How do you curb cravings?

I had the same problem! Don't keep junk food in your house, but allow yourself to have some once or twice a week. That being said, when you go to buy it, make sure you've eaten before hand or you could find yourself filling your trolley with all sorts of bad food.

I'm getting old and slowly winning the battle of attrition with my weight I hope (at last?) but there are a few things I've noticed along the way.

Some people, when they go on a diet, become immediately obsessed with food. They think about it, they wallow in it. They plan all manner of meals and snacks and treats and motivations and goals... and basically, are exposing a kind of sick relationship they have with food.

The trick when dieting is to think LESS about food, not more. And the easiest way to do that is to make certain rigid rules:

(a) always the same breakfast. Routine is vital to forgetting. habit is unconscious.
(b) prearrange a lunch, take lunch to work and leave your wallet at home. Lack of opportunity breeds lack of temptation. If you know you can't have a thing you don't give it head-room.
(c) don't plan treats and snacks. The more often your mouth has stuff in it, the more obsessed you become with having stuff in your mouth. Eat your alotted number of meals a day and no more.
(d) prearrange dinner, organise it in MFP food section before eating it. Juggle options until it comes in under calories. you may 'gain space' by swopping peas for broccoli, for instance, so that you can have that hot chocolate for supper that you love so well.
(e) end on a high note. If there is a little treat you can give yourself for supper, for me it is hot chocolate and 2 shrewsbury biscuits, then make it happen, lock it in, make it part of your ritual. it need not require many calories, but it needs to be your only treat for the day.

I am on a diet at the moment which has 2 maintenance days a week which is key, because I'm never very long away from being able to eat that chocolate, or that biscuit, or that cake. I can't have it today but I can have it on Sunday... So on a Wednesday and on a Sunday i may eat maintenance calories but on the other days I eat the calories calculated by my diet. The system involves dieting more ruthlessly at the beginning of the diet, when motivation is high and calorie stores are huge, and then as time goes by and weight comes down, raising the daily calorie allowance slowly towards a maintenance level until finally you're balancing out, smoothly, into maintenance at goal weight.

Perhaps if you have trouble with temptation, cravings, needs, then this is the way for you. Your fat cells can only express fat at a certain rate, so the fewer you have of them (ie the less you weigh) the less fat your body is capable of offering up. If you are at a large deficit the only thing your body can do to meet those calorie needs is consume some other part of you that you may not want to lose.