We use food to self-soothe. People who have struggled with it, and the professionals who treat it, call it by many different names; compulsive overeating, emotional eating, and food addiction. No matter what it's called, people use food because food works!

If you learn the secrets to stop emotional eating, losing weight becomes simple, clear and easy. If we don't learn how to handle our emotions and consequently our eating properly, we will still carry extra weight, even if we're eating all the 'right' foods and exercising ourselves silly!

Most of us have an emotional connection to food. This connection is normal and completely natural. Advertisers and restaurants tell us to 'super-size it', 'get your money's worth', ’all-you-can eat', ’buy the combo to get your full value'. In the next moment we see messages everywhere that tell us we must be a size 0 and

Run around in bikinis & halter tops! We’re told to eat more but weigh less! How crazy is that? Unfortunately this set up a cycle of guilt: we feel guilty when we eat too many carbs, too few carbs, too much fat, too little fat, too much sugar, too much fruit, not enough fruit.

This guilt then snowballs and feeds on itself. The result is weight gain, misery and self-hatred. Emotional eaters-- more often female - eat more sweet, fatty, and thus energy-dense foods under stress.

Both eating and thinking about eating work as distractions from uncomfortable feelings. a carbohydrate-rich/protein-poor diet allows more tryptophan -- a mood regulating amino acid -- into the brain. And as we've all learned after a big meal, a serving of tryptophan-laced pizza puts us in a sleepy mood -- a sure cure for combating stress.

For example...You're feeling bored. Suddenly you find yourself thinking about the ice cream in the freezer. As soon as you start to think about the ice cream, you are no longer focused on feeling bored.

How to tell if you are an emotional eater?
There are several differences between emotional hunger and physical hunger.
1. Emotional hunger comes on suddenly; physical hunger occurs gradually.
2. When you are eating to fill a void that isn't related to an empty stomach, you crave a specific food, such as pizza or ice cream, and only that food will meet your need. When you eat because you are actually hungry, you're open to options.
3. Emotional hunger feels like it needs to be satisfied instantly with the food you crave; physical hunger can wait.
4. Even when you are full, if you're eating to satisfy an emotional need, you're more likely to keep eating. When you're eating because you're hungry, you're more likely to stop when you're full.
5. Emotional eating can leave behind feelings of guilt; eating when you are physically hungry does not.

Comfort Foods
When emotional hunger strikes, one of its distinguishing characteristics is that you're focused on a particular food, which is likely a comfort food.

Ice cream is first on the comfort food list. After ice cream, comfort foods break down by sex: For women it's chocolate and cookies; for men it's pizza, rice, bread and meat.

And what you reach for when eating to satisfy an emotion depends on the emotion. According to an article by Wansink, published in the July 2000 American Demographics, "The type of comfort foods a person is drawn toward varies depending on their mood. People in happy moods tended to prefer ... foods such as pizza or steak (32%). Sad people reached for ice cream and cookies 39% of the time, and 36% of bored people opened up a bag of potato chips."

Managing Emotional Eating
Oftentimes when a child is sad, his mother or grandma cheers him up with a sweet treat. This behaviour gets reinforced year after year until we are practicing the same behaviour as adults. We never learned how to deal with the sad feeling because we always pushed it away with a sweet treat. Weight loss is a tough process, and constantly taking breaks will never, ever produce the results you say you want. Grandma is not cut out to be a diet guru, and she will have to go. Take an honest look! Do you inject your dieting process with periodic “grandma breaks?” Don't you deserve a break at the end of a long day at work? How about when you feel lonely or depressed? Just before your period? Do you fall prey to your desire for the easy way and avoid the parts of the diet that are difficult?

Learning how to deal with feelings without food is a new skill many of us need to learn. When grandma shows up, you have to say, “Get out of the way you seductive fat-enabler, and don’t come back. I am serious about controlling my weight, and I have no place for you in my life.”

Here are a few tips to help you deal with emotional eating:
• Recognize emotional eating and learn what triggers this behavior in you.
• Try taking a walk, calling a friend, playing cards, cleaning your room, doing laundry, or something productive to take your mind off the craving -- even taking a nap.
• When you do get the urge to eat when you're not hungry, find a comfort food that's healthy instead of junk food. Comfort foods don't need to be unhealthy.
• For some, leaving comfort foods behind when they're dieting can be emotionally difficult. The key is moderation, not elimination. Divide comfort foods into smaller portions. For instance, if you have a large bag of chips, divide it into smaller containers or baggies and the temptation to eat more than one serving can be avoided.
• When it comes to comfort foods that aren't always healthy, like fattening desserts. Your memory of a food peaks after about four bites, so if you only have those bites, a week later you'll recall it as just a good experience than if you polished off the whole thing. So have a few bites of cheesecake, then call it quits, and you'll get equal the pleasure with lower cost.

Remember that emotional eating is something that most people do when they're bored, happy, or sad. It might be a bag of chips or a steak, but whatever the food choice, the key is to learn how to control it.

Does all this nasty talk about grandma make you nervous? I hope so! Super size French fries loaded with fat and six hundred calories must go. It takes two hours on the bicycle to burn 600 calories. I also hope it scares the heck out of grandma, because that lady has to take a hike so that you can get on with the grown-up business of serious weight control.