So how do you move beyond the urge to use food to fix feelings of anxiety, anger, or frustration? Emotional eating tends to be a habit, and like any habit it can be broken. It may be hard, especially if you’ve been doing it for a long time, but it is possible.

Here are four tips to help you and your family stop using food as an emotional fix:

1. Make your house healthy– Take a look at your refrigerator and pantry and cut down on your go-to temptations.
2. Figure out what’s triggering emotional eating– The next time you reach for comfort food, ask yourself, “Why do I want this candy bar? Am I really hungry?” If not, try to figure out what emotions you are feeling. Are you stressed, angry, bored, scared, sad, lonely?
3. Find satisfying alternatives– Once you figure out why food makes you feel better, you can come up with alternative behaviors that can help you cope instead of emotional eating.
4. Celebrate success– Changing an emotional eating habit is a process. Some backsliding will happen, so acknowledge when it does and use it as a chance to plan how you’ll deal with the same situation in the future!