What's eating you? If you find yourself continually using food to deal with your emotions, there are ways to change.(EAT SMART: FOOD)

You've had a grueling day: bad news at work, a parking ticket, a nasty letter from your credit card company and a tension-filled evening with your mate. Now, it's 9 p.m. and it's just you, your stress and the refrigerator--a perfect setup for emotional eating. And in spite of the fact that you've enjoyed a full dinner and sworn off sugar, you find yourself standing at the kitchen counter, tucking into a pint of double-fudge ice cream with a brownie back.

"Any time you reach for food when you're not physically hungry or needing nutrition, that's emotional eating," says Linda Spangle, RN, MA, author of Lire Is Hard, Food Is Easy. "You may be tense or angry. You may be bored or in despair. But whatever the reason, emotional eating has nothing to do with your body's need for food."

We've all experienced emotional eating to one degree or another: a nibble of chocolate, an extra helping of mashed potatoes when we weren't hungry--just because they tasted so good. "And that's not necessarily a bad thing," says Marc David, author of The Slow Down Diet. "It's when emotional eating becomes disruptive to your life, when you have weight or health issues because of your eating or when you habitually use food to cover up your feelings instead of confronting them, that emotional eating becomes problematic."

Why do we eat to soothe our emotions? "Most of us learned somewhere along the line that it works," says Spangle.

Why do we eat to soothe out emotions?

The truth is food does work. "It's grounding, it fills up empty time, it's soothing and nurturing," says Jane E. Latimer, MA, author of Beyond the Food Game. "It's a fast, easy and seemingly harmless palliative for unhappy feelings like stress, anger, frustration, loneliness, boredom, sadness and depression." And if you're in overwhelm mode, if you don't know how to handle your emotions or nurture yourself, you may turn to eating.

If you make the occasional frustration-fueled trip to the vending machine, emotional eating may not be a problem. But if you find yourself habitually using food to deal with your feelings, try these approaches to curb, even end, emotional eating--and find out what's really eating you.