Breaking Free From The Stress & Eating Cycle

Anytime we are making changes that we want to maintain over time, such as with nutrition and exercise, it is important to also evaluate our stress level. Stress is one of the major obstacles to making and maintaining healthy lifestyle changes. Stress can make it more challenging to engage in healthy behaviors for various reasons (e.g., lack of time, no energy, lost motivation...). In addition, stress makes people more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors, including overeating, smoking, drinking alcohol, and avoiding a physically active lifestyle. Our reactions to stress happen automatically, and often we are not even aware of them. Because our automatic reactions to stress tend to be unhealthy, it is important to look carefully at the relationship between the stress in our life and our typical eating patterns. The focus of this program is to learn and explore strategies and skills based on the principles of “mindfulness” to better manage our stress and support losing weight, maintaining weight loss, and decreasing metabolic health problems. Mindfulness skills can help us to learn to identify our stress response, interrupt automatic and unhelpful reactions to stress, learn healthier ways to manage stress, and develop healthier relationships with food and our bodies.