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What is Emotional Eating? 1/2
And why is it so important?
Roxane Gay, the New York Times best-selling author weighed 577 pounds at her heaviest. In her brutally honest memoir entitled “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body”, she explains that the word obesity, “is an unpleasant word from the Latin ‘obesus’ meaning ‘having eaten until fat’, which is, in a literal sense, fair enough”. The real question is not whether she ate until fat, but why? Upon reflection, Gay believes that her early childhood sexual trauma precipitated her disordered relationship with food. Gay writes that, “The past is written on my body. I carry it every single day. The past sometimes feels like it might kill me. It is a very heavy burden.”
Roxane Gay understood the essence of the problem. Her memoir’s title is not “Calories” or “Willpower” but tellingly, “Hunger”. It is not that Gay didn’t know the health risks of obesity. It is not about the macronutrients. It is not about lack of vitamins or supplements. It is not about lack of exercise. The problem is the hunger.
