what i do when i'm sad

this is the response to a question posed to me.  it is one of a series of questions i'll be answering here. 

when i'm sad i do the obvious...eat,  i mean cry.  whenever i am unhappy i eat.  i think its how i cope with things. 
happy is an emotion i can handle.  Sad, not so much .  its easy to say sad makes you feel horrible but sad is somehthing i have a hard time dealing with.  when i was younger sadness was handled with food.  the sad parts of my life i can associate with food.  and there was quite a bit of sadness in my childhood.  it took longer for me to deal with my sadness than others.  i don't remember much from when my grandpa died.  i was 8 years old and it was the weekend after my first communion.  all i remember is everyone came in from ourt of town and we ate out every meal for a while after that.  then around that same time my cousin got sick.  and we started spending every other weekend in wast virginia to spend time with im.  and that was food.  the thing i remember most clearly was the food: colessessanos (a pizza place there that has the BEST pizza and pepperoni roles), Murial's (a mish mosh restauraunt), and whatever Denise (their neighbor) felt like making for us.  when tim died, i remember that vividly, the casket, the flowers, the  cemetary.  i can still tell you who catered it and what i ate.  after that happpiness came for a while and i didn't eat as much.  we had more of a schedule.  tuesdays we ate out lunch and dinner.  tuesdays are my dad's day off and we would spend them with my grandma.  when my grandma died we held the reception after the funeral at a restaurant.  everyone ordered exactly what they wanted.  all 150 guests. 
food in my mind satisfies sadness.  my eating normalized again until i started dating my exboyfriend.  i don't think i was ever truly happy with him.  but the beginning of my relationship food was fine.  i never had butterflies which was rare for me.  it started with ice cream.  i would eat ice cream when he made me upset.  then i would eat two dinners.  then it escalated.  i stopped seeing my friends.  i ate more.  i stopped seeing my family except for those whom i lived with.  i ate even more.  i stopped caring about what i looked like.  and ate.  and ate. and ate.  until i was almost 200 pounds heavier.  and he was unhappy and i was unhappy. and being verbally abused.  the more abused i got the more i ate.  the more he told me i was fat the more i ate to become fat.  the more i didn't deserve friends the less i saw my friends and the more i ate.  you get the pattern.  i ate. 
i now know that eating is not an emotion.  sadness is an emotion.  i cry now.  i feel sadness.  i try to feel sadness.  let me correct myself.  i'm working on feeling my emotions.  its hard but i'm working on it.  right now i know that i have a problem and that i alone can not fix it.  i need my god to help me.  i need help big time.  the life i was living was killing me.  slowly but surely.  more than tthe anorexia was killing me back in the day.