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Sadly, emotional eating can interrupt your healthy eating and prevent you from losing weight on a consistent basis. Too often our efforts to lose weight come unstuck when we indulge in emotional eating. Using these tips and tricks can help you control your emotional eating, stay on your calories loss diet and enjoy long term weight loss.

Learn the difference between being truly hungry and wanting to feel better is not always easy, especially if you have eaten in response to your changing emotions over an extended time. You need to learn to recognize that true hunger comes with feeling physically fatigued and can include a grumbling stomach. Make sure that before you next eat food that will help fuel your body that you permit yourself to get really hungry as this is the only reason you should ever eat.

Determine what sets off your emotional eating, making note of the times and causes of these occasions and look for a pattern around this to become apparent. Do you hanker after salty fatty food when the pressure is on at work instead of those calories loss lunches you know are nutricius and much better for you? Do you head for the cookie jar at the end of the day after a drive home filled with traffic jams or do you eat lashings of gravy on mashed potatoes when the kids are a nightmare after school?

Understanding the causes of and times when you have an overwhelming ‘need’ for certain foods is the answer to preventing your uncontrolled eating. When you can pinpoint these aspects of your behavior you can begin to change this by finding other ways to manage stress. Have alternative healthy foods that will satisfy you cravings for sweet and fatty salty foods on hand to eat or plan to actively do something like jogging or working out or, on a more relaxing note, playing your favorite music or asking for a back rub or head massage.

Cross comfort food off your shopping list as this may give you momentary comfort when things are tough, but if there is none in the pantry, you can not eat it and will learn to seek comfort in other ways. If you feel down and think escaping in front of the TV with a soda and bag of buttery popcorn is the best way to recover, will you drive to the nearest supermarket to buy this comfort food? Probably not, if you are like most people who search for an alternative food at home rather than go out to buy what they would like to indulge in.

Do not use food as comfort and instead of reaching for the ice cream when you are depressed or lonely, find other ways to comfort yourself. Call a friend, take a hot bubble bath, treat yourself to a manicure, write in a journal to try and discover what is making you sad or lonely. There are hundreds of ways you can comfort yourself besides reaching for food so learn to use other things to get you through a tough day and this leaves room for you to continue to eat calories loss meals when you need to.

Keep healthy food in the house because if you have healthy snacks in the house you can use those as a substitute for comfort food when a craving hits. Instead of candy bars, keep granola bars in the cupboard and instead of chips, keep popcorn or sliced veggies or other calories loss foods around because making healthy substitutions for the foods you crave is a very practical way to deal with emotional eating. After all, cravings happen but eating healthy snacks in place of the high fat, high calorie comfort food is a practical and responsible way to deal with food cravings when they happen.

Wait 30 minutes and when a craving does hit, wait it out by setting a timer, looking at your watch, whatever you need to do. But wait a full 30 minutes before acting on that craving. If you still are craving that food after 30 minutes, allow yourself to have a half portion of it, but you will find that usually after 30 minutes that craving will disappear.

Get exercise because exercise is not just good for burning calories as when you exercise, your brain releases serotonin and endorphins, which make you feel good and make you happy. Twenty minutes or more of exercise can trigger the same feeling of peace and happiness and well-being that you get from food. Emotional eating is not responsible for your entire weight gain, but it can be a factor in why it is hard for you to make a consistent weight loss. Using these tips and tricks to control your emotional eating will help you stick with a calories loss diet and might be the way for you to start losing weight and keeping it off.