Behind every woman who struggles with food, there’s often a story woven from survival, tenderness, and the quiet ways we learned to cope. My story — the one that shaped my understanding of emotional eating and healing — began the year my body stopped working the way it once did.
After a serious car accident, I found myself trapped inside a body that refused to move. The days stretched long. The pain grew louder. Friends brought flowers. My mother brought chocolate chip cookies — soft, sweet, warm with something I couldn’t name.
It was love, disguised as butter and sugar.
I accepted it because I didn’t know what else to accept.
I told myself it was comfort. And for a while, it was.
But as the months passed, that comfort turned heavy.
Fifty pounds heavy.
The cookies stopped being treats. They became anesthesia. I told myself I didn’t care — that life had already broken me, so what did it matter if I broke a little more?
But deep down, I knew I wasn’t hungry for cookies.
I was hungry for life. For freedom. For the young woman I used to be before everything shattered.
When Comfort Turns Into Coping
My mother wasn’t someone who talked about emotions or inner wounds. Her love was practical, quiet, and loyal. She couldn’t sit beside my pain with words, but she could bake. She could do something. And so she did.
But she also sensed something wasn’t working.
One afternoon, she wandered into a used bookstore. She told the bookseller about my accident, about my long days of waiting and hurting. A few minutes later, he handed her a small, gilt-lettered book: Autogenic Training by Dr. Johannes Heinrich Schultz.
She brought it home and said only, “Try this.”
I did.
As I worked through its strange, gentle exercises, something inside me softened. The book taught me how to rest from the inside out. How to calm the storm my nervous system had been holding since the accident. How to feel the difference between hunger and emptiness… comfort and care… coping and healing.
And slowly — without force, without shame — my interest in cookies disappeared.
The Inheritance We Carry
Looking back now, I see my mother’s gift for what it was: a bridge.
A quiet act of hope.
A belief that I could find my way back to myself.
Many women carry a similar inheritance. Research shows that emotional eating often develops when stress or distress becomes chronic, especially when early life teaches us to soothe instead of feel
(https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12297910/).
When our nervous systems learn to associate food with relief, we don’t just eat to fill our stomachs — we eat to quiet the ache inside us.
Love came in butter and sugar, in casseroles and extra helpings, in the belief that fullness meant safety. And somewhere deep inside, we learned to confuse nourishment with affection.
Fullness with comfort.
Eating with survival.
The weight I carried wasn’t just mine.
It held my mother’s fear, her longing, her hope that sweetness could save me.
Healing Begins Where Fighting Ends
Today, that little gilted book still sits on my shelf — its pages yellowed, its corners worn. I keep it because it reminds me that healing rarely arrives in grand gestures.
Sometimes it arrives in a cookie baked with love.
Sometimes in a secondhand book bought for a few coins.
And sometimes it arrives the moment you stop feeding pain… and start feeding peace.
According to Harvard Health, emotional eating often soothes in the moment, but real healing begins when we start noticing our emotional cues — the inner signals that tell us what we actually need
(https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/struggling-with-emotional-eating).
It’s not about willpower. It’s about awareness, compassion, and learning new ways to care for ourselves that don’t require a plate.
If You’ve Ever Fed Pain Instead of Hunger
If you’ve ever reached for food to soothe what hurt inside you, please know this:
Compassion weighs nothing.
And yet it fills you completely.
Sometimes love begins with a cookie.
But freedom begins the moment you no longer need one.
If you’re ready to explore that freedom gently, you can begin here:
A Note About Evie’s Resilience
If you’re beginning to explore your relationship with food, you may find comfort in my free e-book, Evie’s Resilience. In the book, I share more of the inner journey I only touched on here — the part where healing stopped being about control and started being about listening. During that long season of recovery, I discovered Autogenic Training and learned how to calm my body from the inside out. That practice opened the door to everything that came later: loosening shame’s grip, understanding cravings with compassion, and rebuilding trust with my body instead of fighting it.
The book weaves my story together with the gentle tools I now use with clients — the same tools that help women soften old patterns, reconnect with their inner cues, and find peace with food without punishment or fear.
Evie’s Resilience is a companion for anyone ready to stop battling themselves and begin healing with tenderness instead of discipline.
Download your free copy here:
👉 https://coacheviesullivan.com/evies-resilience/