I have been struggling with emotional eating/binge eating for 2 years now. I always was an emotional eater as a child, but I never considered it a problem. Food just made me happy and thats all I knew. I do exersise so I am not obese, but am overweight. I have been OBSESSED with losing weight for the past 2 years since I recignized I had an eating problem. I want to lose 40 pounds by august and I have been trying to lose weight forever and ALWAYS fail. I just cannot take it anymore. All I think about is trying to lose weight but I cannot break my emotional eating cycle. I will never be hppy until I lose this weight. How do you maintain willpower to NOT eat a lot? I have to lose weight faster than most people because if I lose it too slow I will give up and binge. One of the biggest reasons I found that I emotionally eat is when I see few to no results after dieting and then I eat. So i need to lose weight fast. It keeps me motivated once I see how I lost and then I will continue dieting. I don't want food to control my life anymore. Thats the difference between emotional binge eaters and anorexics. In anorexics they control the food. In emotional eaters the food controls them.

I see how I used to be when I read your story. I too was and still am an emotional eater. I struggled to lose 20-30 pounds for about 7 years. I suffered from Binge eating that whole time too. I am 26 now. I finally did lose those 20 pounds and I can tell you that yes, I am glad that I finally did it but Losing weight will not Make you happy, or will it make your problems go away.
What I did to finally lose weight is love myself how I was. I quit dieting, quit the extreme exerciing and decided that I am good enough how I am and God made me this way and maybe this is how I am sapposed to be. I ate what I wanted when I wanted it. After a while I quit being so obsessed with food- because when you drastically restrict your food intake everyone becomes obsessed with food. And then I started eating like everyone else and the pounds just came off. The one thing that I do because it makes me feel good is that I quit eating after 630pm. That way I go to bed with an empty stomach and sleep better and wake up ready for breakfast! I hope that you can learn to love yourself how you are.

Hey
I just wanted to clarify something that you said earlier about the anorexics controling the food and bingers having the food control them. This could not be more untrue. I have been anorexic for 6 years and i can tell you that even though it may seem that anorexics are "in control" of the food they eat they are far from it. when you are in a restrictive mode everything is about what you eat and don't eat, how long you go without food, what time you eat at, how long it takes you to eat, where you eat, how much you work out to burn it off, it never ends, so much of your mental power (and there isn't much to start with when you are so malnourished) is dedicated to OBSESSING about food. So in reality the food does control you, it determines everything from whether or not you can meet your friend for dinner to what route you take home from work. when i was in a really restrictive phase recently i once stood in a grocery for 35 minutes picking out an apple because i was all that i was going to eat for 3 days, i mean i was so obsessed with that one apple that i stood there for 35 minutes! if that isn't food controlling my life, i don't know what is.