Hi uberinquisitive,
yes, NotesMaeve is awesome!
My highest weight was 80kg. I'm 1m58, so you can imagine my hurting feet and knees and lethargy at that time...
I'm so sorry for you. Sounds like you had a hard time in your life. If you already had success with EFT, then that's great! Tap in all details every traumatic event in your life, from the divorce, your parents blaming you, your fear, confusion... till the suicide of your boyfriend. EFT is great, I also used it to overcome the emotional issues that were holding me back from being thin! With success btw, I'm permanently losing weight now.
But you asked for emotional issues others have... Well ok then, here are mine:
First there are the emotional issues that in fact are no emotional issues
Some overweight people have problems regulating their blood sugar levels. They have to eat at very regular intervals, or their blood sugar level will drop too much. When they get hypoglycemia, they feel like eating a lot, especially fast carbohydrates. Further symptoms can be something like headache, but also sadness or depression. They may then think that they want to eat because they are sad or tired. But in fact it's two symptoms of too low blood sugar.
A solution for this is to avoid sugar and white flour, eat whole grains with a lot of food high in fibers (vegetables), eat regularly and often (!), and take chromium. Chromium is necessary to regulate your blood sugar levels. If you're overweight, that's the first step I would recommend anyway.
Then there are the emotional issues that lead to eating.
Some people eat when they have some negative emotions they haven't learnt to deal with in another way. That's a learnt habit. Angry? eat. Sad? eat. Bored? eat. Lonely? eat. Eating enables you not to deal with feelings you're afraid to express or even to aknowledge, for it makes them just disappear. Eating calms you down, consoles you, gives you a feeling of being loved... and can become quite addictive if you have no other way to get what you truly want in this moment: love, peace, whatever.
Solution: 1) every time you feel like eating, ask yourself if you're really hungry or if it's some emotional problem (let's assume you have already eliminated the possibility of hypoglycemia).
2) if you're hungry, eat as much as you want. if not, don't eat, tap the underlying negative emotion
3) learn to deal with your emotions in a better way, by identifying and aknowledging them in the first place and then responding more appropriately.
And last but not least, there are emotional issues about being overweight.
You can be overweight because for some reason you eat too much or just wrong things (bad eating habits, unstable blood sugar, negative emotions, and so on). In this case, the overweight is nothing more than an unpleasant side-effect. But you can also be overweight because for some reason you want to become or stay overweight. In that case, it's overeating that is just a means to make you fat. These emotional issues were the most important ones for me, although they are a bit harder to identify.
Here are a few of mine as an example:
I am of feminine build: small waist, round hips, big boobs, very curvy. My mother is the opposite. She's pretty, slim with longs legs and so on, just like it's fashion now, but she finds the sort of women like me sexier. After puberty, she began telling me nasty things about my body. She used to make jokes about my "fat ass" and laughed at me when I couldn't find appropriate bras for my "monsterboobs". She attacked me a lot about my feminity. In my head she burnt an 11th commandement: "thou shall not be sexier than thy mother" As I was quite pretty as a teenager and already looked like a woman at age 14, I felt very guilty and started eating a lot to make me less attractive.
Another reason were men. They used to look at me in a way that made me feel very uncomfortable, dirty, ashamed... and I found it very dangerous too. I was scared of them. So I ate a lot and became fat to hide myself, so that they would eventually stop looking at me like this!
Later as I was overweight indeed, my mother kept on pressuring me about losing weight, she gave me too small clothes to "motivate" me, weight loss books to "help" me, when I visited her she used to give me smaller food portions... such things. She even told me things like "that's such a pity, you would be beautiful if you were thin!" I told her to let me in peace, but she said "how can I lie? I find it ugly to be so fat!" At the same time, I felt she didn't really want me to lose weight. Even today, when I tell her "mom, I lost weight again!" she says "aah, super..." which sounds like "sh*t."
Anyway, I had a very low self-esteem at that time. I felt unworthy, ugly, I thought I didn't deserve a beautiful body... and ate more.
There are more reasons. In my childhood nobody liked me, and I wanted people to like me so badly. Later at the time I was very overweight, I was such a nice little thing with this funny big appetite. Everybody liked me and I was completely harmless. I was no concurrence for other women, and I could hang out in a relaxed manner with a lot of male buddies without being considered as a "real" woman. Now that I'm thinner, that's different. Women look at me differently, men too. It's not that comfortable any more...
And you have more power when you're attractive. I was afraid of having such a power.
A last one: as a woman you permanently get the message "you have to be pretty. you have to be slim. you have to wear nice clothes and high heels and please men." Well I didn't want to be like I was told to be. Being fat was a manner for me to say "f*** you all. I'm like I am and I don't want to be like you want me to be!"
As you can see, there are many reasons why someone can want to become or stay overweight. For years I obstinately refused to be thin for these reasons... even though I desperately tried to lose weight.
Solution for such emotional issues: Introspection. EFT, EFT, EFT. A counselor if it's not enough.
What a long post! I hope I didn't go too much into details.