My emotional eating is triggered when I feel a loss of control.

Loss of control is a particularly uncomfortable feeling for me, so whenever I feel it, I would resort to shoving enough food in my mouth to make myself feel really full instead. Disgustingly full. Seems odd for a bad feeling to make me feel better. But it really wasn’t better, just different. Eating brought relief for about five minutes before I would be right back to the original emotion I was trying to cover up.

Instead, I had to face that feeling. I started to find I actually had control. Maybe not total control of things happening in my life, but I can control how I respond and I can control what food I put in my mouth.

I learned it is actually much easier for me to navigate feelings and emotions in the moment by addressing them, rather than sitting on the sidelines, blaming others and wondering why my life was not the way I wanted it. I would address my feelings with applicable reactions and useful solutions—not food. My life is the way I choose it to be.

If you are like me and even still reading, at this point you are probably pushing away this information and declaring I do not understand. I get that. It was always my defense too. I know it is a hard pill to swallow. (You mean, my life is what it is because of MY choices? Ouch!)

Still don’t believe me? In the first year of living Code Red I started to work on tackling this demon named emotional eating. In that year, my brother had seven strokes, my daughter’s dad died, my dad had a stroke and spent 20 days in ICU plus rehab, a tree fell on our house, my daughter started college, and my relationship of nine years was falling apart.

I do not share this for sympathy or empathy. I share with the hope you will start to hear how it is possible. Life happened and I was still responsible for all of my choices. I set out to gain knowledge and find support. Regardless of what life was throwing at me, I had control over my choice to finally work toward the life I wanted. I learned how to fall that year, a lot! And each time, I learned how to get back up and keep moving. I finally found the tools I needed to be successful.

If you have fallen in your effort to accomplish something in your life—weight loss or otherwise—recognize your pattern, find a lesson, use what you learned to make an adjustment, get back up and start again. That is what I did. That is what others are doing. Don’t give up and resort to negative talk and stay in a victim role. Rather, accept 100% responsibility for your life.

And you know what, when you get up and try again, you’ll probably fall again. I certainly do. But once you’ve learned how to fall, each time the fall becomes shorter, getting up becomes easier. The information you are learning becomes a tool you can use. It doesn’t matter how far you may have fallen right now. Get up and go again.

“How did you climb over that wall I seem to run into over and over again?”

The truth is, I didn’t learn how to climb over it so much as I learned how to fall and get back up. That is the only difference. The walls don’t go away or stop trying to push you back. Each time I fell, I developed new tools I still use every day to tackle life challenges and to prevent self-sabotaging. One tool is to accept I have control over my life choices. And I choose each day to continuously seek out the life I want instead of wondering why someone else couldn’t just hand it to me. It took time and it still takes effort but what I can promise you is that it does get easier and most times now getting up and moving forward is a habit rather than a conscious effort.

Tip: It’s a lot easier to scale a wall when you’re armed with the right tools.