Control your appetite

Ideally, you should eat when you feel hungry, when your stomach growls, telling you it needs food. Stomach hunger should not be confused with mouth hunger, the desire for food because it will taste good. Eating in response to how good food looks or smells has to do with your appetite, not your hunger.

Some of my clients have reported never feeling hungry during the day. Yet they eat anyway, either because it was time to eat or because the food was there. If you're out of touch with how hunger feels to you, eat according to schedule for the next two weeks. Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at approximately the same time each day. You'll find that you will start to feel hungry before your meals.

Pay attention to your hunger signals, and let them dictate how much you eat. When you sit down to a meal, rate your hunger on a scale of one to ten, one being so full you couldn't possibly eat and ten being ravenously hungry. Halfway through your meal, rate your hunger again. Let your score tell you whether it's time to stop eating.

Learning to stop eating when you feel full can also help you eat less. Feeling full does not mean feeling "stuffed." Satiety means that you no longer feel hungry and, in fact, you feel good. Keep in mind that it doesn't take much to feel satisfied. Sometimes all you need is a small snack to keep hunger at bay.

Excerpted from Leslie Beck's 10 Steps to Healthy Eating by Leslie Beck. Copyright © Leslie Beck, 2002. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Canada Limited.