Almost all of us suffer from being over weight in one period of our lives. If you do not have any physical illness and/or cause to gain weight, then the reason could be emotional eating.
Emotional eating is eating while you are not physically hungry but psychologically. Emotional eating could be said to be an ineffective coping mechanism. Besides, individual could eat when he/she could not control his/her urges or just get bored. Individual could have binge-eating and/or attacks in which eating without any control.
The sense of being hungry is sudden and out of control during the emotional eating. The individual wants to eat just one specific thing and does not satisfy until eat this specific thing. Even if the individual is not physically hungry, he/she has an urge to eat. After eating, self-punishment or regret is highly common and the individual could use laxatives, could exercise excessively or engage in self-vomitting.
For coping, the urges that are causing the emotional eating are needed to be understood. The causes could be distorted thoughts (Eating is one of the ways to be joyful), perceving the food as a reward (I will a cheesecake as a reward after completing this essay), trying to convience yourself that your body is needing the food (It is cold outside, my body needs to be warmed up via a dessert), and/or making the food a tool for socialization. Besides, the individual may not know how to cope with dysfunctional emotions and/or thoughts and eat in order to soothe him/herself. Additionally, the associations with food withing the family and/or culture could be a valid reason as well.
In the psychotherapy, the personal reasons to eat are needed to be evaluated and founded in order to reconstruct new and functional ways to cope with. Otherwise, the individual would gain the weight even if he/she lost weight previously in a cyclic way.