It's difficult for people who struggle with emotional eating to make real progress toward weight loss goals. As soon as they feel they are on a roll and the pounds are melting off, something happens that sends them into eating overdrive. They find food simply irresistible and often would rather drown their emotions in a pint of ice cream than deal with the real issues.

Does this sound familiar? If so, then chances are you know all about the weight loss setbacks that can come from emotional eating!

For someone who suffers from emotional eating, food becomes more than just a way to nourish the body. Food becomes a hobby, best friend, or even a form of stress relief.

Food as a Hobby

The real problem for someone who uses food as a hobby or an enjoyable past time is boredom or perhaps dissatisfaction with life. Rather than plugging into activities that are enjoyable and rewarding, you spend your free time enjoying your patterns of emotional eating.

In many cases, someone who is using food to mask boredom will not even consciously recognize that they are bored or discontent. They may just eat automatically at particular times of the day as a habit. When they finally stop and try to control the behavior they realize that boredom and unhappiness overwhelms them to the point it is almost unbearable.

In order to overcome using food to cure boredom, make a list of things you can do other than eat. If there are particular times of the day or week that you find yourself driven to eat, schedule other activities into those times and replace the habit with a new hobby.

Food as a Best Friend

Most people who are locked into patterns of emotional eating are using food as a best friend. Your best friend is where you turn with your problems, speak your mind openly, and receive comfort, love, and validation. Your best friend is your safe place to rest your head and be yourself. For many people that best friend has become food.

There are a wide variety of deep emotions which can be suppressed by eating! Many people who find refuge in food do not even recognize what is literally eating them until they begin their weight loss journey and try to stop the emotional eating patterns. Without that comfort they literally feel themselves falling apart emotionally.

Food as Stress Relief

For someone who has a very stressful daily life, eating could be the one enjoyable thing that they get to look forward to every single day. Meals, snacks, and hidden treats become sources of pleasure that relieve some of the stress.

In order to turn this type of emotional eating around you will need to find alternative measures of stress relief.

A Note on Binging

If you find your emotional eating patterns include periods of eating whatever you can find as quickly as possible or you tend to eat huge amounts of food without even realizing what you have done, then you are doing what is called binge eating. There are often deep emotions hiding beneath this type of behavior and you will need to face them in order to achieve your weight loss goals successfully.

If you find that you are binging uncontrollably or feel that you have emotional eating patterns you would love to break, consider taking up journaling. Rather than eating through your feelings try to write them out and face them head on.