“Hyperpalatable” foods — those loaded with fat, sugar, and salt — stimulate the senses and provide a reward that leads many people to eat more to repeat the experience.
He calls it conditioned hypereating, and here’s how he says it works. When someone consumes a sugary, fatty food they enjoy, it stimulates endorphins, chemicals in the brain that signal a pleasurable experience. Those chemicals stimulate us to eat more of that type of food — and also calm us down and make us feel good.
The brain also releases dopamine, which motivates us to pursue more of that food. And cues steer us back to it, too: the sight of the food, a road lined with familiar restaurants, perhaps a vending machine that sells a favorite candy bar. The food becomes a habit. We don’t realize why we’re eating it and why we can’t control our appetite for it.
- Structure your eating — knowing when and how you’re going to eat. That plan helps you avoid the situations or foods that trigger overeating and establishes new eating patterns to replace destructive ones.
- Set rules, such as not eating between meals. If you know you’re not going to eat something, he says, your brain won’t be as stimulated to steer you to that food.
- Change the way you think about food. Instead of looking at a huge plate of french fries and thinking about how good it will make you feel, he advises saying that it’s twice as much food as you need, and will make you feel bad. “Once you know you’re being stimulated and bombarded,” Kessler says, “you can take steps to protect yourself.”
- Learn to enjoy the foods you can control.
- Rehearse how you’ll respond to cues that set you up to overeat.
http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/compulsive-overeating-and-how-to-stop-it?page=3
