Ever thought about this paradox of life:
what once was crucial for our survival is now detrimental for our mental health
The drive to eat AND to overeat made our ancestors survive for thousands of years. This drive is the reason why we exist today. Why I am here to write this post and you to read it.
But times change. Nowadays when we overeat, we feel guilt. We feel guilty that we can’t control our behaviour. We feel guilty that we don’t act based on the ideal image we have of ourselves. We feel guilty that we put on weight. We feel guilty for something that is programmed deep inside our brains.
If we zoom out and look at it from distance: what exactly do we feel guilty for?
We feel guilty that we evolved the drive to survive.
We can’t fight our biology. We can’t fight our nature. We can’t fight being human.
The dilemma is that we as humans evolved to be smart enough to have ‘body composition prestige goals’. These, however, often counteract our primitive evolutionary survival settings. When these animalistic instincts kick in, like the drive to overeat, we hate that our rational minds lose control. We feel guilty because we sabotage our attempts of reaching the ideal image we have for ourselves.
What can we do?
We have to be a rational human before our biology kicks in. We have to make sure that no food is around in large amounts that can trigger the drive to overeat.
Just to give an example, this means: don’t buy large packages of junk. Get the junk in single serving packages when you crave it. Don’t stock up on any food that is really tempting to you. Don’t go shopping hungry, as you will probably buy and eat more than your rational minds wants…
Your major task is to limit the chances of doing something your rational mind doesn’t want when your evolutionary instincts kick in. They usually kick in in a weak moment… when you are stressed, tired, seek for comfort, or just act impulsively without thinking.
One tool I used successfully with my clients in the past years it the “ban scale”
Categorizing food based on the likelihood of you overeating it will help you make smarter decisions on what to buy when you go shopping and to avoid the situations where you eat more than you should when your willpower isn’t the highest.
This is how you use the ban scale:
Imagine the worst situation ever; you are tired, stressed, angry, sad or maybe even just bored…basically, your brain is screaming for getting pleasure right now.
Go through all the foods you have at home (fridge, freezer and pantry) and ask yourself this question:
“How easy is it to resist this food in the worst situation you can imagine?”
Group the food according to the numbers in this chart. Everything that scores higher than 3 has to go. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have the food occasionally, rather you just shouldn’t have it at home as your normal staple food or the food you buy frequently.
In case you do buy some of the food that scores higher than 3, you should get a smaller serving size (e.g. a 30 g/ 28 oz. chocolate bar) if you really want to eat this food.
What I want to say is that it’s better to be safe than sorry. It’s not about restriction or not trusting yourself or anything like that. The fact is just that there are mechanisms in our brains that drive us to eat, even if the rational part of the brain would rather resist.
There seem to be even binge circuits in our brains (something I recently heard on the Huberman Lab podcast). These circuits that are programmed to make us to eat as much food as fast as possible in a very short time. It’s really weird crazy evolution came up with!
So, why making it unnecessarily difficult for us to resist temptations? Why risking doing something we don’t want to do and feeling guilty after, if we can actually make it easy and feel good?
If there is an easy path, take the easy path. Life throws enough difficulties at us. We don’t need to add more to it. Let’s be kind to ourselves :)
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And if you struggle to find the easy path for yourself, I’d be happy to help you. For more info click here.