A major cause of weight gain, weight regain, and overeating is emotional eating. Emotional eating can happen at any age and is an attempt to manage, suppress, or soothe your mood with food.

Tips on understanding your need to emotionally eat:

• It is first important to take time to understand and identify your emotional eating triggers. Examples of triggers could be situations, certain people or relationships, feelings, major life events or even just daily life.
• Some of the most common feelings that trigger emotional eating are: boredom, anger, stress, fear, loneliness, sadness, poor self-esteem, and even happiness.

Tips on ways to help prevent emotional eating:

• When you have a craving or urge to overeat try to ask yourself why you are eating or why are you feeling hungry. This can help you with identifying your trigger.
• Logging your food or food journaling. This should include what you are eating, when you are eating, why you are eating and how it made you feel.
• When the craving or urge hits, try to hold off eating for five minutes. This is not necessarily to tell yourself you cannot eat, just telling yourself to wait. If you tell yourself you cannot eat, the forbidden is extremely tempting. While waiting check in with yourself. Determine how you are feeling and try to figure out what is going on emotionally. The urge or craving may actually pass as you reflect.

Support yourself with healthy lifestyle habits.

• Try to get 8 hours of sleep every night.
• Make exercising daily a priority.
• Allow time for relaxation.
• Connect with others.