If you deal with a powerful emotional eating habit, you’re not alone. For many years I did as well, and I work with plenty of women who come to me for help with their own emotional eating battles.

This may seem harder to manage than other aspects of weight loss quickly, creating a healthier lifestyle and getting yourself on track to have a happier, more balanced life full of health. Certainly emotional eating sometimes makes incorporating diet and exercise into your life more challenging — in part because so many of us grew up in families where food was an expression of love or where the most accepted way of expressing our feelings was by eating. And we may not have witnessed many healthy habits either.

When I was growing up, every family event was all about the meal being served for the occasion, and I remember my lovely grandmother (who was obese and dealt with many health challenges in her life, including a really tough run with colon cancer) always overdoing it on the food she served — making enough food and enough different types of food to feed a not-so-small army, which we often ended up eating even though it was far too much and not healthy either.

Most of us women (in a family with lots of females) all took that focus on eating to heart, and I went on to make money during college and afterward for some time as a professional baker and dessert maker. I thought food was a part of who I was as a person, in fact, for a very, very long time. But I also grew more and more overweight, sicker and sicker, and my lifestyle had to change or else I was going to spend the rest of my years taking increasingly frightening amounts of very potent medications just to barely manage my symptoms. So change I did, and one of the things I had to tackle first and foremost was my relationship with food so that I could lose my emotional eating habit. Because no matter what, to lose weight, you do have to change your eating and reduce how many calories you eat. (And to lose weight healthfully, you have to replace unhealthy foods with healthy ones too, which happen to have fewer calories too — a nice side effect!)

The good news is that while emotional eating can certainly be challenging, it doesn’t have to be the way you live your life forever. I’m living proof, and I help clients improve their relationships with food as well all the time.

In fact, there are conscious steps you can take to eliminate your emotional eating habit, and I recently shared them all in a teleseminar I gave for my Inner Circle Coaching Club. You can access this Learning Module on conquering your emotional eating habit as a member in my Inner Circle.

Some simple things that may work for you right away include:

1) Asking yourself before you eat whether you’re hungry or lonely/frustrated/bored. Often that’s all it takes to avoid overeating and avoid weight gain — knowing the underlying emotions and working through them instead of trying to mask them with food.

2) Being mindful for the next few days of whether you’re eating due to real hunger or because you want comfort. If the latter, what else could you use to comfort yourself? Foods aren’t the answer — not even healthy ones. They’re like a band-aid over a wound that won’t heal on its own.

3) Working to avoid as much stress as possible or otherwise get upset to the point that you’re inclined to overeat for emotional reasons. You don’t have to make yourself gain body fat just because you’re upset, and your eating habits while under stress are probably far less optimal than they are in normal conditions. (And if stress is the norm, are there some larger shifts you can make?)

4) Knowing that food cravings aren’t always about emotional eating habits — they’re also sometimes physiological. Many women I work with initially feel that most of their overeating is due to emotional stress, and yet invariably it turns out that they have certain trigger foods that cause them severe withdrawal symptoms (not just cravings, but also depression symptoms, irritability, anxiety and other emotional symptoms) when they stop eating them, which is a sign NOT to eat these foods … again, no matter how healthy they are under normal conditions.

Certainly working on the underlying causes is important as well, but often just being mindful of the moments when you’d otherwise reach for food without actually being hungry can often impact your weight for the better. The most important thing to know as a current emotional eater is that even if you’ve struggled in the past with your emotional eating habit, you can take active steps to eliminate it entirely.