Here’s an activity I wanted to share with you all from my Real World Wellness nutrition consulting business. It’s a valuable way to identify emotional eating triggers and to overcome those obstacles that can derail us from eating well.

Goal: identify and overcome emotional eating

If you eat emotionally on a regular basis, you probably already know what triggers you. It can be a “friend” that always calls you to whine about their problems, or it can be work that stresses you out, or it can be any number of things.

The first step is to identify your triggers. The next time you eat emotionally, write down (afterwards, when your head is clear) what was taking place before you began to eat. Do this after you eat emotionally several times in a row – from there, you should be able to see a pattern.

The next step is to develop a mantra that will help you out when the trigger occurs. Your mantra needs to be something positive and effective for you – what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. Mantras can include phrases like “I eat healthy,” “cravings don’t control me,” “I will not let XYZ be my excuse to eat,” and so on.

Get into the habit of saying your mantra regularly so that when your trigger occurs, it is right there at the tip of your tongue. Although it might take a few times before it has a real impact and prevents you from emotional eating, this is a wonderful way to become more aware of your emotional eating behaviours, and can be effective for eventually reducing them (and perhaps even preventing them altogether).