What Emotional Eating Is Really Telling You — My Journey With Emotional Eating
I want to talk about something that I don’t often talk about. It is the things we all struggle with. I think as a coach I often feel like I have to look like I have it all figured out.
The thing is before being a coach I am human. I do struggle with things and one of the ones that causes me the most amount of struggle is emotional eating. This has been the case since I can remember… My early 20’s this less evident and maybe connection was more the driver but after 25 it started to become obvious.
I want to tell you how I figured out that was never the real problem though.
It Started With McDonald's
My mom worked at McDonald's for close to 30 years.
When I was little, I would come home from school to a Happy Meal. It was something I looked forward too… it was time with my mom! It was the smell of the fries when I would step through the door It was sitting with her after a long day and just being together, telling her about my day.
McDonald's became comfort before I even knew what that word really meant.
It also made me a chubby kid. Which, looking back, is one of those things you can laugh at a little — the irony of a future fitness coach being a round little guy who grew up eating Happy Meals. But that is how it goes doesn’t it. We create impact from our experiences. Being the chubby kid leaves a mark. It shapes how you see yourself, how you move through the world, how you relate to your body.
That experience is a big part of what pushed me to walk into a gym at 13 years old, that and my older sister… thanks sis! I wanted to change how I felt about myself. I wanted to feel different in my own skin but to be honest with you I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t realize what the outcome would be.
And that's where the fitness journey started. But the emotional relationship with food? That didn't get addressed for a long time.
The McDouble That Had Nothing To Do With Hunger
As I got older and more aware of nutrition, I started noticing a pattern.
On hard days — the days where things didn't go the way I planned, where I felt like I wasn't doing enough, where I felt lonely or just worn down — I would want McDonald's.
And here's the part that I realize now, and probably before but I didn’t think of it, I often didn’t really want it. Not in the way you crave something you reall enjoy. I knew before I ordered it that it probably wasn't going to taste as good as I was hoping. But my brain didn't care. It wanted it anyway.
Then there were the long work days — the ones where I'd get home exhausted and even though there was food in the fridge, I didn't want it. I'd stop somewhere on the way home not because I was starving, but because I didn't want to cook, clean up, or deal with one more thing. I just wanted to be done. The drive-through was easier. It required nothing from me.
For a while, I told myself I just had no self-control. That I couldn't manage a simple craving. That other people were better at this than me. I repeated that story enough times that I actually started to believe it.
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Then I started to study the Psychology of human behavior.
As I got deeper into personal development, coaching, and building myself as both a person and a business owner, I started questioning that story.
Because here's the thing — I had discipline in other areas of my life. I was consistent in my training. I ran a business (although this has its own journey of growth I am always on). I showed up for my clients. So why did this one pattern keep repeating?
That's when it clicked.
The McDouble wasn't about hunger. It wasn't about taste. It was about what it represented. Certainty. I always knew exactly what I was getting — same taste, same experience, same feeling. On days where everything felt uncertain or out of control, my brain knew exactly where to find something predictable.
And it was about connection. Not with another person necessarily — but with a feeling. With memories of 10 year old me coming through the door. With that version of home and comfort I had carried since I was a kid. On the days I felt most alone or most like I wasn't enough, that association was still there, tucked away, just waiting to be activated.
I wasn't weak. I was looking for something real. I just hadn't learned yet that food wasn't actually able to give it to me.
What Emotional Eating Is Actually Telling You
If you struggle with this — and if you're reading this, there's a decent chance you do — I want you to hear this clearly:
You are not broken. You are not lazy. You do not have a discipline problem.
You have an unmet need that you've been trying to fill with food. And food works — just enough, just often enough, to keep the cycle going. That's the trap.
For some people, food is comfort when life gets overwhelming. For others, it's excitement or reward after a long stretch of restriction. For others, it's connection — the one thing that doesn't require anything from you in return.
None of that is shameful. All of it makes sense.
But here's the part I'm not going to sugarcoat: shame doesn't fix this cycle. In a lot of cases, shame is part of what keeps it going. You eat to cope with a feeling, feel guilty for eating, feel worse about yourself, and then reach for food again because now you need comfort from the guilt. Round and round.
What also doesn't fix it? Another diet. More restriction. More willpower. If you have been running on that hamster wheel for years, you already know it doesn't work long-term.
The Practical Part
I'm not here to tell you to never eat McDonald's again. I'm not here to tell you to detach every emotional connection you have to food. That's not realistic and honestly, food should bring some joy. A meal with people you love, a comfort meal on a hard day once in a while — that's human. That's fine.
The goal is not to become a robot. The goal is to stop letting food be the only tool in the box.
A few things that have genuinely helped me and the clients I work with:
Pause before you eat and ask what you actually need. Not in a judgmental way — just genuinely curious. Are you hungry? Are you tired? Are you stressed? Are you lonely? Are you looking for a way out of the next task? Sometimes just naming it takes some of the power away.
Stop over-restricting. Chronic restriction makes emotional eating worse. When your body and brain feel deprived, the pull toward comfort food gets louder. Eating enough — real food, enough protein, enough structure — takes the edge off in a way that willpower never can.
Get support. Sometimes you are too close to your own patterns to see them clearly. That's not a weakness — that's just how humans work. Having someone help you connect the dots can change things faster than years of trying to figure it out alone.
The best coaches I have found are the ones that help you when you are struggling to show up for yourself.
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What I Know Now
I understand my relationship with food a lot better than I used to. I still have the occasional moment where I catch myself wanting to pull into that drive-through for reasons that have nothing to do with hunger. But now I know what to ask myself.
And that awareness — that small pause between the urge and the action — is where everything changes.
Not perfection. Not elimination. Awareness.
If This Hit Something In You
If emotional eating, body image struggles, and the start-stop cycle have been part of your life for years — I want you to stop trying to fix it with another random diet.
Inside Diamond Coaching, we don't just work on calories and workouts. We work on the patterns underneath the behaviour. We look at your real life, your emotions, your structure, your habits, and the reasons you keep falling back into the same cycle. Because that's where the actual work is.
If this blog resonated, that's not an accident. It means something in here is true for you. And that's worth exploring.
Fill out the intake form and book a call. It's time to change this for good.
