Dieting your butt off, but still not able to lose all the pounds? It could be you're eating more than you realize!

    How is that possible, you say? Experts report it's easier than you think, thanks to our "hefty habits" -- unconscious pairings of food with activities that sometimes cause us to eat more than we realize.

    "Too often we eat on 'auto pilot' -- we associate food with certain activities or even times of the day, and without really paying attention to how much we're consuming, we overeat, " says Warren Huberman, PhD, a psychologist with the NYU medical program for surgical weight loss.

    Whether it's subconsciously crunching chips while surfing the Net, grabbing that 20-ounce bottle of soda every time the phone rings, or sometimes, just automatically pairing two foods together -- like reaching for a chocolate doughnut every time you smell your morning coffee -- experts say old habits die hard, even when we're on a diet.

    "Your brain stores things in a way that makes life easy for you, so if you do things in a certain manner a number of times your brain says, 'OK this is how we do things'; when those habits include food, overeating can become a simple matter of unconscious association," says Huberman.

    Weight control psychologist Abby Aronowitz, PhD agrees: "If a response to a stimulus is rewarded continually, that response quickly becomes connected to the stimulus. So if you always reward the thought of having a cup of coffee with reaching for a doughnut, than those two thoughts become connected in your mind," says Aronowitz, author of Your Final Diet.

    But it's not just associations that are set in our brain. It's also cravings. Huberman tells WebMD that if, for example, we have that coffee and doughnut together enough times, not only are we conditioned to reach for those two items together, our brain actually sets up a craving system to ensure that's what we do.

    "This means if you have coffee and a doughnut every morning for 90 straight mornings, on the 91st morning when you pour that cup of coffee, you are going to be craving a doughnut because those two foods are linked in your brain," says Huberman.

    Cravings, he says, are not random, but rather learned. "You never crave foods you have not tasted. You have to learn certain things in order for your brain to crave it, and when you repeat something enough times the craving becomes part of your brain's repertoire," he says.

    Breaking the Chains That Bind

    Because the first step to breaking any habit is a desire to break it, motivational psychologist Paul P. Baard, PhD, says it's important to understand why you want to change.

    "The building platform is always motivation -- and in order to make it work, the motivation must be intrinsic. The change has to represent benefits you want," says Baard, an associate professor at Fordham University in New York City.joozone.com