Address Emotional Eating and Lose Weight

I know this may sound cliche (and maybe just too easy) but one thing I have always suggested for emotional eaters is to journal feelings. I suggest it because those who do it are much more successful  mastering their emotional eating! Negative feelings frequently occur because specific needs are not  being appropriately met. By making this self-realization a person can gain more control over any kind of emotional eating (stress, frustration, boredom, anger, etc.)

When you truly understand what you are feeling through writing  you might also also note any patterns that might occur. For example do you find you always eat when you are overwhelmed and stressed? How can you get your needs met better or how can you diffuse the stress in an appropriate way? Do you find that you always eat in specific situations with certain people? By exploring these things in a food diary and/or along with your feelings you can figure things out and take some steps to actively change your eating behaviors.

For more direction with emotional eating and writing you might try reading the Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size by Julia Cameron. She's got some  inspiring insights of what others have discovered and some specific writing techniques which ultimately helped them overcome emotional eating.

The bottom line is if you self-sabotage your dieting efforts because of any kind of emotional eating you need to address the feeling behind the eating regardless of how you find the correlation.