Eat Out Eat Well

eating cues

What Do Crossing The Street And Eating Have in Common?

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Look Both Ways

Don’t you look both ways before you cross the street — or shouldn’t you?  That’s called being mindful of your surroundings and potential problems – like a car or bike speeding toward you.

Check In With Yourself

The same thing is true with eating:  check in with yourself and ask if you’re really hungry.  Is your stomach growling and your blood sugar low?  Or is it the wafting smell of the freshly baked bread coming from the open door of a bakery or the sight of just out of the oven chocolate chip cookies that creates an irresistable urge to eat  – even if you’ve just had a good sized and satisfying lunch.

There’s the rub: in situations like that you are eating in response to external cues (what you see, hear, smell, or even think) rather than checking in with your body and determining if you are actually hungry.

Be Mindful

It’s called mindful eating for good reason:  you are being mindful, or thoughtful, about whether you really need or want to eat versus eating because your emotions are sending you “feed me” messages.   You know, the kind of messages that make you scarf down the mini snickers bars and the Reese’s peanut butter cups (and then some)  from your kids’ Halloween candy or propel you to taste (big serving size tastes, of course) of all three pies Aunt Mary had for Thanksgiving.

Make Your Decision

Try to let your body talk to you – and then listen to it.  There will always be occasions — certain celebrations come to mind — when it may be important or the right thing to do to eat a piece of cake or a cookie or an ice cream cone.

Before the food starts its path to your mouth, stop and ask yourself if you are really hungry or if you have head hunger  — the urge rather than the need to eat because your emotions and external cues are telling you that you should. Answer the question and proceed accordingly.

What Triggers Your Overeating?

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“No, no, no, I’m not hungry,” you say to yourself – and, five minutes later you have a lap full of crumbs and a powdered sugar mustache.

Sound familiar?  Why, oh why, does this happen?  What’s with the loss of control over eating?

According to David Kessler, MD (The End of Overeating), 50% of obese people, 30% of overweight people, and 20% of healthy weight people say they have a loss of control over eating.

Eating Triggers:  Starting a course of events

A trigger is something that sets a course of events in motion, like overeating.

Eating triggers generally fall into three separate categories: food, feelings, and the environment.

Trigger Food

  • a specific food that sets off a course of overeating where you lose control and eat an excessive amount
  • usually a combo of sugar and fat – like brownies or gooey cookies – or a combo of fat and salt – have you downed your popcorn in the movies, lately?
  • Don’t confuse your food triggers with your favorite foods (the ones that you really like), your comfort foods (ones that you link to home and happiness), or food cravings (when you want a food you haven’t had in a while)
  • a true food trigger is the actual food, not a feeling or place that triggers the out of control eating – think:  an open bag of chips – bet you can’t eat just one regardless of where you are eating or how you are feeling

Trigger Feeling

  • an emotion, good or bad, that causes you to overeat
  • anxiety and sadness are common triggers
  • food triggers prompt overeating of a specific food;  general out of control overeating — the kind where food is often shoved in the mouth as quickly as possible in large quantities – can be precipitated by an emotional trigger

Trigger Environment

  • a specific situation or place that starts a period of overeating
  • common examples might be walking into a movie theater (popcorn), going to a buffet restaurant (one or two helpings of everything), attending a sporting event (how many hot dogs?) or visiting a relative (cookies, pie, and cake?)

Eating Triggers Are All Around You

Bottom Line – eating triggers are commonplace. When you bump up against some of yours, recognize them for what they are and have a strategies to deal with them. 

Often the triggers are linked – this happens often, sometimes by design.  Think about the sugar/fat and salt/fat triggers and fast food restaurants, desserts in fancy restaurants, your local bakery, the gas station convenience store.  What do they have in common?  Lots of food with sugar/fat and salt/fat combinations.   They stare you in the face wherever you turn and at whatever hour.  Stir in some feelings and emotions, a not infrequent occurrence, and you have the perfect set-up for overeating.

Ways To Outsmart Food Triggers

  • Figure out which food makes you lose control.  Is it potato chips, chocolate chip cookies, ice cream, or mac and cheese?  We all have our particular triggers.
  • What kinds of feelings make you run for the fridge?  Is it when you are sad, anxious, really happy, or just procrastinating?  Once you can identify the feeling, try to substitute a behavior other than eating – maybe a walk or a project.  Make a deal with yourself:  if I do X then I can eat Y.  But you have to do X first!
  • Be savvy and know when you are in the emotional danger zone where you are on the brink of rapidly spiraling out of eating control.Educate yourself about which kinds of foods are hidden saboteurs – or maybe not so hidden.  Beware the sugar/fat, salt/fat, or sugar/fat/salt combos.
  • Educate yourself about which kinds of foods are hidden saboteurs – or maybe not so hidden.  Beware the sugar/fat, salt/fat, or sugar/fat/salt combos.
  • Know your environmental triggers.  If the gas station convenience store screams candy bar then pump your gas at a gas station with no store.  If you have a history of overeating at X restaurant then go to Y instead.  If you know that you always overeat at Aunt Mary’s (could be all three triggers:  food, feelings, and environment are operational at her house) then have a strategy or plan in place to handle the situation.  Or maybe invite her to your house.
  • Keep the darn trigger foods out of your house.  Or, if they have to be there for other family members, or maybe for a party, make them difficult to get to.  Put them in the basement or the garage.  Make them inconvenient or really difficult to get to.  Not only is out of sight out of mind operational, we also tend to be lazy.  The more effort you have to exert to get to the food, the less likely you are to eat it.
  • This is a tough one:  sometimes you have to avoid thinking, talking and reading about food. Brain imaging research suggests that the addictive response of the brain to food could by calmed by not thinking about food. Obviously, you can’t be abstinent from food – you need to eat – but long conversations about it, might be more than your brain can bear before you succumb to the bakery or vending machine.  Don’t linger in the grocery store and skip the gourmet shop that opened three blocks away.
  • And, the time tested – wait at least 15 minutes then allow yourself to have the food – often works. Better yet, wait 15 minutes, try to create a diversion to get out of your trigger feeling, and change your environment – get out of the kitchen or away from the bakery aisle.

Table For 8? You Might Eat 96% More!

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No kidding.  You tend to eat for a longer amount of time — and eat more — when you’re with people you like compared to when you eat alone.  It could be because you mindlessly nibble while someone else talks, you’re using the good manners you were taught in fifth grade about not letting someone else eat alone, or you’re just having fun and enjoying your food. Most of us tend to stay at the table longer when we’re with others.   Bottom line:  The longer you stay at the table, the more you eat.

Losing Track

Here’s the other thing:  friends and family influence what you eat.  Sometimes, it’s so easy to get involved with the conversation (or argument) that all the monitoring of what goes into your mouth goes out the window.  Look down at your plate.  Did you ever wonder where all the cookies went or how you managed to work your way through the mile high dish of pasta or the four pieces of pizza?  How many tastes did you take of everyone else’s meal and dessert?  Those tastes aren’t like invisible ink.  Those calories count, too.

Who Sets the Pace?

You tend to mimic your table companions.  They eat fast, you eat fast. They eat a lot, you eat a lot. Ever wonder why you look at some families or couples and they’re both either heavy or slender?  As Brian Wansink, PhD says in his book, Mindless Eating, “birds of a feather eat together.”

96% More

Wansink reports on a study that shows how strong the tendency is to increase the amount that you eat when you eat with others.  Compared to eating alone, you eat, on average:

  • 35% more if you eat with one other person
  • 75% more with four at the table
  • 96% more with a group of seven or more.

SocialDieter Tip:

Think about who you are eating with – and why you’re eating with them.  If you want to have a blast and don’t care about how much you eat – eat with a big group and chow down.  But, if you want to be careful about what and how much you eat, think about eating lunch with a salad (dressing on the side, please) friend rather than the large pepperoni pizza group.  Remember, without thinking about it, you tend to adjust your eating pace to that of your companions.  So, sit next to the slow eaters rather than the gobblers if you are trying to control how much goes into your mouth.

Why Do You Still Eat More . . . Even When You’re Stuffed?

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You’ve been eating all day.  Eating everything – a bagel for breakfast, a chesse Danish for a midmorning snack, lunch with some friends.  This is followed by  a latte in the afternoon – and why not a cute cupcake to go with – or perhaps it’s a workday and you amble down to the hall to the vending machine or the snack room.  Oh, and it’s someone’s birthday so there’s that delicious birthday cake sitting in the middle of the table.  A little nibble of some cheese around six.  Uh oh.  Dinner plans that night – how can you eat more?

Somehow There Always Seems To Be Room

Into the restaurant.  A darn good one.  Good company, too.  How can you not go for it?  The food is supposed to be phenomenal.  You’re not hungry, but you eat, and eat.  Appetizer, entrée, bread, salad, and then it’s time for dessert. But dessert sounds appealing. And the chocolate whatchamacallit is what this restaurant is known for. You order it and eat it – every last fork full.

What Gives (certainly not your waistband)?

Amazingly, the signal to stop eating is usually not because your stomach is full (except in some extreme cases), but, according to Brian Wansink, PhD, author of the book, Mindless Eating,  a combination of things like how much you taste, chew, swallow, how much you think about the food you are eating, and how long you’ve been eating.

Incredibly, the faster most people eat, the more they eat. Eating quickly doesn’t give your brain the chance to get the message that you’re not hungry any more.  Research shows that it takes up to 20 minutes for your body and brain to get the message — a satiation signal — and realize that you’re full.  Think how much you can eat in that time span of 20 minutes – a burger, fries, pie, pizza, ice cream.  This calorie fest is all in added time — the time after your stomach is full but your brain hasn’t gotten the message yet.

Twenty Minutes Or Less

Research has shown that Americans start and finish their meals — and clear the table — in less than 20 minutes.  A study published in the journal Appetite, found that people eating lunch by themselves in a fast food restaurant  finish in 11 minutes, they finish in13 minutes in a workplace cafeteria, and in 28 minutes at a moderately priced restaurant.  Eating with three other people takes about twice as long – which ends up still being a really short chunk of time.

SocialDieter Tip:

Slow down when you eat.  Give your brain a chance to catch up.  How many times have you devoured what you’ve made or bought for lunch and then, almost immediately, decided that you’re still hungry?  So, you eat a whole bunch more – once again in a short period of time.  Then, about half an hour later, as your belly feels like it’s going to explode and you can’t unbutton any more buttons on your pants – you realize that you should have stopped before the seconds.  With slower eating (and maybe as some research suggerst, more chewing) and better pacing, your brain has a chance to synch its signals with the messages generated by putting food in your stomach.  You can even make yourself get up from the table and do something else – and promise yourself if you’re still hungry in 20 minutes you can have more.  If you’re in a restaurant, it’s the perfect time to excuse yourself and go to the rest room.  In most cases, after the 20 or so minutes, your belly and brain are both happy and you won’t want more to eat. Calories and uncomfortably expanding stomach saved!

See It: Eat It

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Not Hungry To Hungry In No Time Flat

How can it be that you’re sitting in your house at about 9PM, nice and content from a good dinner.  You’re satisfied and not hungry.  Whoops, hold the phone.  An ad comes on television for a fast food burger topped with melted cheese and bacon.  Really crispy French fries tag along and so does a strawberry milkshake.  Bingo.  You are hungry and cannot get the thought of that burger, shake, and fries out of your head.  (If we really looked into this, your hunger might be head hunger not stomach hunger.)  It’s a bit of I want what I want and I want it now syndrome.

Can An Ad Change Your Eating?

Can food ads really change the way you eat? You bet they can – or a whole lot of multi-million dollar advertising campaigns wouldn’t exist.

According to the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, there’s no doubt that food marketing affects eating behavior. Continued exposure to many ads over time stimulates your desire for what’s being touted. They found that the foods that are advertised the most are what people say they like and buy the most. That wouldn’t be so bad if the marketing efforts were for healthy foods instead of junk – or, to be a little nicer, food of lesser nutritional quality.

What Is The Norm?

Advertising psychologically affects what you think is the norm. The visual and emotional effects of TV advertising, along with a story line and music, really gets to you — especially when you’re tired and plopped down in front of the TV.  Your ability to control your impulses is decreased.

There’s more:

  • Advertising affects your preference for various categories of food.
  • When you see more fast food commercials you want to eat more fast food than people who don’t see as many commercials.
  • People who are exposed to food ads end up eating more food overall.
  • When people see an ad before tasting a food they like the taste of that food more.
  • Food marketing affects what might be considered “typical behavior,”   for instance, when people see fast food ads and then believe that their neighbors eat fast food more frequently than they do.

What’s The Message (Is It Good Or Bad)?

Food marketers have a lot of power.  The tricky thing is to harness that power for a good purpose rather than for hawking nutritionally poor food with a large caloric bang for the buck. Unfortunately, the majority of ads tip the unhealthy end of the scale by advertising fast food, drinks, and snacks  often accompanied by unhealthy eating messages such as young men should eat big portions of meat so they “eat like men” and that it’s a good idea to have a “fourth meal of the day” (sweetened cereal at night springs to mind).

Kid Stuff

Kids are impressionable and for them, food marketing packs a very powerful punch. A recent study (2/10) in the American Journal of Public Health showed that childhood obesity is directly related to children’s exposure to commercials that advertise unhealthy foods.

According to Rudd, the average child sees 15 food commercials each day.  It takes only one commercial to make them want a particular food. Grocery store marketing takes direct aim at kids with TV characters on packages and shelf displays at their eye level. The internet is jam packed with food marketing on children’s websites and with online games that feature food products within the game.

Fortunately, there is an Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children which will make food marketing recommendations to Congress this summer, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest has developed “Guidelines for Responsible Food Marketing to Children” (www.cspinet.org).


SocialDieter Tip:

Food marketing is everywhere – and it affects your eating behavior. Be aware that it’s going to get to you – if you let it.  Try to cut down your exposure.  It’s insidious so heads up.  Don’t be taken in.  Some of it is up front – like TV commercials –and some isn’t – like product placement in television shows and the movies.  How can you not crave a fast food burger and fries or a glazed donut when you watch your favorite character happily munching away? The thought gets in your head and it just yanks your chain until you raid the fridge or head out to grab whatever it is that advertising has successfully planted.  Steer clear of the commercials or have diversionary tactics or food.  96% fat free microwave popcorn, Skinny Cow ice cream cones or cups, fruit, 100 calorie English muffins with fat free or low fat cream cheese and all fruit or sugar free jam are some suggestions for reasonable calorie controlled snacks.  Or, take the dog for a walk – just stay away from the corner deli.

Don’t swallow what an ad is preaching (and trying to sell).  Inform yourself about your choices – check out the nutritional content by going online and reading labels.  Give yourself license to make healthy picks – in restaurants and in the supermarket.  The choice of what you eat is yours – not the food company’s or the ad agency’s.