How about this for "Ah-ha!" moment?

The book is "Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever" by Roger Gould.

The book refers not to dieting the psychology of emotional crutches.The author contends that an immature and overly critical conscience that has avoided developing ways to cope with emotions leads us to feelings of powerlessness, which in turn drives the urge to eat (or insert alternate emotional crutch here).

Gould says that people who have "installed food as a preferred way to cope," stop developing new ways to deal with stress, fear, anxiety, anger and other emotions that they have (for whatever reason) deemed to be negative (the critical conscience). By choosing food, they totally relinquish their ability to deal with their emotions in a mature and empowered way.

He states that emotionally mature people ride out their emotions knowing that they are only temporary and that on the other side there will be relief and resolution.

Food (or other) serves as a temporary comfort and distraction from having to deal with those feelings, thereby impeding our ability to be informed by those feelings and, in effect, stalling our emotional maturation. [Side note: He's not including severe clinically-diagnosed emotions like depression or panic attacks.]

He asserts that a person's powerlessness over the urge to eat is simply a superficial layer, masking what he calls "the five layers of powerlessness" in their lives:

You feel powerless about how to deal with your self-doubts.

You feel powerless about how to get real satisfaction in life.

You feel powerless to insure your own safety.

You feel powerless to appropriately assert your independence.

You feel powerless to fill yourself up when you feel empty inside.

When a person crosses over the line between food as a source of life and food as a source of comfort, all these layers compound one another and food becomes a psychological thing instead of a biological necessity.

As a result, you eat when you feel powerless in one or more of these five ways, because the experience of powerlessness is almost instantaneously transformed into the uncontrollable urge to eat.

And here was the ah-ha for me... Some get so adept at swapping food for emotions that they no longer feel the emotion, all they feel is the craving to feed their addiction, be it food, alcohol, drugs, sex, cutting or other distractions.

What the book purports to do is "help bring the spotlight back to the real issues and take the focus away from food and weight, so you'll begin to see who you really are, what you really want, and how to get it. Once you do this, you'll become like... the child at play who doesn't want to come in for dinner, or the artist in the studio so fixated on creation that he forgets to eat. You will have recovered your power."

It may be something interesting to pursue as a read.