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More EatingWell Diet Tips
What Are Your Triggers?
8 Tips for Winning the Food Fight
7 Steps to Permanent Weight Loss
Quiz: Are You Obsessed with Food?

The focus of The EatingWell Diet is on behavior change—permanent behavior change. It’s only through a systematic shaping of everyday common behaviors that you’ll be able to break old habits and learn new ones. In this section, we’ve gathered some of the best behavioral strategies for making permanent weight loss a reality. Take some time to master them, and they’ll become instinctual.

Name Your Triggers

What makes you eat? List your eating cues so you can learn to manage them better.

• Certain places (e.g., Mom’s house)
  
• Actions (coming home from work)
• Seeing or smelling food
• Boredom
• Emotions (positive and negative)
• Stress
  

Behavior Modification 101

Here are some key behavior management techniques experts use to help bring about permanent change: They’ll work for you too!

Behavior Management Techniques

Conditioning. When you practice two or more behaviors simultaneously—like watching TV and snacking—you can come to associate one with the other. So in order to break the behavior, you need to break the chain of events that lead from one situation to the other—say, outlawing food from the TV room.

Stimulus Control. Make the environment as conducive as possible to the behavior you’re seeking—e.g., make it easier to do the right thing. Put your sneakers by the front door so you won’t forget your daily walk, or store the ready-to-eat carrots in the front of the fridge so they’re easy to grab for snacking.

Compensation. Instead of trying to change a behavior that’s contributing to your weight problem change something else in your planning to make room for it. If you don’t want to give up having a regular popcorn fix at your family movie night, compensate by having fewer servings of starchy food earlier that day—or “bank” some extra calories during the week.

Combat “All or Nothing” thinking. Many of us have a tendency to think it black-and-white extremes: chocolate is bad, carrots are good; one slip-up means you’ve fallen off the wagon. This distorted thinking pattern can ultimately harm your efforts to lose weight. Here are tips for getting out of the “all or nothing” thinking trap.