I wish I could stop binge eating, but it isn't that easy. Most people who overeat don't do it because they think it's fun; it's to find comfort or fill some sort of void. Cookies, potato chips, and cinnamon rolls taste really good. Sometimes good enough to forget your problems for a little bit.

It all started at my grandma's house. She flopped the plate down in front of my downward-turning, disappointed eyes. It sat between my hands, each grabbing the respective silverware in a tight fist. My six-year-old, diva self plugged her nose and proceeded to state that the smell was "not something I wanted to be handling at that moment." My grandmother laughed and told me that my performance wasn't going to help me finish the fat filet of haddock in front of me.

I've always been a stubborn, hard-headed individual. I wouldn't let anybody tell me that I wasn't going to win American Idol, and I always had a lot to say about everything. It was my way or the highway; except for in my Abuela's house. This woman was tough; if she put her foot down, you'd best bet it'd be staying put.

My mom would drop me off in a small town in the mountains of Madrid each summer to stay with my grandparents while she led a study abroad program for Michigan State University in the north of Spain. When my mom would go up north, it was me, my tyrant grandmother, my adorable little grandfather, and often my older cousin (who I got into a ton of mischief with, but those stories are for another day).

Although I call my grandmother a tyrant, I love her. She has a good heart (deep down), but a very weird way of showing it. It was always an interesting time when I stayed with her for a few months. They say that heat induces anger, and, boy, that's the last addition that her attitude needed.

Early in that summer, my grandparents, my cousin, and I were eating dinner in the kitchen, like any other typical evening. There were boiled green beans (ew), boiled potatoes (thank you, Jesus, for putting potatoes on this earth and into this woman's kitchen), and thick filets of whatever fish was on sale that day (another solid ew) on the menu. I shoved the green beans and the fish down my throat as quickly as I could so that I could proceed to enjoy the potato (the only decent shred of hope). Little did I know, that behavior would change my life.

One thing that you should know about Spanish fish dispatching is that they give you the whole freaking fish. No cleaning, no cutting; nothing. You take the entirety of the dead swimmer and clean it up at your own liberty. In theory, this is all fine and good. Throw in a 70-something-year-old lady with a recently performed cataract eye surgery, and the compulsive need to be right, and you've got yourself a bit of an issue.

My cousin had a similar approach with the fast eating. We were both chubby, and not so much into the meals that formerly swam in the ocean. Suddenly, that night, he started aggressively coughing, and what do you know? He got a bone from the fish lodged in his throat. It was stuck, and he was starting to flip out (naturally), so my grandfather took one for the team and stuck his finger down my cousin's throat until he got the bone out.

From that day forward, I couldn't swallow a bite of fish. Trying to would make me gag, but my grandmother firmly stood by the assertion that this was all part of the whole drama queen attitude we talked about earlier. She wasn't entirely wrong, but I can tell you from the bottom of my heart that I actually felt sick just thinking about eating the gosh dang fish.

No matter how much I begged her to let me eat something else, Abuela insisted that I finish my meal like the polite little girl that I was raised to be. My ever so sweet grandfather, bless his soul, would take forkfuls of the little swimmers off of my plate whenever my grandma wasn't looking. My stubborn butt refused to eat the fish, so, after an average of half an hour of fighting, she'd let me go hungry.

To this day, you won't ever see me order any sort of fish, except if it's made by Pepperidge Farm and in the form of a cracker. I'm an adult, but the six-year-old me in the depths of my subconscious is still epically paranoid about the whole "I'm gonna choke on a bone," thing.

It caught up to me, though, the hunger, and then it was time to go home to my parents in the USA. My mom was always known as the mom with the best snacks among my friends, and it held especially true when we got back and I could finally eat things that didn't scare me. It ended up becoming a quick recipe for disaster though, because my parents never restrained me from eating. They never deprived me of food or played the games with me that my grandmother did. I am endlessly thankful for this.

I felt saved. I wasn't hungry anymore. If you know me or anybody in my family, you know that we are not pleasant when we are hungry. The hanger is so real. So, when I finally found the chance to make myself happy again, I did. The problem became that I slowly but surely began to turn to food for happiness, and the fact that there were no more limits made my six-year-old mind go crazy. I thought that the more food I could get into me, the higher amount of happiness I would feel. This feeling, dangerously enough, has never fully gone away for me.

I overeat because, in my mind, that's how I save myself. I went through a phase in middle school when I would only eat one meal a day: dinner. I'd feed the piece of toast my mom would make me each morning to the birds on my walk from my house to the bus stop. At school, I would spend lunch time in the library reading books and doing homework. I wanted to be thin (a whole other big issue that I dealt with, like most other pre-teen girls). I wanted to look like the girls that were popular at school. I wanted to look like the girls that I thought boys liked. This phase was on and off through middle school and the first half of high school I thankfully snapped out of this phase, because the hanger was so real. I lost some weight, so I got what I wanted, but I was unhappy and mean because I was hungry.

I've never eaten super healthy. I did the cabbage soup diet a lot in middle school, and that ruined the taste of a lot of vegetables for me. My mom cooks relatively healthy foods at home, but there's also always chocolate and sweets laying around the house. I always seem to find my way to them when I'm sad. When I moved to college, at first I tried so hard to eat healthy. I often did eat salads at the dining hall, but on my bad days I went straight to the waffle fries and the cookies. Freshman 15 was so real, yo.

Overeating, for me, is a psychological thing. I cannot even begin to describe to you the out of control feeling that I get when I'm not hungry anymore, but I see appetizing food in front of me. I have to eat it all, even if I try to tell myself not to. I've gone to a nutritionist and a counselor to help me stop. It is a work in progress. But food is my drug, my addiction. You wouldn't tell an alcoholic to just stop drinking, you'd tell them to go to rehab so they could get over their addiction correctly so that they are unlikely to fall into the spiral again.

I'm doing what I can to stop, and to find new ways of making myself feel better on bad days. But I'm sick and tired of people saying "it's so easy to avoid junk food and eat healthy." While that may be the case for you, it isn't for me. I struggle with this, just like you may struggle with something else that I could be great at. Please don't judge my character based off of my eating habits. I'm a hardworking hustler who is empowered and confident, but you wouldn't get that from my eating habits.