Let’s face it: change isn’t always easy. Old habits can be hard to break. But to lose a significant amount of weight permanently, it is absolutely necessary to ditch old eating habits that led to the weight gain in the first place. Simply modifying your existing way of eating won’t do it; you have to rethink your priorities and be willing to make fundamental changes in the way you approach food and eating. To ease the transition, bad habits will need to be replaced with good habits that you can easily handle. The following is a list of the top 10 bad habits that prevent weight loss and what can be done to change them.

1. Skipping breakfast
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. By the time people rise in the morning, most haven’t eaten for 10 to 12 hours, and their blood sugar levels are low. As a result, skipping breakfast will most certainly cause you to snack throughout the day in an effort to boost your blood sugar, or energy, level. And chances are good that you will reach for high-calorie, high-fat foods such as doughnuts, muffins or cookies to give you that quick sugar fix your body feels it needs.

It’s tremendously important that you never skip breakfast. Research consistently shows that people who eat breakfast actually eat fewer calories per day and lose weight more successfully than those who do not. Always start your day with a substantial breakfast.

2. Not taking time to eat properly
It’s easy to slip into a harmful cycle of fattening convenience foods and short-term energy fixes, but you’ll pay for the convenience with a growing girth, flagging energy and poor health. And really, the amount of incremental time required to prepare your own healthy meals and snacks is quite modest. Fifteen minutes in the morning is all it takes to eat a healthy breakfast – often the length of time it takes to line up at Tim Hortons for a coffee.

3. Grazing
The world’s best grazers are teenagers. They simply cannot avoid opening the fridge every time they pass it. Their rapid growth and (hopefully) high activity levels require a constantly high calorie intake. Unfortunately, grazing is a habit that many people continue into their adult lives with disastrous results for their waistlines and health. A few nuts here, a couple of cookies there, a tablespoon or two of peanut butter, and a few glasses of juice all look pretty harmless in themselves, but taken together they can easily total several hundred extra calories a day! And those can add up to over 20 pounds of additional weight in a year.

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Excerpted from The G.I. Diet Clinic by Rick Gallop. Copyright 2007 by Rick Gallop. Excerpted by permission of Random House Canada. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.