There are as many reasons that you have given yourself to eat as there are minutes in a day. The storm clouds do it for me. They trigger a memory of when I lived in Florida and went deep sea fishing in Key West. When a storm was imminent, we would stop our boat at a nearby atoll and wait out the storm while eating fresh fish sandwiches and drinking cold beer. Sandwiches are munchies, which I now avoid, and I no longer drink beer, but the smell of a storm can be a powerful trap for me. I don’t act on it, but the memory is a tempting trigger, nonetheless.
A splash of red wine on white pants may not trigger an overeating episode or a car not starting, a flat tire, and your cell phone losing signal at 4:58 p.m. 5:00 pm But these things have a cumulative effect, and all the mini-annoyances have the potential to turn into maxi-eating responses by the end of the day.
You may stumble because you saw your favorite dessert on a restaurant menu. Or a celebration can turn an attempted no into a resounding yes as soon as you hear the popping of a bottle of champagne.
“He could resist anything but temptation,” said Oscar Wilde.
Consider the reasons why you are tempted to eat. Highlight or circle those to which you respond. There are many and they are varied.
Do you eat because you are hungry? Do you know what hunger is? Or are you eating because you are lonely, tired, angry, or bored?
Think of all the reasons you eat that have nothing to do with hunger.
Maybe you eat because you’re awake: it’s your birthday, my birthday, our anniversary, or Groundhog Day; or because you are depressed: sad or afflicted. You can eat because it’s there, or someone else is eating, why not you? Is food readily available at your office, your home? Do you eat in your car?
Are you eating because of the good news? Bad news? No news? One man said that he eats during the news.
You may find yourself eating some foods because they come with a restaurant dinner or others because they come free with your plane ticket or hotel room. There is bread on a restaurant table, peanuts on the plane, chocolates on the pillow, and you think: I will never go through here again.
For some, food is seen as a reward: I’ve been so good all day. I didn’t have breakfast. I didn’t have lunch. I’m going to have this meat side for dinner. Of course, if you feel full, bloated, and not so good about yourself, then overeating isn’t a reward. it is a punishment
When a young woman used the excuse that she ate too much before going to the ballet, I asked her, did you dance? Unless she was dancing on that stage, she ate too much at dinner. She ate more than she could burn off.
For many, food has become a socially acceptable drug. It seems to list the tensions and stresses in your life. Perhaps you use food to suppress feelings and thoughts that you don’t want to feel or think or escape.
Do you eat when you are frustrated, disappointed, or angry? One guy told me he knocked over a box of cookies and a pint of ice cream when the courts awarded his ex-wife a big divorce settlement. He wanted to know if he had returned her alimony check when he realized she was hurting herself.
Although eating doesn’t change the outcome of anything other than your waistline and self-esteem, you may still eat to cheer yourself up when you’re down. Or not feel so alone when you’re without company. Or to socialize: you don’t want to be left out. He may continue to eat even though his clothes are too tight and he is huffing and puffing when he walks. That’s part of the addiction: you keep doing what you do even though there are negative consequences.
Maybe you eat because you’re bored or have to fill unstructured time, like nights and weekends, or because you’re experiencing family, business, financial, or peer pressure: (“Come on. We’re all going out for pizza and we want come here”). You don’t want to be left out. You can use food to avoid intimacy or sex. Perhaps you use food to avoid nourishing yourself or being nourished. You are procrastinating: (“I’ll have lunch first and then I’ll work on that report”).
You can eat during food preparation and storage. Maybe because once you start you can’t stop. You might think, what the hell, I blew it anyway. Maybe food is used as a reward for doing something wonderful, or as a punishment for overeating and realizing it. What the heck, it won’t make a difference. When you smell coffee in your office or popcorn at a movie, or fresh donuts at a bakery, do you stand in line? Do you use food as a meal extender? You’re having such a good time and you don’t want the evening to end so you order another cup of coffee, a cocktail, a dessert. You are entertaining guests. There is plenty of extra food and all those leftovers.
Going home to the family is difficult for some. You may feel guilty that your family and friends have been cooking since last Thursday, and you have to taste (and comment on) everything on offer. Is the cook offended if you don’t have seconds and thirds?
We eat differently when we are in the company of two people, three people, four people, more people. A recent study said that people who eat with six or more people consume 78% more than if they ate alone. The more people there are, the more food is offered.
The longer food sits on the table, the longer you’ll be tempted to eat.
Are you too tired to cook, so you pick, pick, and convince yourself you didn’t eat anything?
A point to remember:
If it’s not water, it’s food.
And this too:
If you swallowed it, you ate it. It all adds up.
It doesn’t matter if you overeat due to genetics, ethnicity, religion, circumstance, or emotions. Maybe you eat for some or all of these reasons. Every person gets into the habit of misusing food when eating for reasons that you tell yourself are okay to eat, even if you’re not hungry. Having followed these habits for so long, sometimes decades, they have become involuntary conditioned responses. Like Pavlov’s dogs, when a stimulus appears, can a yes, thank you, be left behind? You smart, you think you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing, but you can’t stop. That’s the sneaky part of addiction, like making a decision will work when it never has before. This might be the time to make a list of the reasons you eat. Put down the breadstick and pick up a pencil.
After looking at my list, a middle-aged woman told me, “According to your program, I haven’t been hungry since 1963.” She was correct. She and you may have misidentified these situations, circumstances, and emotions as hunger for so long that she has lost her innate ability to identify this very basic feeling.
If you are trying to satisfy a physical hunger, your body does not require a large amount of food. If you’re trying to satiate an emotional hunger, you could back a truckload of groceries into your home or office, and you’d never, ever have enough food. “Okay guys, put the Mallomars in the cabinet, the Häagen-Dazs in the freezer. The Twinkerdoodles go on the bed.”
If you feel so overwhelmed, confused, and paralyzed by not knowing what to do about this multifaceted and layered issue of weight management that you can’t stop eating once you start, chances are you’re not doing anything.
If you are hungry, you need to nourish the body. If, down the road, it also tastes good, looks good, and smells good, you have a bonus. But you shouldn’t eat it because it looks, smells and tastes good. Almost everything fits that criteria.
If you are thirsty, drink water.
If you are responding to one of the above stimuli, change the habits by creating new, constructive responses to replace the old, destructive ones. This is called redesign.
I may have missed one of your Possible Cheats, but you get the idea. Add yours if it’s not here. Watch how you eat when you’re up or down, alone or with friends. We even eat differently with men, differently with women and differently with children. These pitfalls can be due to emotions, circumstances, or simply because you are there, or you are there, in the neighborhood where your favorite food is prepared like nowhere else in the world! Traps can be any of these things or all of these things.
None of the traps I have described above is starvation. And if it’s not hunger, it’s not a reason to eat.
What are its possible pitfalls?