This week’s Juice video episode featured Deb Roby, who has some great tips on staying motivated to eat healthy.  Because it's one thing to say: “okay, from now on I’m ditching the sugar and the refined flour and transfats and I’m going to eat nothing but whole natural healthy foods!"  But quite another to deal with the grim reality that for many of us, chocolate cake and nachos have it all over brown rice and grilled salmon and steamed broccoli.

How to stay on track in the face of temptation?  Thanks to Deb and some of the awesome Blogher bloggers out there, here are some ideas for dealing with the dilemma of  how to handle Evil Treats and stay on track.

Plan Your Indulgences!

Perhaps you're lucky and you don’t even like foods with a lot of sugar and saturated fat and refined grains.  I find this personally hard to imagine, like giving up breathing air or sleeping at night.  In fact, many of us feel so deprived if we have to say no to our favorite foods forever, that we've discovered we need to include them occasionally.  But how to keep them only occasional?    One trick, according to Deb, is to tie some of your occasional indulgences to an event that has nothing to do with your emotions or your cravings.  Her example?  She gets fried chicken when she changes the oil in her car!

Indulge on Vacation When You Can Walk it Off.

Jennette wrote a post recently over at Pasta Queen about her European vacation.  (Jealous, who me? Totally!)  And what were some of the things she ate over the course of 8 days?  “A Nutella Panini. Crepes with ice cream and chocolate sauce. A Cornish pasty. A custard filled donut with chocolate icing and white chocolate flakes. A Kit Kat McFlurry. A McCrispy. Pain au chocolat. Fish and chips. A whole pizza. A praline tart.”

But Jennette lost four pounds during that time because she walked and walked and walked and walked!  Unless you travel constantly, combining vacation splurges with fun vacation exercise options (hiking, biking, sightseeing, etc) preserves the fun of travel, the sensual pleasures of "forbidden" foods, and you don't need to beat yourself up about it!

Find Alternatives to Stress Eating.

It's one thing to make lots of healthy choices, then mindfully eat and enjoy planned treat that you know you have coming to you.  But it's another to eat dinner over the sink or find yourself eating coconut cookies when you don't even like coconut cookies!

In a great post over at CaregiverLand, these and other stress eating habits are described in the context of Caregiving demands.  But feeling stressed and having no time are things we all can relate to!  Fortunately the post suggests lots of great alternatives, like mini-meals, smoothies, crockpot meals, and stress-busting evening walks.

Find the Stop Button

In an inspirational post at Lynn's Weigh, Lynn describes the process of finding her “stop” button to put the brakes on uncontrolled snacking.  As she says, "it’s always there, I just lose sight of it sometimes."  For her, the key was sorting through the emotional issues.

"As I drove home from Pittsburgh, I separated the food mood from the emotional mood and waded through the muck...Remembering for the 1 millionth time that I am in control of what I put in my mouth, I’ve got a cleaner playing field on which to live. My strategy is this: when I think about food and I’m not hungry, I think more deeply and try to pinpoint the source of that desire."

Focus on Adding, not just Subtracting

Strangely enough, the health vs. taste dichotomy is sometimes a false one. There are actually delicious things to eat  out there that are good for us!  Alas, it  sometimes takes more effort and a spirit of adventure to find them.  In the video, Deb describes Farmers market experiments (some successful, and some not!).

How do you folks deal with the temptations of junky treats?  Ban them?  Plan them? Any helpful tips or blog links?