What "all in your head" really means

Many of you are thinking "but I didn't get kidnapped at age 4 and held captive for years without seeing the light of day" or "my parents were good people that fed me and read me bedtime stories" or "I don't hide in layers of fat to hide my guilt and frustrations".  All in your mind is not always about eating away the bad nor is it that your problem is just all in your mind and you are crazy insane.  My hubby has never once found me passed out in the closet with chocolate donuts smash to my face.  I would have loved for the problem to be so easy to recognize.   However, I did emotional eat that is for dang sure.  Through life's challenges and baby making weight was added and added and added.   Our bodies are built with an amazing way of keeping our bodies regular but little by little our "regular" really isn't what it should be.  Our froggies are boiled and we didn't even break a sweat.  Whether easily seen emotional eating got us there or not, it will take an emotional change to get us back.   We are smart creatures and can manually change our behavior and our thinking but to have real long term change we need those things to become automatic.  That is the real hill to climb.
The last few months I have really struggled with life.  I was down a lot and my definitions of things seem to always be in question, mostly by me.  All of the sudden I have been so unsure of myself.  Then on a particular hard day it hit me - the old me would have made chocolate chip cookies today.  Again, it wasn't like I would binge in a sort of shooting up kind of way but making and eating delicious warm chocolate chip cookies would have taken my mind away from the problem just long enough to see that life was not ending.  It was a huge moment for me to realize both that I have changed from manual to automatic and that I haven't found the right thing to replace that need for a distraction in my life yet.  I still eat chocolate chip cookies (what, you think I am crazy?) but the difference in my mindset makes all the difference on the scale.