You can respond more intentionally when you understand what is actually driving the urge to eat.

Learn to recognize the different experiences that can lead to eating and identify personal patterns involving physical hunger, cravings, emotions, habits, environment, stress, boredom, loneliness, rewards, and social situations.

• Differentiate physical hunger from cravings, habits, and emotional triggers.
• Identify common personal eating triggers.
• Recognize environmental and social influences.
• Understand what emotional eating may be attempting to accomplish.
• Create alternative responses to recurring triggers.

The goal is not to fear food — it is to relate to it with greater awareness and intention.

Develop more intentional eating behavior through mindfulness, awareness, planning, flexible thinking, and collaboration with your bariatric nutrition team.

• Practice mindful and intentional eating.
• Reduce shame-based thinking about food and eating.
• Follow individualized nutrition recommendations from qualified providers.
• Prepare for social situations, eating out, holidays, and travel.
• Recover constructively after difficult eating experiences.

Your body may change faster than your inner picture of yourself.

Explore how significant physical change can affect body image, identity, confidence, relationships, intimacy, clothing, attention from others, and the way you see yourself.

• Understand why body image may lag behind physical change.
• Separate personal worth from body weight and appearance.
• Navigate compliments, attention, loose skin, clothing, and other appearance-related experiences.
• Recognize changing relationship and identity dynamics.
• Develop a values-based sense of who you are becoming.