oes the rocky road of life drive you to find solace in Rocky Road ice cream? What steers you to the freezer? How do you turn off your eating engine? Is your appetite on auto-pilot?

Hey, I know it's December and we've all been stuffing ourselves like we're Thanksgiving turkeys, but there's no time like the present to pause and tune up our self-awareness-especially in the appetite department. Appetite, or our desire for food, is stimulated by our environment, behavior, and even biology.

The biological part of appetite is hunger, which is that internal feeling (it can come from your stomach or your head) that drives you to seek out food and eat it. Hunger helps us decide what, when, and how much we eat, but it is often ignored because it is so easily trained to respond to external cues. However, the fact that hunger is adaptable is good news for those of us who could benefit from changing our eating habits.

The opposite end of the appetite equation is satiety. I know that's a funny word, but it perfectly describes the crux of the appetite issue. Satiety is the biological state of feeling satisfied enough with the amount of food you ate to stop eating. Most people don't listen to that signal that says "Stop! I've had enough." It's not that some of you are missing that signal; it's more probable that, like your hunger, you're ignoring it. Perhaps it gets drowned out by the television or the family argument or the din of traffic on the road. Furthermore, habitually ignoring hunger, skipping meals and overeating or bingeing can interfere with cues to stop eating. When you are tuned into your eating, you find that the factors that influence your satiety are how food looks, tastes, dissolves and feels in your mouth, the nutrients and calories it packs, and how much volume you eat.

Volume is actually a major player in ending your meal. Let's face it, the name of the game of weight loss and maintenance is feeling satisfied while eating fewer calories. The foods you choose can make a big difference in your weight control strategy. Several studies by nutrition researcher Barbara Rolls have shown that eating a large volume of food with a small number of calories is much more satisfying than eating the same number of calories in a small volume of food. This is a concept called energy density; a food with low energy density has just a few calories per ounce, and a food with high energy density has a lot of calories per ounce. Basically, it benefits you to track down foods high in water, because water increases volume without adding calories. Fiber also adds volume and a small amount of calories to food, making it bulky and satisfying.

Water and fiber is the magical combination that helps create feelings of satiety. The best examples of low energy density foods are fruits, vegetables and whole grains, while foods high in fat and low in water, like cheese and potato chips, have high energy density.

If you're thinking that drinking a glass of water with your bag of chips will help balance things out, you're wrong. Those studies by Rolls also show that drinking water with energy-dense foods doesn't make a difference in how much people eat. However, if water is incorporated into a food, like when the ingredients in a chicken and rice casserole are cooked into a soup, people eat about 100 calories less of the soup than the casserole.

Truthfully, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains are only the partial answer to the satiety question. You and I both know from experience that eating a big salad will fill you up in the short term, but you'll be hungry before your next meal rolls around if you're not careful to balance out your salad by adding protein, another high-satiety nutrient. Protein can help to sustain your feeling of fullness for several hours. Try to stay away from foods with low moisture content, like crackers, cookies, and croutons, since they have little influence on making you feel full. Another way to be aware of this concept is to try to avoid highly processed foods and focus on fresh produce, lean meats, nonfat dairy products, and whole grains and beans.

Now that you understand the tangible part of feeling full and reducing hunger, you also need to understand how to deal with the more abstract parts of appetite.

Your eating environment can influence both your hunger and your satiety. Some of you may need to change your environment in order to change your eating habits. Turn off the television, put down the book, get out of the car, and move away from your computer-these are distractions from the task you should be concentrating on (traffic and advertisements for food, for example, may be appetite triggers for you). Set a place for yourself at the table. Put your food on a plate and your napkin on your lap, even if you're eating alone. When it's time to eat, you need to focus on eating. Often, the first bite or two of food tastes the best, and pleasure diminishes with each subsequent bite. If you can really take the time to focus on your food, you will have an easier time focusing on your satiety. You can also use smaller plates and serve yourself smaller portions to reduce the amount you ultimately eat and feel satisfied with. Studies with children and adults have found that the more food a person is offered, the more they will eat. Kids whose macaroni and cheese portions were doubled at lunchtime ate 25% more than the standard portion they were served the previous day. They took much larger bites when there was more food in front of them, and they did not compensate for the extra calories by eating less at other meals. However, when they were allowed to serve themselves on the third day, the kids only took a standard portion. This should be a good incentive to stay away from restaurants that serve enormous portions, especially buffets.

Emotional eating, or eating in response to feelings other than hunger, may also interfere with your appetite. Keeping a food journal can help you identify emotional eating and other eating patterns, like the times of day when you're most hungry and the times when you're not hungry but you still eat. It has been proven that people who use food journals are more successful at losing weight and keeping it off. Journaling forces you to "own" your behavior and the foods you eat. Once you identify your emotional eating times, plan a different activity, like a brisk walk, for that time of day. Pay attention and learn to recognize the circumstances under which you're not actually hungry but you want to eat. Sit down and make a list of all the activities you are fond of that don't involve eating. Put them away and when the urge to munch mindlessly arises, refer to your list and choose an activity you enjoy doing.

One final strategy for getting in touch with your appetite is to get in touch with your body. Exercise not only burns calories, regular exercisers tend to eat fewer calories overall. It seems that exercise is a natural appetite suppressant. Meditation and yoga, a moving meditation, are excellent ways to relieve the emotions that lead to emotional eating. Mind-body techniques such as these are helpful for increasing self-awareness, meaning they can help you get in touch with your true feelings of hunger and satiety.

The road to satiety is a short one, but it will take some work to get there. Appetite is a complex mechanism that is different for everyone, but if you can appraise your eating to figure out where you make your diet detour, you can easily get back on track. Learning to listen to your hunger and satiety may be exactly what you need for life-long weight control, but you may also need to incorporate more low-energy dense foods in your diet, change your eating environment, exercise more regularly, or learn to meditate or practice yoga before you get there.