Teaching Teens To Regulate Emotions Could Help Them Stay At Healthy Weight

Showing teens how to better manage their emotions may help them maintain a healthier weight, a new study says.

Teens engaged in a weight-loss program were less likely to regain weight if the program included training on how to understand and manage their moods, researchers reported Oct. 22 in JAMA Network Open.

Doing so left teens less inclined to use snacking as a way to ease stress or boost mood, the research showed.

“Weight loss is only part of the story,” explained lead researcher Kerri Boutelle, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of California-San Diego.

“Our goal is to develop treatments that give adolescents and families skills they can continue to use after a structured program ends,” Boutelle said in a university news release. “Understanding how emotions influence eating may help us build interventions that are more sustainable for youth over the long term.”

For the new study, researchers at a weight-loss clinic recruited 166 teens who were overweight or obese and their parents.

Half of the teens were randomly chosen to take a standard weight management program focused on healthy eating, exercise and good habits such as tracking calories, setting reasonable goals and avoiding snacking.

The other half received that same training, but also got additional counseling on how to understand and manage their emotions.

“Adolescence is a time when young people are gaining independence and learning how to manage increasingly complex emotions, so treatment needs to evolve with them,” Boutelle said. “Considering that 43% of adolescents in the U.S. have overweight or obesity, supporting adolescents in managing their emotions and eating could make weight -management last.”

Both groups achieved similar levels of weight loss during the program, which lasted six months, researchers said. 

However, 26% of those in the enhanced program had reached a clinically meaningful amount of weight loss by the program’s end, compared to 22% in the standard group.

The emotional regulation training appeared especially valuable in preventing lost pounds from coming back.

One year after the program, about 22% of the teens who’d gotten emotion management training had successfully kept the weight off, compared to 4% of those who got the standard counseling, the research showed.

Interestingly, researchers said the teens who got the extra training did not display a significant difference in emotional regulation skills, based on a questionnaire assessment.

This could mean that the training helped weaken the connection between difficult emotions and eating, even though it didn’t boost overall emotion management skills, researchers said.

“The fact that we saw less emotional eating and better weight maintenance, without a measurable change in overall emotion management, raises an important question about what is actually driving the benefit,” Boutelle said. “We need to understand which parts of the intervention are most important and whether helping adolescents respond differently to difficult emotions is the key.”

Researchers said future studies should look more closely into what exactly helped the teens achieve better weight maintenance. It could be changes in teens’ coping skills, parents’ responses to their children’s emotions, or the interaction between teens and parents.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on family healthy weight programs.

SOURCE: University of California-San Diego, news release, Oct. 22, 2026