Stress eating fat?

Just out of curiosity

Work at it. Cut the intake and increase exercise.

If they go back to the lesser calories then they will eventually lose it unless they messed up their metabolism. The note they cut back on calories the faster they lose it unless they starve themselves and their metabolism shuts down.

It won’t magically fall off because the stress is gone. The person would need to have a deficit in calorie intake to energy output. As @Judi suggests, steady, healthy weight loss is their best option.

There is always the chance that it wasn’t only from stress eating. When people gain weight they may also go out less and drop activities that kept them fit. Also they may have also developed a nasty addiction for junk food that they didn’t have before. Just the idea changing their eating habits can create stress enough for them to go back into that cycle.
That is why a lot of people hate the word diet. It sounds like denial. Many people like to call it a life style change or a health change.
Then there is also the possibility that the weight gain was from an internal body change, like hormonal.

Ha, it’s still hard to take off. Ask me how I know.

Gaining is always much easier than losing. No magic here, yep, if you stress ate your way up the scale your going to have to eat a lot less and exercise a lot more to get that needle spiraling downwards again.

The stress hormone cortisol causes weight gain. Not just stress eating. So once your cortisol levels go down then theoretically you should stop gaining weight. But you probably need to counteract the cortisol with some of the feel good hormone endorphin. So exercising would help

Eat less, exercise more.

Maintain happy/normal.