My weight and my attempts to exercise have been mentioned here many times. I am more than happy to hear constructive comments and suggestions, but bear in mind that what I’m really about to discuss is my emotional habits, not the fact that I eat more than I should, and don’t move my body often enough.
I’ve been weighing myself weekly since the turn of the year —to be fair, I’ve been weighing myself on a fairly regular pattern for almost three decades now— yet despite that or maybe because of that, I remain fat.
I weighed myself this morning —29th April 2026— the number has gone up and my instant thought was ‘fuck it’. Like, why do I even bother? Maybe I should just accept the fact that I’m fat and leave it at that.
Except I don’t want to be fat, because being fat shortens my lifespan, reduces my mobility, and means I can’t be the Dad I want to be for my son.
And that is a classic (for me) fear of failure loop that sucks me in week after week after week.
I want to be X, I am not X, so I have failed.
All of which leaves me emotionally drained and so I turn to my favourite comfort activity.
Eating.
I have written about this before specifically the fact that I am an emotional eater
…realising the emotional impact my weight has on me, specifically seeing the numbers when I weigh-in. There is an argument to be made for not weighing yourself and relying on how your clothes feel/inch loss measurements instead but I know that, at some point, I’d still want to know what weight I am. Given that I turn to food for comfort, well the emotional impact is a big factor in my eating habits for any given day.
Why is this happening?
I deliberately chose to share my weight when I started compiling my Week Notes posts. Accountability was the aim but with little to no movement since February, it now feels a more like a millstone round my neck (thankfully not applied physically before hefting me into the sea).
And yes, I chose the millstone metaphor because it’s heavy.
The facts are, as of this morning, I weigh 113.5kg. When I started my weekly weigh-ins in February I was 113.6kg.
Which makes me feel ashamed, and pretty stupid.
I know how to lose weight, I know it’s basic arithmetic, calories in versus calories out.
Let’s dig deeper
It’s safe to say —because of who I am— I’ve done a fair amount of reading and research on this and there is a consistency to the thinking behind my eating habits, and the advice offered, at least as far as my own research shows.
From what I’ve read emotional eating is —and yes this is obvious— a regulation strategy.
So when I have ‘an emotion’ —stress, boredom, frustration, relief— it makes me internally uncomfortable and my brain looks to later my state back to my normal (whatever the fuck that is).
Food works because it’s reliable and immediate, we always have some form of easy to make and ingest food types in our house, even though our house has —thanks to my amazing wife— mostly healthy options. Yet even with a more limited set of options, the highly palatable foods (fat, sugar, salt) are the ones I seek out because I need that dopamine trigger, and that in turns dampens my response to having ‘an emotion’.
It was called out to me by a work colleague several years ago, after a particularly fraught meeting about a serious issue we were having, I strode back to my desk, likely sighed heavily and dropped my notebook on the desk, flumped in to my chair and reached for the Double Decker that was sitting on my desk. My colleague turned and with said, with a gentle grin, “Ahhh bad meeting? Eating our emotions are we?”.
I laughed it off at the time but he was right on the money.
Emotional eating has been so ingrained in me, so subconscious a habit that I’ve not even realised it. I feel the emotions (usually bad ones) so I eat, and then I feel better for a while. My brain knows it and as my brain is always looking to make me feel good, has re-enforced that loop over and over again as it knows it will bring me some relief.
It doesn’t help that I have a level of guilt about all of this to begin with. I guess deep down I know this isn’t good, the avoidance of emotions, and so a lot of my overeating is hidden away, quietly opening cupboard doors, hastily gobbling snacks so I don’t get ‘caught’, taking empty packets out with me to dispose of in any other bin than ours,
Peeling the onion
Objectively I know this “eating to cope” mechanism is a shortcut, and that the key part of all of this is the fact that I only feel better for a while . This a learned association is so deeply engrained that I don’t even process it, to the point that my cravings kick in as soon as the emotion level starts to spike. That ‘fuck it’ moment is coupled, in the same moment, with a desire to eat an entire tub of Nutella.
Dealing with emotions
However, that reaction, that reaching for comfort through food, doubles down on the problem by giving me a way to tamp down the triggering emotion. It’s a way to take the edge off feeling sad, angry, or guilty, but it also stops me fully experiencing that emotion and because I’m not feeling the emotion I’m not properly dealing with it so it lingers, as a low level thrum. Over time, as you repeat this process, you add more and more little lingering emotions until you get back to a triggering, ‘fuck it’, point once again. And again. And again.
Tricking myself
I’ve also considered my behaviours from the point of view of decision fatigue.
A recent example that sticks in my brain, and is an extreme example of minimising this type of fatigue can be found with President Obama. Whilst in office he limited his wardrobe to only a couple of colours of suit, shirt, and tie. Removing the tiny decisions made helped give him energy for the bigger ones. No decision on what to wear, just pick something out and put it on. Simple.
The problem for me is that, if I’ve had a busy day, physically or mentally, my ability to handle decisions and plans is diminished, and so it’s far easier to just let the default habits win. The emotional spikes don’t need to be of much consequence to drive me to a post 9pm treat.
There is also an element of allowing myself treats or larger (takeaway) meals because I’ve been good and deserve it, or sometimes because I’ve been bad so fuck it, I may as well continue to splurge. Without conscious consideration I think this just re-enforces the eating habits, letting me ignore the underlying drivers of those thoughts and emotions by masking them with tasty foods full of wonderful whizzy endorphins. Wheeeee!
It’s also fair to say that I regularly use the ‘but I exercised today’ excuse to over indulge at times. Just as it’s also fair to say that on the whole I eat pretty healthily, my main meals are typically healthy, whilst I shy away from acknowledging the splurges and hidden snacking.
Yet underlying those sentiments —I exercise, I watch what I eat— I have a broken emotional coping system that quietly self-sabotages all my best intentions.
What about the drugs?
I’m loathed to name them and attract spammy attention —you likely know the names anyway, Oze, Weg, et al— but there seems to be no doubt that the weight loss drugs being pushed at me from every angle whenever I venture onto social media can be effective.
I’m hesitant to go down that route because what are the longer side effects? Do they outweigh the benefits in the short term? Given my weight loss is focussed on being more available for my son, surely I should be prioritising whatever I can do to lose weight as soon as possible.
Post drug use though, what happens? I can’t take them forever so let’s say I’ve hit a happy weight —for argument sake we’ll say 95kg— what then? I still need to have better habits and better ways to combat the emotional eating triggers that will still exist, and as the hunger abatement abates as the drugs leave my system and the GLP-1 ‘goodness’ is no longer curbing my cravings, there is an obvious risk of presuming that I no longer need to worry about any of this stuff, I will be cured!
Of course that’s not true, any GLP-1 drug is not going to combat and remove my emotional eating tendencies.
Emotions will still find me, I am an emotional guy at the best of times, something I’m very comfortable with —why do I always feel the need to caveat that, like somehow emotions are a bad thing?— so I know I will continue have strong reactions to my emotions, regardless of whether I was taking these drugs or not.
What’s Next?
As I alluded to early, I can be honest and say that I’m still fat because I’m not creating a calorie deficit and that’s largely down to my emotional eating. It is not rocket science, like I said, it’s just arithmetic.
So I find myself realising that I need to break my habit, need to find a way to catch when I’m triggered and insert a pause, a mental stopgap.
I have no idea how to do that, but I do know that just writing about it will help me start that process. I will figure it out —26 years of writing this blog has held this true, even if some lessons have taken an awfully long time to come around.
There are other things I can do of course —schedule my exercise, track my food intake, remove snacky temptations from the house— and I’m looking at those too but I’ve tried all of those in the past and none of them get away from the fact that I need to deal with the trigger emotion.
One thing I haven’t yet tried is to treat like purely as a mental issue, not something I can schedule and track, but something that I need to be aware of and let myself experience whatever emotions that are pushing me to want to eat.
I may turn to my journal to write thoughts down, I may turn to meditation to calm my brain so I can work through both what triggered the emotional spike, and why it matters to me. I am lucky enough to have done some of this kind of thing in the past, so it’s time to dust off that part of my mental toolbox.
Bottom Line
I post my weight here each week, and I will continue to do so. I originally had a family holiday as a target but that is now only a couple of weeks away so I’ll look to a trip to Madrid in September as the next goal. I don’t know what weight I will be then, and I’m not setting a target, instead I’ll aim to have my weight trending down between now and then.
If it does, hopefully that means I am tracking my improving ability to counter the emotional spikes that drive me to eat.
If it doesn’t, then no doubt I will be back here writing about why I think that failed and what I’m gonna try next.
It is easy to get very down on yourself when you are overweight. You don’t look how you ‘should’ look, clothes don’t fit as well, you feel self-conscious a lot of the time. I don’t like any of this, and that is also part of why I’ve been on this coughs journey for so long now.
According to the NHS BMI calculator (I know, I know! See link below for more on BMI measurements), I am obese and my ideal body weight should be between 64.1 kilograms and 86.4 kilograms —I can’t even imagine being 86kg I think I’d look utterly emaciated.
I don’t really have a target weight in mind though, the notional 95kg mark is a goal purely for the sake of having one.
I just want to lose some weight.
Additional reading:
P.S. I picked my Featured Image from Unsplash, can’t believe I found one that is almost showing my actual weight, what are the odds!
What are your thoughts?