Ever find yourself halfway through a bag of chips at night and think, "What the hell am I doing? I SWORE I was done with this!" And then you keep eating anyway?

I get it. For years, I blamed myself for not having enough "willpower" to stick to my diet. Turns out I was solving the wrong problem.

Here's what I know after losing 100 pounds and keeping it off for over 15 years. If you're eating when you're not hungry, food isn't your problem.

And those diets that made you feel like a failure for "cheating"? They failed YOU by never helping you figure out why you were reaching for the food in the first place.

In today's episode, "Why Emotional Eating Feels So Hard to Break," I'm revealing:

• The surprising reason you get stuck in the cycle of overeating
• The hidden link between being "good" all day and secret eating at night
• The most powerful first step to break free from emotional eating

Most weightloss programs have it backward. They focus on the food instead of figuring out what the food is doing for you. That cookie isn't the enemy. It's what happens before – and after – you eat it that keeps you stuck.

Food isn't failing you. Your emotions aren't failing you. And YOU are definitely not failing. You just haven't been taught how to handle life without using food... yet.

Hello everybody. Welcome back. So a few episodes ago I was talking about the three types of eating. We talked about mindless eating, habit eating and emotional eating. And it was in the podcast where we were talking about why weight loss feels so hard and why it's not your fault. Well, since then I've gotten a butt ton of questions about emotional eating. So I thought we would kind of dive a little deeper into emotional eating today so that you can finally start getting some help for this and more importantly, so you can quit blaming yourself for why most diets have failed you in the past. And I will say this until I'm blue in the face. And please, please, please hear me when I say this. If your diets have not been helping you with your emotional eating, those diets failed, you stop saying you failed. 

You are not the broken one here. The diets are broken when they are only taking away your favorite foods, when they are just relying on exercise, when they are having you fast, when they have you eating certain amount of calories. If they're not addressing why we overeat to begin with, they're failing you. So please, I would beg you right now to say out loud, this is not my fault and I know I need you to hear that because there are answers for you. But if you keep taking the blame that is not yours, you will never be able to lose your weight. You'll be so afraid of anything that's going to help you with your weight loss. So not my fault. So when I ask you this, have you ever found yourself halfway through a bag of chips and suddenly you're thinking, what the hell? 

Why am I even eating this? I said I was going to lose weight. I swore to the heavens this was the time. Or maybe you catch yourself sitting on the couch with ice cream after a long day and you know you're not hungry, but you also don't give a damn that you said you were going to lose weight. That right there is the signal of emotional eating, and that's what we're going to talk about today because it's why you are stuck and you cannot lose weight. And I also want to tell you what you can start doing about it. I have told this story for years and years and years, but I'm going to tell it again. When I weighed two 50 was convinced that overeating or that food was my problem, I did not know that my problem was actually emotional overeating. I would always say things like, if I could just stop snacking, if you could just stick to your diet, the weight would come off. 

But here's what I learned. The food, the eating, the calories were never my problem. I'm smart and you're smart too. My problem was is food was what I used in order to get through life. It is what I used to feel better. So back when I weighed two 50, I was a stay at home mom. I was stuck in this constant loop of being stressed out all day long, never feeling like I was good enough. I was guilty. I felt guilty because I didn't just love every fucking minute of wiping asses and having nobody to talk to. And I literally just felt like I was feeling at everything. I even felt like I was failing in my marriage. I remember sitting there thinking, if I don't get my shit together, Chris is going to leave me. And we weren't even arguing. And the man told me all the time how much she loved me. 

And yet I can remember being paranoid that I was going to lose my husband because I couldn't get my shit together because I couldn't lose weight. So every single night when Chris would take Logan upstairs to put him to bed, I would sit down with the world's biggest ass bowl of ice cream. And I didn't eat it because I really loved the ice cream. I was eating it because for a few minutes each day I was disconnected from the misery of my life. Now that's a classic sign of emotional eating, and I know not all of you or probably in the throes of deter that I was back in the day, but many of us are emotionally eating as a way to deal with stress, boredom. We don't love our lives. It's like I'm grateful for it, but I'm not excited by it. When we retire, we're eating because we don't feel like we have purpose. 

When our kids leave the nest, we are left with, I don't even know what to do with myself. We get overwhelmed. Many of us are lonely. There are so many reasons why we use food to deal with our feelings. So emotional eating at its heart isn't about being hungry. Sometimes you might be hungry and emotionally eating, but most of the time if you're checking in, you're not physically hungry, but you're emotionally starved for something in that moment. And here's the thing, emotional eating works, at least for a little bit. Every time I was stressed out, if I ate some chips, I got a second of peace when I was bored as fuck watching Logan want to play trains for the 4000th time cookies helped pass the time when I felt like crap about myself. Ice cream was sitting there not judging me like my shitty ass Judge Judy brain. 

The problem though with emotional eating is it provides temporary relief, but it doesn't solve problems. It just gets you through a moment. And then you've got the problems staring you in the face along with usually a side of guilt, disappointment, anger, and frustration at yourself. Because as soon as the food's gone, the stress, the boredom, the guilt, they all come flying back in. And then you feel even worse because you overate too. And that's why we get stuck in emotional eating. It's because we're eating to get out of a terrible emotion or to create a positive one. Once we eat and feel the relief, we have now created a host of new terrible emotions and we get stuck. So just remember when we are emotionally eating, we're not solving anything, we're usually just layering guilt and frustration on top of the emotions we're already dealing with. 

Now, emotional eating, it shows up differently for everyone. For some people it's stress eating after a hard day, like you come home and you are immediately eating chips and cookies until it's time to eat dinner. So I call this transition eating. This is where one stressful part of my day is ended. The next stressful part of my day is just beginning. This is very common in women who either you work all day and you come home and you got to take care of kids at night. You work all day, you come home, your retired husband sitting there like patting his little feet, just waiting like a golden retriever for all of your attention. Transition eating is tough. It's just hard for all of us. And it's we eat in that transition time in order to basically get the break that we need and that we're not giving ourselves. 

Now for other people, we do a lot of boredom eating. We're snacking while we're scrolling our phones. We're eating when we're just not hungry, but we're not entertained. And then some of us are doing the late night eating. This is where you've had a long day. Your house is finally quiet. You got everybody finally tucked away in their little beds and you find yourself standing in front of the fridge wanting something to feel anything other than exhaustion. A lot of people will eat at night as a way to give themselves a break. They don't get one all day or they eat at night because they're so ashamed to eat the foods. They're really good about holding it together with healthy foods when they're in front of people, but then they secret eat at night as a way to be a little naughty. This is particularly for people who are people pleasers and for people who feel like they're always trying to appear as if they have it all together, or a lot of perfectionists do that, they eat these foods as a way to just feel like, oh, finally I get to be like everybody else. 

I get to break some rules. I get to just, I don't have to be so tight and bound up like I am all day. So if any of that sounds familiar, you are not alone. And there are actually nine types of emotional eating. But here's what you need to know. Emotional eating is never about the food. It's always about what the food does for you. So the ice cream is not the problem. Nachos are not the problem. Candy is not the problem. Chips are not the problem. Diets convince you that the food is the problem. You're addicted to this. It's got so much power over you. I agree that highly processed, highly sugared up foods give you a quick reward. They're very effective in that. But at the heart of it, they are not the problem. We have had sugar for thousands of years in this world. 

If sugar was the problem, it would've been the problem for a long time. Granted, we have more access to it now, but at the heart of it is we're eating it because it's what the food is doing for you. So when you are emotionally eating, you are avoiding feelings that you do not want to feel or you are creating feelings you wish you had. And if you've been stuck in emotional eating for years, it is no wonder that you feel out of control around some of your favorite foods. Emotional eating is sneaky and it works just until it doesn't. So here's what I want you to start doing. We got to talk about what do we do about this? How do you even start breaking the cycle? Well, the very first step in breaking the overeating cycle is you got to get aware that you do it. 

So many people, you will listen to this podcast and be like, oh shit, I do that. Oh my God, I've been blaming foods for a long time. Maybe this is emotional. The next time you find yourself reaching for any kind of food and you know are not hungry, I want you to ask yourself, do I just want to feel better right now? Is there something wrong? Because if I'm not actually hungry, I must be eating for some reason. Maybe I don't want to miss out and feel isolated. Maybe I'm bored, maybe I'm lonely, whatever it is. And at first, you may not know that answer, and that's okay. You do not want to judge yourself, and you don't want to try to stop the eating immediately in the beginning, in the very beginning, the most powerful step that you can do is to notice that you're doing it and to acknowledge why you're doing it. 

And I promise you, you do not need to judge yourself for your reasons why. Every woman, I have coached tens of thousands of women at this point, over 1 million people have used my free course. I have 50 plus million downloads of this podcast. I know you are not alone in this. Any reason why you are eating is fucking normal and shared by thousands of other women. So when I started noticing the reasons why I was eating, some guilt came in. I remember thinking, why am I eating ice cream every fucking night when I know I'm not hungry? And I realized it was because I didn't like my life. I didn't like taking care of my kid. And at first, I felt so guilty for that. I was like, oh my God, Corinne, there are so many women who can't have children. Oh my God, Corinne, you're so lucky. 

You're a stay at home mom. Your mother never got these opportunities she would've killed to be able to stay home with you. And I realized if I sit here and guilt myself over my reasons, instead of being proud of myself for being honest, loving myself, for admitting the truth, I was just setting myself up to eat again. So one of the things is don't judge yourself for what you find. So when I started really paying attention to my own eating, I realized 90% of the time that I was overeating, I wasn't hungry. Sometimes I was just mindlessly grabbing some food. Sometimes I was just doing something. But most of the time I was stressed out, I was overwhelmed, I was feeling guilty, or I was just tired as fuck. And once I saw that, I then started asking myself a new question. If food is not going to be the answer in this moment, what do I really need right now? 

Now let me be clear. You are not going to fix all this overnight. Sometimes our deepest needs take weeks and months to finally meet them so that we don't have to meet them with food. But I want you to think about this. I don't care if it takes weeks or months. If you finally start meeting your deepest needs, you get a better life. You don't just get weight loss, you don't just get your triggers taken away. You don't just get healthier, you get a better life because you're finally addressing the problem in the room. Now, the other thing that I want to say is that emotional eating is also a habit. And like any habit, it does take time. But just pausing long enough to ask yourself, if food's not the answer, what do I actually need right now? This is a huge first step. 

So I know emotional eating is going to feel hard to stop, and it's going to sound hard to stop. And I know emotional eating is making you feel stuck and broken or somehow out of control in your life. But here's what I want you to hear. You are not broken. Nothing is wrong with you. Emotional eating isn't your fault. It isn't your flaw. It isn't something that is broken within you. Most women were never taught how to deal with their emotions in a way that doesn't involve food. And once you start understanding what's really going on within you, you can start learning how to change all of that. It is never too late to figure this out. And when you figure out why you're eating, you're not just solving the overeating, you're not going to just solve weight loss. You are going to solve the root cause of why you've been feeling the way you have felt for so long and feel better. So here's what I want you to do this week. I want you to pay attention to what's going on when you're eating. The next time you reach for food and you're not hungry. I want you to ask yourself, am I just wanting to feel better? And if so, why? If food's not going to be my answer, what could be? That one small moment of awareness is the first step to taking back control over your life and your food. Y'all have an amazing week, and I'll talk to you soon.