st step to breaking any habit is a desire to break it, motivational psychologist Paul P. Baard, PhD, says it's important to understand why you want to change.

"The building platform is always motivation -- and in order to make it work, the motivation must be intrinsic. The change has to represent benefits you want," says Baard, an associate professor at Fordham University in New York City.

If you're simply trying to please a spouse, a parent, or even your doctor, Baard says success will be harder to achieve.

Once you're clear on your motivations, experts say the next step is to identify where your hefty habits really lie.

"Do you always plop down on the same spot on the couch, with the same television show on and the same bowl of chips in your hand?" asks Huberman. If so, he says it's a good bet you will eat all the chips, even if you didn't plan on doing so.

"Behavioral eating really is a lot like links in a chain; when you continually find yourself in a situation that is conducive to eating, or conducive to eating a particular food, and you follow through by eating that food, you reinforce a chain link of behaviors that is very much like being on autopilot, says Huberman.

To begin to change that behavior, he says, break just one link in the chain.

"Change the time you eat, the TV show you are watching, the bowl you put the chips in - eat with your left hand instead of your right hand. The point is to make your brain work a little so that every bite you take is a conscious decision and not a learned, automatic behavior," says Huberman.

What can also help: Keeping a food diary, and then studying it to see how you may be associating certain foods not so much with hunger, but with activities, events, or even times of the day.

"A lot of people eat by external cues. They see a clock and they eat, they hear a theme song come on the TV and they eat, a lot of eating is based on associations and not really hunger," says Huberman.

Substitute Good Habits for Bad Ones

While changing environmental cues is one approach, another is to keep the habit but try to make it healthier.

"As a strategy it's known as behavioral intervention. You substitute something that is good for you and that you like for something that is not so good for you, but you also like," says Aronowitz.

So if, for example, you always have a glass of milk and chocolate chip cookies before going to bed, when bedtime rolls around keep the milk, the glass, the cookie plate, and the place where you normally have the snack all the same -- but substitute a chocolate graham cracker for the high-fat, high-calorie cookie.

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