Filling Voids with Love Instead of Food

I grow increasingly convinced, especially through reading dieting blogs, that diet and exercise might be adequate for a time to lose weight, but deeper emotional/spiritual work must also be done in order to affect long-term change and in order to maintain new eating habits and to fill the "holes in the soul" that were formerly filled by food. Otherwise, the crack in the door of eating that occurs with transition off of a diet leads to the door being blasted off the hinges and full-out binge. Full-out return to the addictive behavior.

I'm glad to say that the past six weeks (? about?) since I stopped Medifast and returned to eating whole foods, have NOT resulted in my former eating habits. It's too early to tell, but I feel like I am in a really good place where food is concerned and it seems like I've internalized the desire for healthy foods. I literally prefer a banana to a cookie (because I know it makes my body healthier and I love my body) or cooked cabbage to a baked potato.

I eat like all those people who used to mystify me... the ones who would pass on food if they weren't hungry and when they did eat, stopped when they were physically full. Food is no longer my means of self-medicating my emotional needs. I'm growing increasingly content with my life: finding fulfillment in serving, engaged in healthy relationships, always open to opportunities for growing; lots of interactions with people.

And that is the key: Before, I ate because I didn't love myself and I feared people. Now, loving myself, and being open to loving relationships is what fills that former void that food once filled. When I go rolling at the river and engage in deep and meaningful conversations with new acquaintances, that fills me in exactly the same way eating a whole pie would have done before. Connection with people is what my soul has always longed for, and when I felt so not Okay, and when I feared rejection by people, food was a "safe" substitute for that emotional/relational void.

It feels like things are in much better alignment with love of self and love of others filling me up so much that there isn't room to be over-stuffed with food.

Time will tell...