met a boy and started spending all her free times with him. The other two became buddy buddies, started running together in the afternoons, became health conscious, and started making catty remarks about my eating habits and choice of outfits. That bothered me a lot that I finally told them to only tell me their opinions of me if I asked for it. I am not a confrontational kind of person so it took me a long time to bring myself to tell them off. After that things went from bad to worse. They didn't even make eye contact with me or replied when I said hi to them. I started going home late and left very early to avoid running into them. I eat outside, didn't buy any groceries for home anymore, and kept a few things I got like cereal and fruits in my school office. So it was a horrible situation. I couldn't wait for the semester to be over. I am so glad that is all behind me. I just wish I could stop rehashing all their comments and behaviors towards me. Oh well time is going to erase all that I am sure.