Tracking both mood and food creates a powerful feedback loop that reveals how what you eat affects how you feel (and vice versa). PMR is a practical and accessible tool that can be incorporated into a daily routine to help manage stress. If you are eating while you’re working or watching TV, your brain misses out on the full eating experience.
How the mood-food-weight loss cycle works
Do you ever eat simply to give yourself something to do, to relieve boredom, or as a way to fill a void in your life? You feel unfulfilled and empty, and food is a way to occupy your mouth and your time. In the moment, it fills you up and distracts you from underlying feelings of purposelessness and dissatisfaction with your life. Emotional eating is using food to make yourself feel better—to fill emotional needs, rather than your stomach. Unfortunately, emotional eating doesn’t fix emotional problems.
Best Apps to Practice Mindful Eating in 2026
To start a log, take a photo of your food and answer mindfulness questions like why you ate, who you ate with, where you ate and how the food made you feel. The app provides a summary at the end of the day that includes your delicious food pictures in addition to a recap of your mood findings. Share your colorful journal with friends and your dietitian for additional support.
Support yourself with healthy lifestyle habits
There, I could log my food, but instead https://www.helpguide.org/wellness/weight-loss/emotional-eating of equating them to a “good” color or low caloric rate, I instead was encouraged to write about how I felt before, during, and after eating. Book a complimentary call with me to explore how we can work together to enhance your mindful eating journey. You can upgrade to receive access to a wide selection of more in-depth 10-session courses, plus other features such as offline listening and advanced audio features. ($59.99 annually; there is a seven-day free trial for the premium upgrade).
Coena: AI Weight Loss Coach
All of these can be streamed online for free or downloaded through SoundCloud. The Center for Mindful Eating (TCME) is a non-profit dedicated to teaching people how to apply mindfulness practices to their relationships with food and eating. It has various resources for beginners as well as professionals. But over the next decade, hundreds more — including Noom and Weight Watchers — made their way into the app stores, and weight-loss programs shifted from existing in weekly meetings to living in your pocket.
Start Your Mindful Eating Journey
The more you use “In The Moment” the more easily you will be able to create healthy habits and understand how emotions are impacting your eating. We undertook the first review of mindful eating applications for iOS. We found that many of the mindful eating apps did not have sufficient information on how to eat mindfully to deliver appropriate mindful eating training. Most of them lacked in comprehensiveness and were mostly eating timers, diaries, or hunger rating scales. There was very little information on how to eat mindfully or how to make mindful eating decisions when confronted with cravings. There was little diversity in app media and little that could increase engagement in the user experience.
Track All Your Goals
If you’re not currently active, consider doing a five-minute walk or some gentle stretching. Making food for someone going through a rough time is a way to show you care. To help you get the support you need most, advanced AI technology quickly identifies behaviors that could pose a risk and will even suggest local resources when necessary.
What is an emotional eating app?
- Reflect on moments when eating feels out of control and uncover emotional or situational triggers without judgment.
- When you install Shutterbite, you need to first set your goals for using the app and identify your meal preferences.
- To stop overeating in moments of discomfort, try to eat more mindfully instead of dieting.
- At the end of the day, you can view how healthy was your eating overall.
- Moreover, in this app, you will find some theoretical information about healthy lifestyles and foods.
- If you sign up for therapy after clicking through from this site, HelpGuide will earn a commission.
Typical emotions linked to eating include stress, anxiety, loneliness, boredom, frustration, and even celebration or relief. Sometimes the trigger is subtle—like feeling “amped up” after a long day or slightly down on Sunday evenings. You don’t need perfect clarity; start by asking, “What am I feeling right now? This guide explains emotional eating using evidence from psychology, neuroscience, and behavior change research. The list of strategies is organized from foundational mindset shifts to concrete tools you can use immediately, then longer-term habits that build resilience over time.
So Worth It! Like my own personal food therapist!
But there is such a wide variety of classes to choose from on this app, you are bound to find some that suit you. It’s important to know you’re not alone with emotional or stress eating habits – in fact, it’s human to feel stress and deal with food addiction. Eat Right Now® is clinically proven to reduce craving-related eating by 40%. All you need is 10 minutes a day to start changing your relationship with food & building sustainable eating habits.
This could be in the form of ratings or through journal entries that allow users to reflect on their mindful eating after they listen to a mindful eating meditation audio, for instance. They can make the practice of eating mindfully more accessible and enjoyable, helping you create a positive and lasting change in your eating habits. Embrace the benefits of mindful eating and take the first step towards a healthier, more mindful lifestyle today. Eat Right Now® offers an interactive program designed to help users develop healthier eating habits through mindfulness. The app includes daily video lessons, guided meditations, and practical exercises aimed at reducing cravings and stress eating.
Stress Test
For many people, the fullness they feel from food takes the place of fulfillment they lack in other areas of life. One behavioral strategy mental health professionals use to cope with this conditioning is stimulus control, which works by changing food cues. In the cold state (meaning you aren’t hungry and therefore neutral or “cold” toward food), you underestimate how hungry you might be in the future. Whereas in the hot state, you overestimate how hungry you actually are (emotional eating). Even a quick phone call to a friend or family member can do wonders for your mood.
Its options are divided into six parts, among which the hunger scale that is designed to help you differentiate whether you are physically or emotionally hungry. Mindful Eating Tracker offers options that allow you to follow the essential parts of the mindful eating as eating with gratitude, satisfaction, eating from hunger or feeling thirst. Bea Better Eating was created by clinical psychologist and hypnotherapist Dr. Sera Lavelle, founder of NY Health Hypnosis & Integrative Therapy and Soho Integrative EDMR. The developer, Bea Better Eating, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. If emotional eating feels sarasotamagazine constant, compulsive, tied to trauma, or accompanied by purging, self-harm, or severe restriction, specialized support is important.