Tell me about your relationship with food and I’ll tell you if you’re ever going to shed those extra pounds. The simple truth is, those who are able to lose and keep off weight in a healthy manner have developed a positive, giving relationship with food.

Don’t have one yet? Here are 7 secrets to help you find yours.

1. Acknowledge Your Relationship With Food - Whether you realize it or not, you are connected to food on behavioral, emotional, and spiritual levels. The old way of seeing food as what you eat to stop hunger is not serving you anymore.

By realizing the complexity of how you relate to food, you start to see that it has been the source of your weight difficulties all along.

2. Practice Acceptance - Like any goal you have, you need to feel positive about what you’re trying to accomplish. However, you, and most other people, have looked at your weight, felt pain about what you saw, and continued to keep those negative feelings with you while you tried to lose weight.

You must accept yourself first to lose weight, not the other way around.

3. Start Seeing Foods Equally - Over time, you have come to see certain foods as more valuable than others. That’s the real reason why you’re not getting enough vegetables and healthy foods in your daily life. To stop this, you need to learn to stop judging the foods you come across. Then, start giving them all the appreciation they deserve.

4. Recognize The Source of Food - Food is the energy that keeps us alive. But not all foods are made of the same energy. Some of it offers you positive energy, the kind that helps you get the body you want. Other foods, especially refined and processed ones, have energy that takes away from you and tells your body to hold onto its junk, aka fat.

5. Make Conscious Decisions - It’s time to start turning off the cruise control in your mind and start getting your hands on the wheel. If you truly want to lose weight, you need to be an active participant in seeing how food fits into your life.

Once you start to plan how you can fit better eating in, you’ll be able to apply all the nutritional advice out there in the world.

6. Gain Control of Your Emotions - Emotions have never been a good way to make decisions in business and many other areas of life. So why do you let it happen in your relationship with food? Starting to recognize and break the cycle of emotional decisions is your ticket to making smarter choices even in the face of emotions like boredom and worry.

7. Practice Effortless, Positive, Choices. - The real secret of reaching your weight loss goals is actually learning to enjoy the experience, not just the results. You can make this happen when you remove the struggle, the negativity, and the wrong focus in your relationship with food. Making this change means results that no diet quick tips or metabolism boosters could ever match.