eating triggers

Head Hunger

April 26, 2011 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

Have you ever followed an argument with a friend – or maybe with your Mom – with a trip to the bakery or the closest candy store?

You could already be stuffed to the gills. But, all you can think about is getting that cookie, or candy bar, or bag of pretzels and chowing down – even though you’re not hungry and may or may not actually enjoy what you’re eating.

There’s Real Hunger And There’s Head Hunger

Real hunger or physiological hunger is your body’s way of telling you that it’s time to eat food for nourishment. It’s when you have that empty, rumbling feeling in your stomach, a headache, maybe some lightheadedness. It usually occurs two to four hours after your last meal.

Head hunger or psychological hunger doesn’t have physical symptoms and can happen at any time. It can be triggered by emotional situations, habits — like watching TV, working on the computer or driving in the car — or by food cravings or as a form of procrastination. Whatever triggers your head hunger can make you think you’re hungry when you’re really not.

Emotions: Common Triggers For Eating

Emotions are common triggers for eating. Head hunger is emotional eating usually in response to gremlins like stress, sadness, loneliness, anger, fear, or boredom.

Head hunger also serves as a distraction – the eating it provokes can be a way to distract yourself from difficult situations, projects, and encounters.

The thing is, these feelings and situations are a part of life and eating won’t make them go away. Eating in response to head hunger often keeps you from figuring out what’s causing the feeling in the first place.

“I want chocolate” might really mean “I need comfort” or “I worked my tail off and I really need to be recognized for it.” Those trips back and forth to the fridge or the vending machine might be the ultimate form of procrastination – is there a project that needs to get done that you’re struggling with?

What To Do

Wouldn’t it be great if it was as simple as figuring out what’s causing your head hunger and dealing with it. The fact is, that’s the answer. Eating can’t really satisfy your emotional needs, and left unmet, those needs will trigger your head hunger over and over. So, you overeat, you mentally beat yourself up, you feel awful, and the whole process is triggered once again.

To break the pattern, first stop beating yourself up when you eat in response to head hunger — as opposed to eating because you’re starving and your stomach is growling like crazy. Devise a plan to figure out what caused you to eat in the first place. Try keeping a written record of what happened and how you felt before your head hunger took charge. Looking back at a series of entries might give you a clue. Once you get a handle on your triggers, come up with a plan to deal with them and make a “go-to” list of ways to reward, calm, comfort, and/or distract yourself without eating.

Do You Eat Because You Are Hungry?

August 13, 2010 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

Coney Island Boardwalk, Brooklyn, NY

Are You Really Hungry?

It’s summertime and the living is easy. Picnics, barbecues, a sandwich at the beach are often the order of the day. And what about the ice cream cone, the beer with the burger, the peach pie, and the toasted almond from the Good Humor truck? Vacation often means sun, sand, and eating – whenever. Living is easy, unstructured, and calorically dangerous.
Vacations and free and easy summer days spawn classic scenarios for mindless versus mindful eating. Mindless eating often happens when there is no “structure” and a lack planning – when you give into “head hunger” as opposed to actual physical hunger. When you’re faced with groaning buffet tables, holiday spreads with food on every flat surface, and endless passed hors d’oeuvres at an outdoor wedding, do you have a clue about how much – or even what — you have popped in your mouth?

Why Do You Mindlessly Eat?

Hunger doesn’t prompt most people to overeat. Instead, overeating situations are usually created by family, friends, plate size, packaging, lighting, candles, smells, distractions, environments, and feelings. According to the Mindless Eating website, two studies show that the average person makes about 250 food decisions every day – like deciding between white or whole wheat; sandwich or salad; grilled chicken or tuna; half or whole; kitchen table or chair in front of the TV. That’s about 250 daily opportunities to be mindful or mindless.

What’s Different About Mindful Eating?

Mindful eating means avoiding the shove it in your mouth, non-thinking kind of eating and encourages slower, more fully focused eating based on hunger and your body’s need for food. Armed with a plan rather than attacking whatever is edible, you choose carefully, eat more slowly, and savor your food — not gobbling it as part of multi-tasking, grab and go, or a race to the finish line.
Mindful eating doesn’t mean eating with your back straight, elbows off the table, using the correct fork. It means being mindful: conscious and aware of your choices and your food. You can eat anywhere and be mindful – mindfulness and a plan for what and how much you eat are not dependent on your kitchen table or a restaurant menu. You can be mindful at the beach, at a street fair, and at the office, too.

Stomach Versus Head Hunger

Mindless eating is often prompted by head hunger while mindful eating is largely associated with stomach hunger.
Head hunger is the compulsion to eat when your body isn’t physically hungry — often in response to a learned behavior: i.e., it’s noontime so I have to eat, doesn’t matter how I feel or if I’m hungry. Head hunger comes on suddenly and often takes the form of cravings, eating when you’re not hungry, eating when you think you should be eating, and mindless snacking. It happens at any time, with no physical symptoms, and includes time cues and sensory triggers, like smell, taste, or texture. Obsessing about food, habits (like watching TV, working on the computer, or driving), emotional or personal triggers, and cravings can make you think that you’re hungry when you’re really not.

Physical hunger, or stomach hunger, comes on slowly and usually happens two to four hours after you’ve last eaten. With true stomach hunger you may have an empty or grumbling stomach, lightheadedness, hand tremors, fatigue, or a headache. It’s your body’s way of telling you that it needs fuel and that it’s time to eat. You’re usually satisfied with almost anything – unlike the frequent cravings for sugar, salt, fat that occur with head hunger.

SocialDieter Tip:

Head hunger will eventually go away if you ignore it. Your body is not telling you it needs food for sustenance, rather, your head is talking to you, sometimes quite loudly. With head hunger, try to put off grabbing some food by distracting yourself and ignore it until it goes away. Often a cup of tea or coffee or a glass of water will do the trick as well as some distracting behavior. If your head hunger is screaming at you it may be tough to ignore. If you need to eat something ask yourself when you last ate. If it’s approaching three hours you might be physically hungry in which case you can’t ignore it and it won’t lessen with time. When you eat mindfully you are aware of stomach (physical) hunger versus head (emotional) hunger. You tune into your body’s signals about what, when, and how much to eat, and when to stop eating because you are approaching full and not because your plate its empty.

What Triggers Your Overeating?

July 20, 2010 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

“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!

July 9, 2010 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

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?

July 6, 2010 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

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!