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Don’t miss meals. Missed meals lead to much greater cravings for addictive foods. Eat extra portions of soup for the first two weeks while you are going through sugar withdrawal.

Whatever happens, never, ever keep your favourite addictive foods (such as chocolate) in the home, not even for your children.

Have a treat every day. It should be something you like but are not normally addicted to. For instance, if you used to eat chocolate bars every day, replace them with home-made hot chocolate drinks. The ‘comfort factor’ won’t be anything like 100 per cent at first, but after about two weeks it will reach the 80-90 per cent level. Commercial hot chocolate mixes are very high in sugar, so make your own by whisking cocoa powder and a little raw sugar into hot low-fat dairy milk or rice milk. Add a dash of vanilla for extra flavour. Every time you find yourself craving chocolate, take your mind off it by going to make yourself one of these drinks. Or eat a bowl of soup!

If you have consumed a lot of sugary foods and drinks in the recent past, you should take a good quality daily multivitamin with minerals (including chromium). This will help restore and rebalance your system and give your hormones the best chance of maintaining your blood sugar on an even keel, which will help control physical craving sensations.

addiction, not everyone finds it possible to cut down or stop eating comfort foods straight away, even if they follow a diet that leaves them never feeling hungry.

Food addictions can be as difficult to overcome as addictions to alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Chemical changes—perhaps the release of endorphins—occur in your body on eating the addictive food. These changes are experienced as pleasurable and comforting sensations, and the addiction comes from associating the food with these sensations. You can even begin to feel mildly depressed when the pleasant sensations wear off, and this can cause insatiable cravings that keep you eating the problem food, just as nicotine withdrawal symptoms—no matter how mild—keep people smoking.

Since most addictive foods are high in sugar, the depression may be due to the strong dip in blood sugar that occurs in some people a few hours after eating sugary foods. Eating or drinking something sweet provides an instant boost, but it starts the vicious circle all over again. A deficiency of the mineral chromium substantially aggravates blood sugar problems. Chromium is mostly found in whole-grain foods and gets very depleted when you consume a lot of sugary foods and drinks.