Reducing Your Desire To Overeat
When I was still struggling with food and weight, one of the things I wanted most was to just be able to eat like a normal person.
I wanted to be able to eat just 1 cookie, 1 piece of cake, or 1 serving of bread without completely losing all control.
I wanted to be able to enjoy the foods I really liked without it turning into an episode of overeating or bingeing.
At the time this felt impossible because my desire to overeat these foods was so strong.
If you can relate, then what I want to share with you today is that there is nothing wrong with you. Your desire to eat is normal and your desire to overeat is something that can totally be solved.
There are 3 main reasons you have a desire to eat more food than your body requires:
1) Dopamine – This is a neurotransmitter released in our brain when we eat. It gives us a little hit of pleasure. It’s our reward for going out and finding food and eating it to stay alive.
The way your body reacts to dopamine can increase your desire and lead to over-desire if not addressed properly.
How?
When we overeat any foods really, but especially highly processed, sugar-concentrated foods, the dopamine in our brain sharply spikes and gives us a huge hit of pleasure all at once.
This huge hit of pleasure increases our desire to continue the overeating behavior. It leads to what’s called over-desire – an unnatural amount of desire that fuels overeating.
2) Conditioning – We are socially conditioned to overeat by the diet-industry, main-stream media, processed food companies, and restaurants.
Their goal is to increase our desire for food as much as possible. The more desire we have to eat beyond our physical needs the more benefit ($$$$$) it is to them.
3) Distraction – Overeating provides us with a distraction from emotional pain.
Our primitive brains our designed to seek pleasure and avoid pain and overeating fuels this primitive desire.
We’ve never been taught or trained how to properly manage our emotions, so we use food to distract ourselves from having to deal with our emotional lives.
It’s almost impossible to stop eating our emotions away if we don’t have the necessary skills to do so.
All 3 of these reasons combined - dopamine, conditioning, and distraction, are the reasons behind your strong desire to overeat.
They are what’s keeping you stuck in food and weight pain, which is the struggle between overeating and then dieting and how all-consuming that is for us and our brains.
Having an extensive understanding of the mind, as well as the body and nutrition were all key to eliminating my desire to overeat and permanently ending my 20-year struggle with food and weight. In my program I teach my clients the tools and skills needed to do the same.
Ask yourself:
1) Why are you overeating?
2) What is your desire to overeat about?
3) Why do you want to eat more than your body requires?
When you can answer these questions and truly understand them then you can permanently free yourself from your desire to overeat.
Xo,
Khara