Conquering Emotional Overeating: One Bride’s Story

One bride took control of her emotional overeating by seeking help from a registered dietician and mastering an intuitive eating approach.

Jenn Walters is a picture of health. She’s the co-creator of Fit Bottomed Girls (along with Erin Whitehead), a blog through which she channels her passion for sane fitness and healthy-living advice. She’s also a certified personal trainer, a lifestyle and weight management consultant and a group exercise instructor. And to top things off, she’s training for a January marathon (and raising money for Girls on the Run while she’s at it). To look at her, it’s hard to imagine she’s ever struggled with food issues.

Yet, like so many women, she’s no stranger to emotional overeating and the attendant roller coaster of bingeing and restriction. Here she tells Bombshell Bride how deep reflection and an upcoming wedding helped her take the steps she needed to develop a healthy relationship with food—and with her body.

Bombshell Bride: When did your struggles with emotional overeating begin?

Jenn Walters: I’ve probably been an emotional eater since high school. I remember grabbing a carton of ice cream after a tough day and going to town. I’d generally overeat and then heavily restrict for as long as I could before getting really hungry and bingeing again. My struggle with it worsened in college, and really hit me in graduate school when I was off living in a new city by myself.

Bombshell Bride: Did your struggles with food have a specific turning point, or was it more of a growing realization that you needed to take a different approach?

Jenn: It was definitely a growing realization. In college and grad school I had a part-time job as a group exercise instructor and personal trainer, and I knew better: I knew severely dieting and then bingeing wasn’t healthy or making me happy. But I’m a perfectionist and I felt pressure as a fitness professional to look a certain way, so I’d recommit to healthy eating (in an extremely restricted way) time and time again with the hopes of finally conquering it. In the end it would always conquer me.

It wasn’t until a year out of graduate school, on my birthday during a period of intense self-reflection—and nine months before my wedding, so I was in full planning mode—that I realized I needed help, and another diet wasn’t going to work for me. I knew that it was taking up too much of my mental space and energy. And I didn’t want to worry about my weight on my wedding day. That was the last thing I wanted to worry about. Honestly, I also felt like a hypocrite for telling people to love and accept themselves and their bodies in group exercise classes when I had obviously not done that myself. I couldn’t be like that any more.

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