To end emotional eating is a matter of knowing how to conquer your relationship with emotions. Maybe emotional eating could be called a disorder. Eating emotional, however, is actually a compensation for the inability to recognize that eating is a means of handling both comfortable and uncomfortable emotions.

For instance, in all your years of education, have you ever had a course or training in how to handle emotions? Even when this question is asked of health care professionals, only a small percentage have had any training in handling emotions. Little wonder then that the general populace has little guidance in dealing with emotions. If fact if you think about all the things you've been told about emotions, you'll find that you've been encouraged to ignore many emotions--pretend that you don't have them. Or you've been told that you shouldn't have many emotions.

For instance:

Don't be angry because your blood pressure will go up. Or don't be angry because you'll say something you don't mean. Or, don't be angry because you'll look foolish.

Then there's happiness. Don't be too happy because you'll set yourself up for the big let down. Don't be too happy because there are so many others in the world with so much less than you.

You'll find similar reasoning for every emotion--confusion, frustration, upset, excitement...

Unfortunately, we've become a nation--actually a world of emotional cripples. We try to explain emotions by understanding the various brain centers and functions. But mostly all we know is that the emotional brain--the limbic brain--was developed before the rational intellectual reticular brain.

Gurus such as Tony Robbins in his Get the Edge Program devoted an entire cd on emotions. He has a 10-step analysis of any particular emotion. Yes, looking at emotions can be like looking at the purpose of mankind - it can be awesome, or it can just be! The emotion process resembles dominos knocking over other dominos. Something does or doesn't work as expected and bang - there is an emotion, and bang - there is what we do about the emotion.

Along the way, we often want to be more or less expressive of emotions, control or handle them. The interesting thing is that there's no choice in this model. Our behavior is simply a product of our learned perceptions.

Add to this the fact that since we were infants we've learned to associate food with many different emotions --particularly happiness and upset.

Truth is that we don't allow ourselves to feel most emotions. We dilute them or avoid them by using different substances--alcohol, nicotine, and of course food.

So what is the disorder? Eating emotional is merely a symptom of our inability to embrace emotion as opposed to diluting them with food.

A progressive approach to end emotional eating involves asking important questions "What is missing here? Why are you not getting the results you've been promised?" It is clearly insane to keep dieting when the results are so poor. It's more important to gain a grasp on the emotional aspects of the disorder--eating emotional than it is to read the scale. Besides focusing on the scale doesn't empower you to be a better more enlightened person, whereas learning how to end emotional eating empowers you in all aspects of your life. If you're a sales person, you'll be a better sales person. If you're an assembly line worker, you'll be a better assembly line worker; a mother, a better mother... Overall, you'll build self worth and find that what you really want to eat is far more nutritious and less in quantity than you ever before imagined possible.