5 Reasons Why We Overeat

i more than agree with all of the listed reasons that one might overeat; however i think there is one reason that is very important- self worth- when i cook dinner, its just for my boyfriend and myself, but i seem to eat more than i am hungry for because i did make it and i'm very proud that its so good... i think others feel the same way, that they eat in order not to waste.

Boredom. That's when I find myself in the kitchen. In the past I haven't stopped to think about why I'm there at the fridge, now I make myself go do something else.

Emotions. God help me on a stressful day if there is a bag of cookies within a three-mile radius of my house. Fortunately, that's the length of my current run, so at least I can "run it off"...

Just about the only time I'm really tempted to overeat is when I've been doing research on food. With my job, food research means cake and cupcake research more often than not, so I find myself craving sweets like mad. I don't usually keep sweets other than fruit in the house, however, so I seldom end up satisfying my craving.

What kind of job has you researching cupcakes? And where can I sign up? ;)

These reasons are really nothing more than symptoms of the underlying problem. People who overeat on a regular basis either...

- Do not have a clearly defined fitness or weight loss goal.
- Have not examined their reasons for wanting to reach this goal.
- Have not learned to maintain focus on that goal when faced with difficult situations.
- Lack the knowledge to make proper decisions.

...Or don't care.

When you sit down and think about what triggers you to eat more than you should, most of it comes down to habit and conditioning.

Once you're aware of the triggers, you can set a goal to create new habits. Knowing why you want to change helps keep you motivated. Having a clear picture of your goal in mind gives you something to anchor to in times of temptation.

Just my .02.

The fundamental cause of overeating is a lack of connection with our bodies and what physical hunger is. So we get caught up in the visual, emotional, psychological, cultural, and social cues about what is an appropriate amount to eat instead of listening to what our body needs.

Intuitive eating has been my guide and I have learned to identify and discriminate between actual physical hunger and phantom hunger based on other cues. Since then I have been shocked at how little food I actually need to eat compared with the amount of food I used to eat.

Lunch for me used to be a loaded quarter-pounder (preferably with cheese, bacon, and jalapenos), fries, a soda, and a candy bar. This lunch was complete overeating, but psychologically I believed that that was what lunch should be and even if I was stuffed I would make sure to eat it all. If I didn't get to eat all that, I would feel psychologically unsatisfied even if my body was physically satisfied.

Now my typical lunch is a multigrain roll with cheese, some grape tomatoes and red pepper strips, and maybe some cherries. Some days I can hardly finish my roll and other days I need to have some Greek yogurt after a couple hours, but I have learned to close out all the cues other than physical hunger.

It's hard to learn to discriminate physical hunger from all these other cues, but once you can it makes it really hard to overeat again.

Kim said:
The fundamental cause of overeating is a lack of connection with our bodies and what physical hunger is. So we get caught up in the visual, emotional, psychological, cultural, and social cues about what is an appropriate amount to eat instead of listening to what our body needs.[...]

YES! I agree with this and #1. I think the repeated message "just 100 extra calories a day will pack on the pounds over time" freaks me out so much that I end up not eating until satiated or drinking a diet soda to fill myself up between meals instead of having a healthy snack. Then I get so hungry I can't find full and, hey, I barely ate earlier, so it's not really a problem.

100 (or 200) extra calories here is more likely to mean 100 (or 200 or 500) fewer there. But it tends not to if you're thinking about the calories rather than WHAT you're eating...

I agree with these 5 reasons, however just like many of the above commenters, I believe that there are other reasons for overeating, a large one being food addiction.

Certain ingredients that are so prevalent in today's "modern" (not healthy) processed food create the desire for more, more, more. The main culprit is sugar, in its various forms....whether plain 'ole sugar, high fructose corn syrup, crystalline fructose, corn syrup solids, and on and on....all are sugar, and all keep you comin' back for more, making it hard to stop eating even when you aren't hungry.

It's been my experience that when I get off of the processed food, I rarely overeat, and the only reason I have overeaten on whole foods is because I made the mistake of allowing myself to get too hungry. Otherwise I have no problem with just eating when hungry and stopping when full.

It's all about getting the gunk (sugar, excess sodium, unhealthy fats, flour) out of your daily diet. ;) .....And, my food is tasty, even better than what I call "dead" processed food. ;)

Hunger is a very odd motivational force. It is not a learned drive (like say certain fears) but behaviors associated with hunger's reduction are learned. Say like flavors & hunger (1).

Hunger increases general levels of activity/motivation so it makes sense that, over time, that the cues associated with hunger-reduction will be strongly attended to. If those cues are made more salient (bigger servings, cultural expectations, etc.) then the eating/comsumption response will be of a greater magnitude.

One can train humans to eat only when their bodies need food but the key word is train (1). Untrained humans going through life learn based on whatever they are exposed to. Most humans are untrained thus will let their eating be controlled by external cues.

The posts above about thinking about what they eat & changes in diet are examples of changing the previous learning and allowing internal cues to control their eating behavior rather than external.

Here is a review of eating behavior if one really wants to read up on it.

http://physrev.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/83/1/25 (3)

Footnotes:

(1)Cite: Effects of hunger state on flavour pleasantness conditioning at home: flavour-nutrient learning vs. flavour-flavour learning. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16846663

(2)cite: http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/3/1/42 "The main result of this study is that adult individuals can be trained to accurately estimate their glucose levels at meal times. This cognition was achieved by conditioning the subjects to associate feelings of hunger with low glucose concentrations (Figure 5, red symbols). In contrast, control (untrained) subjects were unable to recognize their glycemic levels at meal times (Figure 5, black symbols) and expressed the will to eat at a wide range of glycemic values."

(3) Abstract quote, "A new framework for understanding the control of feeding behavior, with special emphasis on the evolution of hunger, the initiation of feeding, and its dependence on patterns of blood glucose, is the subject of this review. A perspective on the current status and future directions of this search for a more complete understanding of the regulation of feeding behavior in laboratory rats and humans is presented including theoretical and experimental components. First, a historical perspective on the role of blood glucose in the control of feeding is presented. Next, the theoretical approaches that have been applied to the control of feeding and had a strong influence on experimental feeding research are summarized. This is followed by a statement and overview of a current theory that has emerged from studies of the role of transient declines in blood glucose in the control of meal initiation. The current working hypothesis that transient declines in blood glucose are endogenous metabolic patterns that are detected and recognized by the central nervous system and are mapped into meal initiation in rats and are correlated with meal requests in humans are then presented. Then, the experimental studies on meal initiation and its dependence on patterns of blood glucose, first in rats and then in humans, are reviewed in detail. Finally, the future directions of the work, limitations, and the implications for the understanding of the control of feeding behavior and the regulation of energy balance are discussed."

The other problem is portions:)
When for example i want muesli just as a snack i must put some amount of it into the bowl and that hide the whole pack. If i would go with this to the other room and start eating simply from that bag i would eat so much more that i was supposed to:)

All true - plus insulin and leptin resistance from years of bad dietary habits.

I think a lot of people overeat because there are so many ads out there telling you that you need to be eating 24/7. Are you driving your car? Oh, you need to be eating a million calorie snack. Are you bored at home? Again, another snack. And don't forget work meetings...you need more snacks. Snacks snacks snacks plus big meals=FAT ASSES

I keep checking back here, and love all the stuff that you all are saying. I have a question, one that has probably been answered on this blog in other posts a thousand times. But, being who I am, I need something pounded into the concrete block that is my head a thousand times before it sticks...

Kim, if you're still here, or someone else who has insight to share - HOW do I get back in touch with my body after years and YEARS of emotional eating, bingeing, dieting, and general mayhem that I have subjected it to?

This is something that I have struggled with for a very long time, and would appreciate any advice.

I tend to overeat when I haven't allowed myself a "cheat meal" in too long. I think its good to allow our bodies to have that food that it craves every once in a while or we tend to go overboard!

Hi Laura,

Woah, big question here. I'll try to write something up for you sometime this evening. Be sure to check back!

-Kim

My reasons seem to be boredom and HABIT. I got into the habit of snacking every night between dinner and bedtime. The only way to stop myself is by bumping up my supper hour to a later hour. So now I exercise when I come home from work, unwind with a glass of wine, and eat when I have my children in bed (they're usually in bed at 7:30 or so).

Laura asked:
HOW do I get back in touch with my body after years and YEARS of emotional eating, bingeing, dieting, and general mayhem that I have subjected it to?

That is such a big question and all I can offer is my path. The odd thing is, I wasn’t purposefully moving towards changing my relationship with food and my body, but found that circumstances brought me to this point anyway. In my mind, two things have contributed to my discovering and maintaining a normalized eating habit: mindfulness and a change of perspective.

After a couple of tragedies I was lost in a deep depression. I ate to soothe myself and gained 25 pounds after the first and another 20 after the second. This on top of the 25 pounds I gained through yo-yo dieting. I ate from sadness, from loneliness, from boredom, from grief—all because my life was so shite that only a quarter-pounder with cheese could make me feel better. (Or so I thought.)

Cue mindfulness. I began reading books on applying mindfulness and constructive living to daily life. Basically, this is the idea that our emotions don’t just arise from the ether, but are a result of our thoughts and actions. Becoming aware of our thoughts and our actions enables us to no longer be victim to our moods and emotions. We can’t directly change our emotions, but we can change the actions and thoughts that lead to them.

Negative emotions are cues that either your thoughts or behaviors are disorderly. For example, the first time mindfulness I truly understood mindfulness was when I was in a fine craft store (I am a fiber artist) and started to feel very angry. I took that as a cue, “hey, pay attention here” and realized that I was jealous that other artists I knew were making money on their craft while I had projects piling up at home. As soon as I realized what I was thinking, my negative emotions went away.

Now, you might be wondering what this has to do with eating. Well, mindfulness was all well and good in the rest of my life as I came out of my depression, but I didn’t directly apply it to food until I had a change of perspective.

My husband and I travelled to England for a two week trip. I tend to be a fairly observant person now because of practicing mindfulness, so as soon as we arrived I began noticing all the little things that are different over there. One thing I encountered again and again is that food has a different role in their society than over here.

It was shocking to go into a train station and not find a single fast-food burger joint, but instead to have fabulous choices of fresh baguettes or salads. Instead of 20 feet of candy bars in convenience stores, there’d be 2 feet. The refrigerated drinks would have one section of soda and four of fruit juices and sparkling water. Pubs would offer a couple of choices of appetizers, not pages worth. People didn’t eat on the street like they do here and the American fast food restaurants were never busy. Restaurants and pubs were often quiet so you could sit and enjoy a meal and good conversation rather than a three-ring circus of entertainment.

After two weeks of eating differently—simpler foods not drenched in sauces or dressings, smaller portions that still filled us up—we returned home. We stopped at a Red Robin for dinner and experienced major culture shock—18 different burger choices, all-you-can-eat fries, gallon-sized glasses of soda—in addition to the overstimulation from music blaring and televisions around every corner and balloons and super-happy servers. I realized right then that the American relationship with food is completely dysfunctional and that it didn’t have to be that way.

So I began applying mindulness to my eating. I read two books that really helped coalesce my thinking about food: Intuitive Eating and The French Don’t Diet. I learned how to identify physical hunger—the physical signs that can differentiate real hunger from emotional eating. And I learned to identify satiation—that is, the point at which I have eaten enough to not be hungry and yet not overstuff myself. I also stopped eating processed foods—cutting out anything containing high-fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils, artificial flavorings and sweeteners, and preservatives.

I began assessing how I felt after each meal. I found that meat doesn’t sit real well with me and that sugar causes an incredible blood sugar spike and crash. Processed foods increase my cravings while natural whole foods last with me for hours. I make sure to pay attention to each meal and to honor the rare craving. I always take a moment before eating to determine how hungry I am and I eat slowly so that I stop when I am satisfied.

Food is food for me now. It’s neither my salvation nor a curse.

It’s been a long journey and I’m sorry this has been so long to read. I don’t know if it’s been helpful or not, but if you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them.

I think a big problem for overeating is ..eating too fast. You can stuff down alot of food before you even start to feel full. Sitting in front of the TV is a big one today also. You are watching TV and not on your food or the enjoyment of eating. We should be enjoying each and every bite.

Kim said:
It’s been a long journey and I’m sorry this has been so long to read. I don’t know if it’s been helpful or not, but if you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them. [...]

Wonderful story. Very interesting you say that when you noticed your anger it went away. I found that too with mindfulness.

One day I was meditating when suddenly out of nowhere, a dark feeling of depression came over me. It felt really really bad. But once I just watched it from a distance and let it go it just disappeared.

Mindfulness is the key to massive change I think.

Thanks for your story.
~Mike.

Wow, Kim. Thank you. I printed out your post, and will read it again when I'm not so scattered (reading six different websites at once.... talk about not being mindful!)

It is helpful to hear that it was a long process. Once again, that's my concrete head speaking, since I know that it is. I, and so many others, just don't want it to be. We're so used to being instantly gratified that it's hard to face the web of crap that we have to wade through before we can get to the other end.

I am sure I will refer back to your post often. Thank you again.

Thank you Kim! I just finished reading your posting and I've just had a lightbulb moment. Two years ago I had gastric bypass surgery, which at the time I was very mindful of what I put in my mouth, eating slowly and stopping with satisfied. I quit smoking six months ago and instead of eating mindfully , I gained 25 pounds. Granted, I can't eat what a normal person with a normal stomach can eat, but I did my best. Now, I've realized that I need to go back to the begining and start over again. Thanks again Kim.

That is quite a story Kim, but I do agree that dieting seems to be a lot easier here in Europe than in the United States. Not even to mention 'super size servings'. Nobody here has ever heard of them.

Another reason, one that I've come across in my research is that when high volumes of medium and high glycemic foods are eaten, the body is continually pumping out insulin to meet with the demands of raised blood sugar levels, Insulin is an appetite promoter.

Hmmm. That superburger looks kinda fun with that circle of fries around it.
Couldn't eat it by myself though.

I think i eat most at night i work nights but even on my nights off i find myself waking up to eat in the middle of the night.Maybe i need to talk to some one about this?