You are not hungry most of the time. You are not always hungry when something smells good, looks good, or tastes good, whether or not you think you are. All food is prepared to tempt your taste buds, even though youre not hungry.

You are also not hungry because there is stress, a deadline, pressure, a personal or business problem, anxiety, tension, its morning afternoon evening when alone with friends weekdays weekends day time night time money problems it rained it didnt came with the dinner it was there . . . You are not hungry 24 hours a day, though you might think you are.

There are many daily food encounters: friends offering food, a maitre d describing dessert, the smell of popcorn in a movie theater, to name but a few. Acknowledging the visual and emotional blitz helps interrupt the knee-jerk reaction that causes you to eat even though youre not hungry. Just knowing you are not hungry most of the time is a helpful piece of information.

You may even have pinpointed the reasons youre thinking of food, reasons that seem to justify your eating when youre not hungry. Ive heard excuses as varied as I got so angry because I couldnt get a cab to I got caught in a downpour without an umbrella. Many of these reasons might seem a valid enough reason to make you eat. They are not.

Certainly anger might tempt you to use food as a drug to keep the feelings down. If you eat when youre angry, does the anger go away? Or perhaps frustration weakens your resolve. At which point is your threshold for discomfort seriously challenged? Bored? At exactly which point does a yawn become a yen? Tired? When does food become a replacement for sleep?

Does the emotional pain diminish when you eat? Is the celebration any better because you come home stuffed, bloated, and full of gas, uncomfortable and with lowered self-esteem? Is it worth it?

Consider, if you will, that your past behavior has not worked. A clear vision of what youre trying to accomplish will. Most of all, you need a mind open to the possibility of change.

One man I almost taught was so afraid to change that he was locked into where he hung his coat, where I sat, and where he sat. He was terrified I was going to pull off his covers and yank away his security blanket of whatever food he was holding onto whichever food he thought made him comfortable. He was so uncomfortable with even the thought of change, he would not tell me how much he weighed, or what he wanted to weigh.

Of course its possible that some discomfort might occur while youre changing. The very act of weighing less than you did before is a change. And there is no change without change. But there are ways to lessen the discomfort of the journey from where you are to where you want to be; to offer options, suggestions, tactics, tips, tried and true assignments that work more and more as they are practiced. After all, you learned to use food to calm yourself down. You can learn a new method, a new automatic response.

Do you eat out of habit, not hunger? Identifying habits requires guidance, introspection, and patience, but most of all honesty. Once you acknowledge, Yes, I do that, you can decide you dont want to do that anymore and begin to do something else, instead.

It is unrealistic and self-defeating to expect to go from habitual, compulsive, or addictive eating behavior to a calm, rational, in-control eating person by reading an article, even this article. You can, however, alter automatic, learned responses by creating new and effective alternative behaviors that will result in permanent change. The new behavioral choices add up to a permanent weight loss, incrementally, not rattattattat. Its worth repeating: Your original patterns evolved over a lifetime. Now you can consciously plan the person you want to be.

Food does not contain a narcotic. Food only has the power you gave it by doing the same thing with it each time you encountered it