AHS offering in-person or virtual workshops on emotional eating

By KENDALL KING on March 8, 2023.

Southeastern Albertans negatively impacted by emotional eating are invited to take part in Alberta Health Services’ free, public Managing Emotional Eating workshop, returning to Medicine Hat on Mar. 16.

Being offered in person or virtually, the three-part workshop aims to educate on emotional eating and its effects, as well as equip participants with skills necessary to navigate it.

“There’s lots of ways to define emotional eating,” Shelley Boras, a registered nurse with AHS’ Alberta Healthy Living Program, told the News. “One simple way to define it is when people use food to deal with feelings, instead of to satisfy hunger.

“But in our workshop, we sort of take a broader perspective than that. We use the term ’emotional eating’ but we also include non-emotional reasons. (For instance), sometimes we eat because there’s environmental cues; sometimes people eat to respond to thinking patterns (or) sometimes people are eating in response to a physical or mental health condition.”

Boras stresses that emotional eating is not necessarily problematic, and is actually quite common as food provides comfort for a variety of ailments and life stressors, in addition to providing necessary sustenance. However, emotional eating can become problematic if it begins negatively impacting an individual’s mental or physical health regularly.

And so, she welcomes anyone who may be experiencing such to join the workshop, led by trained health professionals and involving individuals facing similar struggles.

“The reasons why we eat are complex,” said Boras. “This is a place where we can talk about our challenges and struggles with eating, as well as, just, understand we’re not alone.”

The in-person workshop will be held from 9-11:30 a.m. Mar. 16, 23 and 30. An in-person workshop will also be held from 1-3:30 p.m. in Lethbridge on the same dates.

The virtual workshop will be held from 6-8:30 p.m. beginning May 11.

All workshops are free for residents of Alberta. To register or for more information, call 1-866-795-9709.