Chapter 6 150 Traditional weight management Until now, traditional behavioural weight loss interventions have demonstrated only little efficacy in reducing emotional eating [15]. This is likely because these interventions hardly give attention to the specific needs of individuals with emotional eating [16-18] such as using food for emotion regulation [15]. Emotion regulation is broadly defined as the extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions, especially their intensity and duration, to accomplish a personal goal [19]. When exploring the concept of emotion regulation, in the context of emotional eating, the act of overeating is commonly assumed to be a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy in itself (e.g., people overeat to regulate negative affect) [8-9, 11]. However, findings propose that it is not the experience of negative affect, but rather a maladaptive regulation of the negative affect that is responsible for the overeating [20]. Accordingly, a longitudinal study among adolescents [20] found that a lack of emotion regulation abilities was associated with more emotional eating and subsequently could predict obesity [21-23]. Thus, it seems that it could be beneficial to assess the emotion regulation ability of participants to improve the tailoring of future online interventions for individuals with emotional eating behaviour. Regrettably, the current provision of care falls short in adequately addressing the needs of individuals who engage in emotional eating. Individuals with emotional eating often feel a perceived disconnect from healthcare services. They experience feelings of shame regarding their eating issues [24] and will not readily seek care [24-27]. They tend to keep their problems related to emotional eating to themselves. They do not share with their GP (General Practitioner) that they have a problem with eating behaviour [55], thus, a considerable proportion of individuals with emotional eating remain invisible to the outside world [28-30]. If they do reach out to a GP for assistance, they are unlikely to directly address their eating problem, but focus on the secondary effects of obesity, such as diabetes or joint problems [31]. Consequently, there is minimal likelihood that the eating problems will be acknowledged or accurately diagnosed [28, 32]. Virtual coaching In an attempt to spark this advancement in the treatment of individuals with emotional eating, a few recent studies have looked at the effect of a virtual coach, which tailors exercises to specific needs of individuals with emotional eating [15, 31, 33-35]. For example, Dol, et al. [36] aimed to develop a personalized coach, which tailors exercises to specific needs of individuals with emotional eating. In the study of Dol et al. [36], they identified three needs of individuals with emotional eating in the context of experiencing food cravings,
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