The following is an excerpt from an audio program designed by Michael Steelman, M.D. Dr. Steelman and Active 8, L.L.C., have designed the fantastic new Better Health Better Life Diet Plan.  This is the first weight management program that gives the results of a physicians clinical weight loss program - at home.  For more information on this very effective program go to: www.active8products.com and click on the weight loss products section.

You can't begin making meaningful changes in your eating habits until you know what those habits are, and they're going to surprise you.

Believe it or not, most of us really don't realize what we eat on a daily basis.  Many times we eat for reasons other than hunger.  Has that ever happened to you?  Of course it has.  When that happens, we call it a `trigger.'  A trigger is anything that causes us to eat, when we're not really hungry.  To give you an example, I have a patient, who's trigger is pizza.  This is what we call a visual trigger.  Whenever he sees a pizza, even if it's on TV, he nearly can't control himself.  He heads for the phone and orders a medium meat lovers pizza from Pizza Hut.  He really wasn't hungry, it just that he really loves the taste of pizza, and the very sight of one, can cause him to have a tremendous desire to eat.

And there are other types of triggers too.  Yours may be stress for instance.  If it is.....then your trigger is emotional not visual.  When your feeling really stressed, you reach for crunchy foods like nuts, chips, cheese and crackers etc.

Other triggers may be specific activities or events.  For example, when your best friend calls on the phone and you know you're going to talk for a while, do you grab a drink or a snack?  How about when they come over for coffee?  Are there cookies or cake accompanying that cup of java?

There are tons of triggers, so many in fact that list is nearly endless.  So let's look at some examples of triggers other than hunger.

Let's see how a phone call might trigger us to want to eat.  Let's say you don't go to the cookie jar when your friend calls, but if the call was about something that upset you or even hurt your feelings, you might find yourself wanting to get into the refrigerator when you hang up the receiver.  In this case, hurt feelings could be a trigger to eat.  This can, and probably does happen, even if you just finished a meal a short while ago and you're not really hungry.  Or, the call may have made you angry.  Again, once you hang up the phone, you may find yourself reaching for something to eat.  In this case, you may be eating because your angry or hurt, and your eating has nothing to do with hunger.

It's important that you don't confuse the desire to eat with hunger.  You can want to eat.....even feel like you need to eat....but it's not because your stomach is asking for food.  It may be because you have an unfulfilled need, that you're used to filling up with food.  We all have appetites.  We all have the desire to eat....but when we confuse it with hunger, we run into trouble.  We'll learn how to avoid this today.

Another type of trigger is called a paired association.  This is the pairing of eating with a specific activity or event.  Have you ever gone to a birthday party and not seen a cake and ice cream.  Of course not.  Cake and ice cream are traditional birthday foods.  Or how about watching a football game, just how many hot dogs and beers do you consume during a game.  And what's a movie without popcorn and candy?  All these are paired associations.  A specific event and food that seem inseparable.  Notice I said seem....because they don't have to be thought of together.  We'll talk more about this later.

A more general paired association is the habit of eating anything along with an activity, such as eating and watching TV.  People with this habit may, for example, eat a full evening meal and then go in the family room for an evening of TV.  But within a couple of hours, they find themselves roaming in the kitchen.  There is no way you're physically hungry, but instead you've associated eating with watching television.  Watching television becomes the trigger to eat.  And you practice it repeatedly.  To some, this trigger is a very powerful one!

Throughout this series, we'll talk about other triggers for eating. I'll tell you how to handle these triggers without eating.

Of course, you can't even begin dealing with triggers until you know exactly what your eating habits are.  The 'best' way to determine exactly what your eating habits are is to keep a food record or diary.  And this food record should do more than just show you what and how much you've eaten.  It will also include information that is often just as important as what you put in your mouth, things like, when you eat, where you eat and with whom you are eating.  It's this kind of information that helps you identify what your triggers are.  Our food record or diary is going to be something you make up yourself, we're going to personalize it to you. You're going to be surprised at how much fun this will be and how much you're going to learn from it.  One of the biggest things you're going to learn is how you gained weight.

Let's look at an example of what you might learn by keeping your food record.  Let's say that you skipped breakfast.  You go to work and by ten o'clock in the morning, you're feeling hungry.  Some rat of an office worker brings in doughnuts, and of course, you eat a couple.  That certainly takes the edge off for now, and keeps you from being hungry at lunchtime.  So, you don't eat lunch. But, by mid-afternoon, guess what, you're starving.

So here comes the trip to the vending machine to grab a candy bar.  Well that works for a while, and the afternoon passes......you go home and realize you are absolutely famished.  The instant you walk in your front door, you make a beeline to the kitchen and grab the first thing you see.  Potato chips, crackers, candy, cookies, whatever.  Your body has been virtually starved of nutrients all day long.  And by the time you sit down to the dinner table, your body is crying for nourishment, and so you eat a large evening meal.

Then you settle in front of the TV for a few hours, grab a snack or two during the comedy hour and maybe Monday night football, then it's off to bed.  Right?  The next morning, you're not hungry, because you just ate a few hours ago, so you skip breakfast.  And the whole cycle begins again.

This is just one example of the kind of information that becomes apparent when you keep a food record.  You will find at least one pattern.  And probably many really.  And once you recognize them, you can begin changing them.

I'll bet you've already started to figure out something very important.  We all know people that aren't over-weight and outwardly at least, they never seem to have trouble staying thin.  Usually these folks only eat when they're hungry, and simply don't eat in response to other triggers.  And that's exactly what we're going to learn to do.

Now that you know why it is important to keep a food record, let's look at how simple it is to do one.

The Food Record Today

In the old days, keeping a food record required a lot of time, dedication and some real work.  You have to carry a paper food record with you at all times and manually enter everything you ate and drank in the course of the day.  Then when you had to take some extra time each day and look up all the calories, fat grams, carbohydrates and other nutritional information in a book and list them all out.  Then you added it all up and tried to figure out how you did for the day.  NOT ANY MORE!

Today it’s all automatic and done for you.  The Active 8 On-Line Food Journal is fantastic, it's complete, instantaneous and it’s FREE!  Doesn’t cost you a penny. Just get on line and go to www.active8products.com and click on the "On-Line Food Journal".  You’ll love it!!  

Ok, are we straight on the food record story? It's important. It make makes a difference. Do it!