After a lot of failure at self-control before, I know that I have an impulse problem. I'm pretty sure it was installed in me by my parents growing up. My mother was really into weight watchers, a lot like a 12 steps thing, and there was a lot of embarassment, ridicule, and constant comparison with others. Impulses were seen as sort of demons, and there were several ways you could defeat them, usually involving oral substitutes, like processed diet food, gum, candy, etc. If these work for you, great, but I only ever found that they work in the short-term. It never addressed the underlying emotional/impulse knee jerk reaction that lands you eating twinkies and watching an entire season of something in a day, and other fun, depressive behavior patterns.
When I quit smoking, I tried all kinds of substitutes, just short of the gum or the patch. None of it worked. Then one day it dawned on me: don't f***in smoke. Whatever you do, just don't smoke. I started to regard the impulse to smoke as something foreign, like a virus or something. I didn't think I was weak or blame myself, I just rationalized it was part of a screwed up culture that values cheap thrills over sustainable healthy practices.
From this, with regard to me eating, I have started to use a "panic" button, which is a two-prong approach. First, I don't eat processed food, ever (still putting this into practice as a way of life, of course). Processing food just adds calories and sucks out nutrition. My wife and I simply fill our house with the ingredients for everything we want, and I've learned to cook efficiently, make sensational meals of pretty much whatever I want, and I keep a calorie journal just to literally watch what goes in. So I know, armed with my journal, that I am eating fine, not overdoing the calories, and getting all the nutrition I need.
The "impulse" I get is for a reward for all my "hard work." And that reward is usually either: Eating processed food at a restaurant, drinking beer at a sports bar, spending money I don't really have, or engaging in other risky behaviors. The wild thing is that I don't really *want* to do any of those, it's just habit. Something tells me I'm missing out on life if I don't get a "reward", when of course the opposite is true. Thanks Mom and Dad....
So now, instead of substitutes, I treat my impulse as something that is quite simply not me. To cement this in the heat of psychological battle, I click my "panic" button whenever the impulse strikes. The "panic" button can be anything really, like a dog training clicker, a literal light, whatever. It's good if it's portable. It sounds silly, but right now mine is a replica of a moon my wife gave me. It lights up when I click a little remote, which is satisfying as something to do with your hands. When the moon comes on, instead of thinking about the impulse as inside my body, I externalize it onto that moon, literally thinking of the impulse as a full moon is to a werewolf. I then refuse to "wolf out", which means I have to sit and gnaw on the urge a little bit, building on my larger goals of my health and what *I* really want, not the urge. It helps dispel the impulse, though, and slowly my habits can be altered (maddeingly slowly, but the frustration lets me know that I'm working and not in denial).
I don't know why, but this really seems to be working, and I only know because it gets harder and harder, and then one day the impulse will have changed or disappeared. It also lets me separate the impulse from self-loathing; it's not me that's weak, it's this stupid habitual impulse that's the problem, and I know it can be defeated. It's exactly how I was finally able to quit smoking. Now I just need to build a clicker/panic button that's really portable so it's satisfying but I don't have lights or noises coming off me in the grocery store when I think about buying snack chips.
