Ater a long stressful day at the office, all you want to do is relax. Unfortunately, as soon as your get home, you have to make dinner. On top of that, your children are acting up, your husband is hungry and impatient, and it seems you have about a million things to do before you have a moment to yourself. With the mounting stress and anxiety, your emotions take over, and with little ways to cope or escape, you have one option to make yourself feel better: you eat.
Often times, when people are stressed and don’t feel capable of handling what life throws at them, they cope through emotional eating. Whether it’s a bag of salty, crispy chips or a few scoops of creamy and delicious ice cream, everyone has a food that seemingly makes the stress float away.
And while it seems like a solution, it may be more of a problem than a panacea.
If you suffer from emotional eating, you’re definitely not alone. Using food as a means of coping with stress and flaring emotions is all too common. And while it may feel good in the moment, it is also often detrimental to yourself, becoming a serious hindrance to maintaining a healthy weight or achieving weight loss. And unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this eating issue.

What You Should Know
At first, emotional eating works. Like a drug, eating certain sugary, salty, or fatty foods triggers certain chemicals in your body and brain that give you a temporary rush or high. But since these foods are cheap fuel for our bodies, our system digests them too quickly, sending our blood sugar levels and emotions on an ever-fluctuating roller coaster.
Not only can emotional eating cause you serious unwanted weight gain, but it can lead to a number of other issues, such as anxiety, high cholesterol, diabetes, and heart disease.

Finding a Way Out Through Weight Loss Programs
Fortunately, you are not stuck in your suffering. Finding a healthy relationship with food is the first step. Seeking out weight loss clinics that specialize in medical weight loss will help you gain back a better relationship with food. While food can certainly be delicious and inevitably has cultural and emotional ties, it is, at a fundamental level, a means of nourishment. Medical weight loss programs understand this, and through comprehensive counseling, diet planning and accountability check-ins, you are able to once more gain control of your life and find healthier ways to cope.
Questions about emotional eating and weight loss programs? Leave your thoughts below.