2023-08-07 13:14:58
Eating behavior – what, when and how much we eat – is regulated by the brain.
But its basic mechanisms developed a long time ago, when people lived in completely different conditions. For most of human history, food was scarce, so the brain thinks we should eat high-calorie foods whenever we can. And in our time, when food has become available, this can lead to overeating. We tell you how to use the mechanisms of the brain to prevent this.
Go see a doctor
Weight loss without medical indications can lead to serious health problems, including psychological ones. Check with your doctor before restricting your diet.
How the brain and overeating are connected
The mechanisms of the brain that make people eat more than they need were formed in the early stages of evolution. At that time, their main task was to help people survive. Here are the main mechanisms.
The brain does not want to miss the opportunity to eat. For most of its history, mankind has been starving: food was scarce, and it took great effort to get it. Such conditions, scientists believe, forced people to eat at every opportunity, regardless of whether they were hungry or not. It was a smart survival strategy.
Now the problem of hunger, at least in developed countries, is practically solved. If a person does not live below the poverty line, food – albeit of poor quality – is available to him day and night.
Moreover, studies showThe more often we eat sweet and fatty foods, the more we like them. In a recent experiment, one group of volunteers were given high-sugar and high-fat yogurts in addition to their regular diet, and the second group was given low-fat and unsweetened yogurts of the same calorie content. After 8 weeks, the participants in the first group, the usual – not too sweet and fatty – food, began to seem unattractive. But when they saw a milkshake, they noticeably more than people from the control group activated the areas of the brain responsible for the anticipation of pleasure.
The brain struggles with weight loss. In times of famine, even a small loss of body weight can be fatal: a decrease in body fat in a person reduced the chances of survival during those periods when he could not find food for a long time.
The brain is trying to once gained weight did not decrease. With a decrease in body fat, the level of the hormone leptin decreases – this signals the brain to increase the number of calories consumed. It enhances appetite and hunger. This makes the process of weight loss especially painful both from a physiological and psychological point of view.
But this does not mean at all that you will not be able to change your eating habits and stop overeating. To some extent, you can learn to control the process. To do this, you need to correctly respond to stimuli – certain situations, thoughts, emotions. They are the ones who instantly launch automatic desire to eat.
Here are some tips to help you avoid the traps of your brain.
Council number 1
Identify incentives leading to overeating
The stimuli associated with eating behavior can be conditionally divided into universal and individual. Most people react to the first: for example, the look and aroma of baked goods or french fries makes many people want to eat them.
Individual stimuli are those that a particular person encounters in his life. For example, he can’t resist any- certain product associated with his childhood or fond memories. Or in front of pizza, which colleagues order to the office on Fridays.
It is important to know what stimuli—foods and situations—cause you to overeat. They can be determined using a food diary: write down everything that you eat during the day, indicating the amount and in what situations this happens. You can also mark how you feel after each meal: “remained hungry”, “ate full”, “overate”.
After a month, reread the diary and try to identify patterns: under what conditions do you usually eat more than you need. This will be your incentive list.
Once you know which stimuli trigger unwanted behavior, you can try to avoid them. Turn off notifications from food delivery services, block ads on websites so you don’t end up on videos with something appetizing, and don’t walk past a bakery exhaling alluring aromas. As soon as the stimulus associated with any - food disappears, pull to it will be much less. This will generally reduce the amount of food you eat in a day and help you make conscious food choices.
Council number 2
Plan your behavior
Of course, it is impossible to completely eliminate the incentives that lead to overeating from your life. But you can learn not to react so strongly to them.
Think ahead about how you will act if an encounter with a stimulus is unavoidable, such as when going to a restaurant or a supermarket.
Imagine walking past the grocery shelves, ignoring the ones you want to cut down on. And mentally linger longer next to the products, the amount of which in your diet you would like to increase.
As the experiment of American scientists showed, such training is really effective. The volunteers were divided into two groups. The first had to regularly play a virtual game for two months: choose healthy products in the supermarket and make sure that chocolate bars and sugary drinks do not fall into the basket. The other part of the volunteers was a control group and just lived their lives.
By the end of the experiment, the researchers found that the participants in the first group began to refuse high-calorie foods more often in reality.
Scientists explain this by saying that planning and thinking about situations in which we might encounter unwanted stimuli helps change the decision-making mechanism.
Training to give up something, man engages the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for conscious actions and setting long-term goals. It takes control of the limbic system and the amygdala, in which a quick reaction to impulses is born. And when it will be necessary to put goods in a basket not in a virtual, but in a real supermarket, a person out of habit will “turn on” the prefrontal cortex and make a choice consciously.
True, at first it will be difficult: you will need to strictly control your actions and think over ways to avoid food temptations. But over time, another automatic reaction to the stimulus will be fixed and, at the sight of an appetizing dish, you will no longer want to eat it without hesitation.
But it is important that the rules are simple and categorical, for example, “no additional snacks between breakfast and lunch.” In this case, if you encounter a stimulus at a specified time, you will not need to think about your decision and fight the temptation. You will simply refuse the treat in accordance with the rule.
Council No. 3
Learn to Detect Hedonistic Hunger
Sometimes in moments of fatigue, boredom, sadness or anxiety, there is a feeling that you need to urgently have a bite to eat. This is the so-called hedonistic hunger.
Since food provides relief and pleasure, a person develops a habit of reaching out for food whenever it becomes uncomfortable. So over time, a neural pathway is formed that connects negative mood changes and pleasant sensations from delicious food.
To assess how exposed you are to There is a questionnaire “Scale of power of food”, which consists of 15 statements, for example: “I often think about food”, “When I eat my favorite foods, I feel great pleasure”, “If I see food that I like or smell it, I have a strong desire eat.” Your agreement with the statements should be assessed on a scale from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree”.
To distinguish real hunger from hedonistic, it is worth paying attention to the physical condition: only real hunger is characterized by weakness and discomfort in the stomach. Another difference: with hedonistic hunger, you just want to eat something with your favorite flavor combinations of the brain – sugar and fat or sugar, salt and fat, and broccoli, buckwheat or chicken breast are suitable to satisfy the present.
If this is still not real, but hedonistic hunger, it can be satisfied not only with food, but also with any other activity that will close the need for positive emotions. For example, if you are sad, you can just actively move around, listen to your favorite music, do some cleaning, meditate, do a couple of breathing exercises, call a friend and chat with him, get creative.
Council No. 4
Don’t Forget the Flame Effect
The fuse effect is another mechanism that leads to overeating. The bottom line is that as soon as the first piece of food, especially fatty or sweet, enters the mouth, it is already difficult to stop. Dopamine has already begun to be released, you feel pleasure and now you want to continue eating to enhance it. Therefore, it is better to completely exclude unwanted foods from the diet for some - time.
But if you do eat them, try not to rush, and chew your food as thoroughly as possible. The brain needs about 20 minutesto get information about satiety from the stomach and other organs of the gastrointestinal tract. The slower you eat during this time, the less you will eat.
Council No. 5
Put barriers between yourself and food
Although the task of snacking seems simple, in order to achieve it, our brain performs many actions that involve several areas: the prefrontal cortex, the striatum, the hippocampus, and others.
If there are difficulties at one of the stages of access to food, a person who is not really hungry may refuse it. Neuroscientists believethat in this case, the areas of the brain responsible for self-control and rational behavior begin to work more actively.
This mechanism can also be used if you want to reduce the amount of certain foods in your diet. For starters, you can just stop buying them. And when you once again have a desire to feast on them, the reluctance to leave the house, spend time and energy on cooking can overpower him.
Although this obstacle is now being eliminated by food delivery services, new barriers arise when using them – economic ones. Pay attention to how much you will have to overpay for courier services, service work and packaging, especially during a period of high demand, and you may decide to cancel the order.
Another way is not to keep in sight the foods that make you crave. It is better to hide them from yourself: say, put somewhere deep in the kitchen cabinets.
But on the way to the food that you want to eat more often, ideally there should be no obstacles at all. For example, if you want to increase the amount of vegetables in your diet, store them already chopped in the refrigerator.
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