1. Regain a sense of real physiological hunger: As babies we know instinctively when our stomachs are empty and we need food, and also when our stomachs are full and we should stop eating. Over the years however, we ‘un-learn’ this by starting to eat in response to all sorts of other things – emotional hunger, boredom, stress, habit, seeing food, walking past the fridge etc – everything other than real physiological hunger. This has been likened to driving in a car with a full tank of petrol, but stopping to try and put in more petrol - simply because we happen to be driving past a petrol station. 2. Learn to manage your emotions appropriately: Mental health is not about always feeling positive emotions – that would be weird. Our emotions are influenced by circumstance, and therefore we should be feeling sad in sad situations, feeling happy in happy situations, and feeling guilty, angry or scared when it is appropriate to do so. The important word here, is ‘appropriate’ – not just in ensuring that the emotion is the ‘correct’ one for the situation, but also that we are feeling it to an appropriate intensity. This is key to mental health. An example of an appropriate negative emotion might be frustration in traffic. Rage however in the same situation would not be appropriate. Feeling disappointed when the scale does not reflect what you hoped it would this week is also fine, but depression is not. (Again, there are indeed times when it is entirely normal , appropriate and even helpful to feel depressed, but standing on the scale is not one of them). In short, the second skill for challenging comfort eating is that of learning to regulate our emotions to an appropriate intensity, given the situation. 3: Learn to sit with appropriate, negative emotions: Once you have ensured that the negative emotion you are feeling is in fact appropriate to the situation, you then need to be able to ‘sit with it’ for a while. We don’t like to feel uncomfortable, so as soon as we feel anything negative we instinctively rush to do something that will help us feel better. Some people drink alcohol, some work, others over-exercise to feel better, and of course many people ‘bury’ their unwanted emotions under food. But if the emotion you are feeling is indeed appropriate to the situation, you should not be rushing to change it – and especially not using a tactic that will accumulate more problems for you over time.   In summary, the above three skills are critical to learning to change comfort eating, and like all skills, they respond to practice. By this point you are probably thinking ‘yes – but how?!’, so over the next few weeks I will write about each one in turn – pointing you in the right direction for starting to develop them.