By Jeff Schnaufer 11:30 AM EST, December 28, 2012 You've had a
bad day at work. Or maybe someone cut you off in traffic. Or
perhaps you found a handful of bills in the mailbox. Whatever
the case, you walk through the front door and head straight for
the freezer and devour a carton of frozen goodies to relieve
that emotional angst gnawing at you. No matter age, weight or
gender, emotional overeating is an equal opportunity offender
affecting millions of us. But is it an eating disorder?
"Emotional eating is not in itself a specific eating disorder,
though emotional eating occurs in eating disorders," says Dr.
Jennifer Taitz, co-author of End Emotional Eating: Using
Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills to Cope with Difficult
Emotions and Develop a Healthy Relationship to Food. Taitz, who
is a clinical psychologist and director of the dialectical
behavior therapy program at the American Institute for Cognitive
Therapy in New York, says emotional eating is associated with
binge eating, obesity and bulimia. In the