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I now know why I gained more than 30 pounds in my early 20s: I was lonely. I had left my beloved alma mater upstate for graduate school and a job in the Upper Midwest. I knew no one and felt like a fish out of water. 现在我知道，在自己20岁出头时，为什么会猛增了30多磅体重了：我当时太孤独了。我告别了北方我深爱着的母校，来到美国上中西部边读研究生边工作。在那儿我举目无亲，感觉像是一条离开水的鱼。 I filled my lonely nights and days with — you guessed it — food. Anything I could get my hands on, especially candy, cookies and ice cream. Food filled the hole in my soul, at least temporarily. 在许多个黑夜和白天，我用吃东西来填充寂寞——估计你猜也猜得到。任何触手可及的东西我都会吃，尤其是糖果、曲奇和冰激淋。食物填满了我灵魂的空洞，至少暂时如此。 No matter how hard I tried, I could not rein in my out-of-control eating until I returned to New York and my family, and began dating my future husband. 不管我怎样努力，都没法摆脱业已失控的暴食，直到我回到纽约，回到家人身边，开始跟我未来的丈夫约会，这一切才停止。 Loneliness, says John T. Cacioppo, an award-winning psychologist at the University of Chicago, undermines people’s ability to self-regulate. In one experiment he cites, participants made to feel socially disconnected ate many more cookies than those made to feel socially accepted. In a real-life study of middle-aged and older adults in the Chicago area, Dr. Cacioppo and colleagues found that those who scored high on the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale, a widely used psychological assessment, ate substantially more fatty foods than those who scored low. “Is it any wonder that we turn to ice cream or other fatty foods when we’re sitting at home feeling all alone in the world?” Dr. Cacioppo said in his well-documented book, “Loneliness, ” written with William Patrick. “We want to soothe the pain we feel by mainlining sugar and fat content to the pleasure centers of the brain, and absent of self-control, we go right at it.” | 
