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.

Seek comfort in things other than food so that if you feel miserable or pressured you head outside for a walk with your partner or some games in the park with your family or friends. It would be nice if you could just wave a wand and not have anymore unhealthy food cravings but that is not realistic so have a list of alternatives to eating a greasy hamburger and include in these relaxing with a glossy mag that you love, a long hot bath or a pedicure- whatever it is that you really enjoy. Make a list of these alternatives and be ready to act on them instead of eating.

Fill your cupboards with healthy foods because these will replace the comfort food from which you are starting to wean yourself. If you replace those high carb and high sugar foods with healthy calories loss foods you will have fewer cravings so do not keep any junk food in the house. When you feel desperately in need of something sweet, instead of filling up on chocolate or fudge, recognize the craving you are experiencing and test out better alternatives that will not set back your weight loss program like a platter of fruit or healthy food bars.

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.

Do something active instead of eating as this does not just use calories, to help with your calorie loss, it also causes your brain to secret endorphins and serotonin and these lift your spirits. So the next time you reach for a pizza to feel better, grab your sneakers and go for a walk, or a bike ride, or a run to help with your weight loss and to make you feel better. Even just a quick mile walk can really change your mood and when you get back you will feel as good as you would feel if you had just eaten 4 slices of pizza.

While we hear accounts of more than 4000 US soldiers killed in the Iraq war to date, the number of returning veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) numbers in the tens of thousands. A result of the constant conflict, anxiety, and daily threats of death PTSD has been referred to in many ways: Shell shock, combat fatigue, and battle fatigue. Post-Vietnam syndrome is the expression that was used as a result of the Vietnam conflict.

The US National Institutes of Mental Health alert us to the characteristics of PTSD. These include a sustained and disruptive set of feelings that occur after a particularly traumatic event. These unpleasant episodes recur at frequent intervals.

One feature is constant video replays, that is, remembering and replaying the event for months after. This repeated and recurring stress means we have trouble sleeping. Some people have very dramatic and violent nightmares, and most wake feeling that their sleep did not refresh or re-energize them.

When we are stressed, one of the best solutions is to seek social support from our loved ones. The sad part about PTSD is that we often have personality changes that interfere dramatically with the quality of our relationships. Instead of being able to approach our loved ones, our irritability and bad temper causes people to move away from us.

Most of these victims have attentional problems and find it hard to stay on task and be productive at work. There is a constant theme of remembering and agonizing. Even the notion of having these recurrences and being unable to concentrate can cause people to worry even more.

Unfortunately, around one in 12 people in the US will experience PTSD – though the degree of stress varies significantly from person to person and even from race to race.

Despite the high figures of stress and PTSD, many people are able to cope with their daily lives and manage stress effectively. They have learned effective strategies to reduce stress by identifying the stressors and finding ways to understand and alleviate the tension and anxiety. The problem is, of course, if people cannot manage stress effectively it will impact negatively many areas of their life.

We have to accept in our fast society that being tense and anxious is a normal part of life. We all have complex lives that present us with daily challenges to our emotional equilibrium. The real issue is to be able to manage stress and tension so that we do not become tense and irritable and lose the social support from our loved ones that are so central in having a stable and happy life.

Managing stress is one of the most important things we need to learn in a modern complex life. Understanding tension, anxiety, stressors and a range of emotional pressures gives us the tools to be able to unlock and deal with stress disorders. And when we have sound information and know effective stress management strategies we can maintain a steady and stable personality and keep the support of our loved ones.

Information is the key to being able to manage stress and reduce tension. Regardless of whether it is just mild stress, severe distress, or even worse, PTSD, the initial way to deal with stress is to understand this disorder as well as you can. Of course, being able to use effective stress management strategies doubles our effectiveness in dealing with tension and anxiety.

Today I went to a new hair stylist. As you know, there is always a lot of social chitchat when you are having your hair cut and colored. This was no exception with my new friend Amy, who like me is passionate about every day exercise.

We have both recently decided to lose weight through starting a new healthy diet and a more consistent exercise program. We have been working at this for roughly the same time and were interested in ‘what worked’ for each other.

Amy is at the centre of many lives including her husband, teenage kids and her clients. She was overweight by about 20 pounds when she decided to start an every day exercise program and to modify her diet. She is very proud to have lost half of her excess weight already despite her busy schedule at work and at home.

I was really impressed to hear how she has rearranged her very full work hours. She now allows time for every day exercise. She tells me that she is serious about reclaiming her wedding day body and health.

Interestingly Amy wears a portable heart rate monitor on her wrist when she walks and jogs. This is something I haven’t thought to do. My faithful pedometer is one way of telling me whether I walk far enough but in order to get cardiac fitness it is essential that I walk at a pace that is approximately 1.3 times my regular heart rate.

I know my heart beat is generally 70 beats a minute. With the new monitor I intend buying, I expect to know when it reaches an elevated rate of 90-100 beats a minute for my cardio-vascular exercise each day. This kind of every day exercise will help me lose weight.

Amy says that she is keeping her program running regularly despite her full lifestyle because she is staying motivated. One of the keys to this for Amy is her ‘Fitness Friend’ who exercises with her. They both enjoy progress rewards as they reach goals along the path of their every day exercise and have a group of family and friends who actively support them.

I know that every day exercise can get a little dreary and you need to know whether you are making any gains so it is essential that you actually chart your progress. This can be either for changes in body shape or reduction in the circumference of various parts of your body for example your butt, your waist, or your upper arms, or your chest.

She makes sure that these measurements are recorded at the right time of the day (first thing in the morning is best) and with sufficient time between each record to allow for progress that she wants to see! This means that she stays focused and feels encouraged even when some aspects of her progress slow down for a time.

I am impressed with Amy. If, with her buddy she can head towards a fitter body by staying committed to every day exercise, charting their progress, enlisting supporters, building in rewards, and using different instruments to read her progress along the way, I can learn from her enthusiasm and organization and get fitter and healthier too.