Maintaining a healthy weight and controlling emotional eating tips by Senior Dietitian, Amanda Foti, from Selvera Wellness

1. Define yourself as a healthy and fit individual. Finding value in making healthy choices will help you stick with them long term.
2. Make healthy eating and exercising a lifestyle you live, not a temporary plan you are follow to meet a goal. A healthy lifestyle shouldn’t have an end point, it should just be the way you live.
3. Understand what emotions are triggers. Before starting to change anything, be mindful of how you’re feeling when you have a desire to eat and identify the emotion behind it.
4. Focus on relieving the emotional triggers. Whether its stress, boredom, sadness, there are alternative actions not involving food that can work to relieve the emotion. Brainstorm a few alternative actions you can rely on in the moment.
5. Keep a food journal. This allows you to reflect on what your food choices are and identify where the trouble areas are. Being accountable for your food choices will make you more mindful in the moment.
6. Don’t deprive yourself. Taking away foods you love will only make the desire to have them stronger. Find a healthy balance of enjoying foods you love with nutritious choices and exercise.
7. Have patience. Changing habits as complex as emotional eating takes time and many attempts of practice. Expect to not be perfect and be okay with it. Rather than setting a goal to go ‘cold turkey’ focus on decreasing the incidents of emotional eating over time.