Breaking an addiction

I agree with the food journal to help figure out the why. As well as what you were feeling at the time also list anything you think might have triggered it such as physical craving and/or stress/and or home life event (row with partner, guilt tripped by parent, etc), and/or environment (smells,social event, etc). Finally list what you ate..specifically.

The why determines what treatment would work best. For example if you are eating the exact same food no matter what your stress level is, or the environment or what's going on in your life..if you can't live without constantly having that food...it is possible it's a food addiction. Treatment would be the same as any addiction...weaning or cold turkey and then avoidance.

However, and this applies to the majority of people, if it's more complex and you find yourself reaching for a variety of foods even if they are all comfort foods (chocolate, ice cream, etc) and your journal is showing that you are doing it when triggered by emotional stimuli, then it's more of a behavioural issue and treatment would be to address your behaviours in response to those triggers. Often avoidance/denial of these foods make it worse for people over eating due to these causes. So the therapy would be about improving your relationship with food rather than cutting specific foods off.

While recognising comfort eating and habitual eating as issues for many the scientific community is discovering the role our digestive biome plays in our various systems. Women are more inclined towards having a disrupted digestive biome because of the regular pressures placed upon our bodies than the men amongst us. If you have ever used antibiotics, which disrupt all bacteria regardless, or have had a poor diet for any reason it is probably this which is where at least part of your problem lies, it is being discovered just how great an influence the digestive balance is having on our immune system too.

You could look into "the Candida diet" site, there are others sites, search yeast overgrowth. There are so many yeasts which can misbehave but the course of action which works for most is finding good probiotic products, using soluble fibres like oats, psyllium or flax etc, increasing digestive acid, as well as reducing foods with added sugar, added sugars are the food yeasts love, think making bread, it has been found they can even demand it. One does not need to have the overt symptoms of yeast overgrowth for it to be an issue.

Info from many functional medic sites because they want to correct the systems to prevent the symptoms rather than treat the symptoms as stand alone problems.