Why some foods are so addictive?
As an overweight person, I often asked myself if I am a food addict.
Treating yourself as an addict has its pros and cons
But is food really an addiction we can’t get rid of?
Well, in some ways – it really is.
Not only does our body need food for sustenance,
But specific kind of food can cause different physiological effect - almost like drugs.
When what you eat or the actual act of eating gains an emotional value,
You can definitely call it an addiction.
But this kind of connections often happens with specific foods as I said before.
Chocolate, for example, contains low levels of serotonin and dopamine – chemicals that might alleviates our mood.
When first we ate chocolate our brain learned about its effects and remembered them.
This kind of learning is subconscious and has to do with neural connection in our brain.
That’s why we sometime feel an uncontrollable and unexplainable urge for chocolate – especially when we’re moody.
The same goes to many other kinds of foods: sweets, fast food, coffee etc…
These sorts of foods are sometimes referred to as “Emotional Food”.
The problem is that when we start eating emotional food when we feel bad – the wiring in our brain becomes even stronger (meaning that there are more neural connection).
We get emotionally attached to food.
When you are emotionally attached to food (or to anything else for that matter) – it’s much more difficult to stop eating it.
Think about a favorite toy or item from childhood.
No one wants to through these things out – even if they do clutter up the house.
Emotional attachments to food can be very specific and they can be very general. Are you connected with that big slice of apple pie because it was your favorite growing up food?
You may have an emotional attachment to the foods.
If you love your mashed potatoes loaded with gravy, sour cream and butter just because you love the taste, that’s a different story.
Emotional food is what our brain tells us to eat when we feel stressed or upset.
Our diet efforts and goals are not always as strong as those mental cries for relief; that’s when we break our diets – and that’s when the vicious circles of low self esteem can begin.
So what should you do?
Ideally, you should never use food to comfort yourself mentally.
It’s just like cigarettes, it becomes a bad habit of smokers to smoke when they are stressed out.
So if you ease your stress with food it becomes the equivalent of a cigarette.
In any case you need to do some damage control,
You should try to substitute the sweets with low fat snacks,
At least while you are working on getting rid of your addiction entirely.
Good luck
David H. Mason
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Tags: Addiction, fat loss, Food, weight loss
