Welcome back everybody to your Week 3 of Eating With Intention. Now that you understand a little bit better about feelings that trigger emotional eating, I want to dig a little bit deeper and evaluate those feelings. Understanding how to combat feelings before they lead to emotional eating, that's going to get you one step closer to food freedom. 

Your day was stressful. You had an argument with your boss. You finally finished your to-do list and now you're bored. Okay, all of these things can cause you to head to the kitchen and eat, right? Here's some other triggers for you. Boredom, social influences like you're at a birthday party, you're at a wedding, you're at a lunch for work and you feel the pressure to eat. Stress, anxiety, loneliness, depression, sadness, anger - all of these things can trigger you to binge or to eat foods that you would not normally eat maybe if you're just at home with your family.

Knowing your triggers for making unhealthy decisions is an important step in changing the habits. You got to know about it first, right? Getting a food diary, keeping a food diary and understanding what you ate and what was happening when you ate - using this daily is a game changer. I have done this. I've tracked it in an App. To me, that's just easier. If you are doing it for an emotional reason, probably writing it down would be easier. There might be an app. I don't know. I don't have one for that. But writing down what you eat and how you were feeling at that time is a game changer. 

I was able to see I eat when I work. So when I'm like super focused on work, maybe I'm recording something, maybe I'm working on a big project for work. I'm just like mindlessly eating, okay? Even if it's good stuff, guys, even if it's things that are keto or paleo or AIP, eating too much of it is still too much of it, all right? So understanding those triggers is important. All right. 

Triggers. Here are the questions for you to think about. What are triggers for you for unhealthy patterns? How can you meet needs without turning to food? That's the key, okay? You're still going to have the needs, but what can you do instead of eating? New practice here, okay? What is a new practice that you can implement to handle your triggers in a healthy way and diffuse whatever's happening instead of being triggered? So we're talking about what's the trigger? How can I do something to remedy this pattern in a different way? 

Here's the new practice. What can I do to keep from being triggered? All right. Also, food diary. Spend an entire day concentrating on what goes through your mind before you head to the kitchen or while you're in the kitchen, okay? I want you to write it down. I want you to write down how you feel before you eat. I want you to write down what you ate and then write down how you felt afterwards. It's only for one day, guys. It's not going to bog you down, all right?

I'm telling you, it's going to help you. It's going to show you when you eat, why you eat, and be able to get those patterns. If you can do 2 to 3 days, that'll be golden. But at least get one day in and see any patterns that you have. 

All right, next week, number 4, okay? I'm going to wrap up this series next week. Make sure you stick around. I'll see you in the Facebook group. Bye, guys. I'm rooting for you. Have a great week.