We all eat. We all have to eat. Generally, we all love to eat. While our relationship with food is entirely natural, it can also be surprisingly complicated. That’s because eating isn’t just a physical act. There is a strong psychological component behind our eating behaviors and habits. Many of us have motivations for eating the way that we do that we aren’t fully aware of in our conscious minds. Yes, there are emotional, family, cultural, economic and biological underpinnings that can influence our eating behaviors. That’s precisely why a one-size-fits-all diet can never work. It’s also why fad diets can fizzle out quickly.

While many people find short-term success with cutting out specific foods by following diets like low-carb and keto, these changes may not be ideal for everyone looking for sustained results gained through overall healthy habits. Focusing on forming a healthy relationship with food is essential regardless of the specific diet protocol you find works best with your body. Here’s a look at what our diets should be doing for us when everything is in alignment:

• Giving us increased energy.
• Helping us to be alert enough to “show up” for life.
• Allowing us to enjoy food!
• Improving our health by delivering the nutrition we need to thrive.
• Fueling us for an active life.

Here’s a look at what our diets should not be doing for us:

• Serving as a way to hide our feelings by being distracted instead of dealing with our problems.
• Allowing us to feel as though overindulging is the only way we can feel in control of something.
• Creating avoidable, diet-specific issues with our weight, blood sugar, cholesterol or blood pressure.
• Curing boredom.
• Causing shame.

Yes, food should be an experience that we enjoy. However, we shouldn’t necessarily be viewing food as a psychological crutch. That’s not to say that food can’t provide psychological benefits. For instance, having a delicious lunch outdoors with friends can be a soul-nourishing experience. For some people, planning meal prep for a busy upcoming week allows them to feel excited about being ahead of the game.

The First Step: Separating Emotional Hunger From True Hunger

Emotional Hunger is when you think you’re hungry due to stress, happiness or boredom. By contrast, true hunger is a gradual process where your hunger builds up while also providing you with cues to stop eating when you’re satisfied. Generally, people who eat out of emotional hunger will continue eating past satiation. This often leads to feelings of guilt or shame.

“Boredom increases eating in an attempt to distract from this experience, especially among people high in self-awareness,” according to a 2015 study examining why consuming food is used as a tool to escape awareness. The researchers in that study ultimately concluded that boredom could actually promote eating healthy if we’re smart about it. They found that eating more exciting foods is the key to formulating a dietary intervention. That means that people looking to break the cycle of emotional eating may be able to pivot to healthier, balanced diets by eating foods that are exciting and interesting. It’s a great reason to try new foods like organic soba noodles, quinoa bowels or organic strawberry chia pudding.

Stopping the Cycle of Stress Eating

Stress eating is another primary culprit for poor dietary choices. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), 27 percent of adults admit to eating to manage stress. What’s more, 34 percent of those who report either overeating or eating unhealthy foods due to stress say that this behavior is a habit.

Stress can impact our food preferences. Studies show that physical and emotional stress prompt the intake of foods that are high in fat and sugar. Once the fat and sugar are ingested, our stress response and emotions are dampened. As a result, we feel temporarily pacified in the moment. However, many people experience a food “hangover” after using food as a coping technique. This can create a very vicious cycle that leaves you feeling tired, stressed and unproductive. For example, you may reach for a box of sugary cereal because you are stressed while staying up late to get a deadline completed for work. While all that sugar may ease your anxiety in the moment, you will soon have a sugar crash that causes you to feel sluggish and unproductive. This can make it even harder to get through your work to meet your deadline. As a result, you’ll miss even more sleep because you’ll stay up later. That equals a very unproductive night followed by a tough morning. You’re already setting yourself up for an energy deficit in the morning that may perpetuate your stress-overeating-crashing cycle. This is precisely why so many people feel chronically stressed and tired. By contrast, reaching for a high-protein, low-sugar snack to get a sustained energy boost while powering through a work session can help you avoid crashes.

Don’t Sabotage an Opportunity to Build a Healthy Relationship With Food

Some people believe that deprivation is the only way to gain control over cravings and “out of control” eating. In reality, this only feeds into a dangerous cycle of feeling deprived, resentful and out of control in your relationship with food. While having techniques for delaying gratification instead of grabbing for the closest thing when cravings strike is wise, trying to outsmart your body through deprivation is always a bad idea when the goal is to create a balanced, nurturing relationship with food. Here are some simple ways to correct the path if you’ve drifted into an unhealthy territory with eating:

• Don’t skip meals. Plan a meal menu ahead of time if you struggle with knowing what to eat. Prepared, made-to-order delivered meals can help you to stay consistent about getting the proper nutrition if this is a place where you tend to lose your way.
• Keep a judgment-free food journal. The goal is accountability over blame or regret.
• Drink plenty of water! In addition to keeping you satisfied, it’s just good for you!
• Devote your full attention to eating when you’re eating. Carve out a time for eating when you’re not driving, working or watching television. Eating while doing another task reduces enjoyment. “Distracted eating” is linked to weight gain. When we eat while we’re distracted with something else, we also tend to engage in “repeated eating” because we’re not getting the full eating experience.

This is not meant to be a set of strict “rules” to follow. The goal should be to experience the nourishing, delicious food you’re engaging with to avoid the feeling that you’re left wanting more. When we eat based on automatic emotional reasons, we often find that we’re never really full because we haven’t allowed ourselves to truly be present while eating. We’re always chasing the next bite.

A Path Toward a Healthier Food Mindset: Practicing Mindful Eating

One of the ways to overcome automatic eating behaviors is to practice mindful eating. If you’ve spent time researching wellness and self-care, you probably already know that mindfulness can help us combat stress, enjoy our lives and provide perspective. Mindfulness is simply the “quality” or “state” of being conscious of something. While many people use mindfulness techniques to learn how to be still in the moment during everything from meditation to breathing exercises, few ever stop to consider the value of mindfulness when it comes to eating.

Simply making an effort to be aware of your eating experience is a form of mindful eating. When enjoying healthy meals, take time to notice the colors, textures, aromas and flavors of the food you’re eating. Consider how the beautiful, vibrant colors are full of vitamins and antioxidants that will help to keep your body strong.

Here is a visual guide to mindful eating.

The biggest rule of mindful eating is that distractions aren’t allowed! While a dining companion is allowed, you’ll want to shut off any electronics that could take you away from the moment. If you struggle with rushing through meals in a way that makes you finish your plate before your body even feels full, consider setting a timer for 20 minutes. This will help you to pace your bites. The emphasis should be on taking small, slow bites that you savor. The plus side to this is that chewing your food properly actually aids in digestion to help you absorb more usable nutrients. Food mindfulness can even begin before your meals start. When you catch yourself reaching into the fridge or pantry for a snack, always take time to ask yourself if you’re truly hungry. This is a good opportunity for you to explore any anxiety, boredom or feelings of avoidance that may be compelling you to distract yourself with food instead of addressing your emotions.

Final Thoughts on Having a Healthy Food Mindset

Like all things related to the brain and body, diet psychology comes down to making a decision to change for the better. The goal isn’t to cut out comfort foods from your life forever. It’s simply important to be intentional and mindful when it comes to how, what and when we’re eating to make sure that we’re eating to fuel our biological needs instead of our emotional needs. There are many other appropriate outlets in life for getting our emotional needs met. The bottom line is to go in prepared by having a plan for each meal that will help you to avoid the emotional pull of feel-good foods that don’t actually leave you feeling good.

Are you ready to put a stop to emotional eating and become more mindful in your eating habits? Take the first step by shopping for fresh, healthy meals. Our meals are proportioned perfectly to help satisfy you when hungry and help you stop eating full.

Have you ever felt like your body has an internal “timer” that makes you crave snacks before bed? It turns out there’s some science behind this phenomenon. While many people blame that all-too-familiar “snack attack” that tends to hit between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on everything from boredom to lack of willpower, researchers have made some interesting discoveries that point to the idea that our internal clocks set the snack alarm for the evening hours.

If you believe the research, your own natural circadian rhythm may be behind the strong urge to snack that you can’t seem to shake. This is need-to-know information for anyone struggling to shake off the habit of snacking in the evening. While you may not be able to change the biological factors that drive humans to snack, understanding what your body is “looking for” when it compels you to grab for those chips or chocolate cookies could help you formulate a plan for achieving a better nutritional balance.

The Science Behind Evening Snack Attacks: How Circadian Rhythm Impacts Hunger Cues

One curious observation is that people don’t tend to be “ravenous” in the morning even though they’ve just fasted for roughly eight hours. In fact, breakfast is typically the smallest meal of the day for the average person. This fact led researchers to wonder why people aren’t at their hungriest in the morning.

It turns out that our natural circadian rhythm drives hunger in anticipation of overnight fasting. This is why it’s so common for people to get hungry before bed, even if they’ve eaten what would be considered adequate meals. What’s more, our hunger declines as the night goes on to stop hunger-induced wakefulness from disrupting our sleep.

For many people, the temptation to snack at night can feel a little bit like having a devil on their shoulder urging them to grab for those crunchy, sweet and salty treats. In reality, what’s happening to us on a biological level isn’t so far away from that imagery. The brain and body are conspiring to try to persuade you to “stock up” for the night.

It turns out that our bodies are smart enough to know that the most efficient way to “store up” calories before a fast is to eat high-calorie, high-fat foods. In fact, researchers were able to identify how our internal circadian rhythm actually induces cravings for sweets, salty foods and starchy foods. While this may seem frustrating when you’re trying to be disciplined about your diet, our bodies really are just trying to do us a favor!

There is an evolutionary advantage to having your largest meal of the day in the evening just before bed. During times of food shortages, eating the bulk of your calories just before bed allows you to store up energy overnight while you’re sleeping. That means that your body can distribute energy while it’s in a rest state. By contrast, food that is consumed in the morning can be burned off quickly.

The problem that many people run into when following the natural hunger cues that are dictated by the circadian rhythm is that they don’t necessarily need to store up energy while they sleep. In fact, this built-in hunger cycle that is intended to keep us alive in lean times may actually be putting our health at risk. There is evidence that consuming the largest meal of the day in the evening could be contributing to the rise of obesity in the United States.

Is there anything that we can do to ease the cravings that come knocking at night? According to researchers, hunger guided by the circadian rhythm occurs independently of other factors. However, maintaining a balanced, complete diet can make it easier to decipher the difference between “genuine” hunger and the body’s personal snack alarm.

Avoiding the Circadian Rhythm “Snack Trap”

Hint: Planning ahead is the key!

The best way to effectively fight an evening snack attack is to ensure that you’re getting appropriate nutrition the rest of the day. This will help you decipher between genuine hunger caused by the need for more calories and a biological urge to “load up” before fasting. If the theory regarding the circadian rhythm impacting hunger patterns is correct, everyone is hit regardless of how much they’ve eaten in a day. However, we can set ourselves up for extreme nighttime hunger if we haven’t adequately nourished our bodies during the day.

Start With a Solid Breakfast

Most people don’t crave a big breakfast. However, it’s still important to make sure that you’re planning a balanced, healthy breakfast that will help you power through the first portion of the day with the energy needed to fuel your brain and body. When planning breakfast, you want to avoid high-sugar, high-carb foods that will cause your blood sugar to spike and drop. This can be a recipe for feeling terrible before 10 a.m. In fact, having a sugary, “carby” breakfast can leave you in worse shape than not breaking your morning fast. That’s why things like protein, fruit and whole grains are commonly recommended as breakfast staples. It takes planning to get the right amount of protein and nutrition in the morning. It’s so easy to grab for something that’s “sweet and easy” without really paying attention to the nutrition label.

Plan a Snack-Busting Lunch

It’s the same story with lunch. If the goal is sustained energy using fresh ingredients and lean proteins, be smart about meal prep instead of falling prey to prepackaged foods that are easy to grab on the go. You also don’t want to skip lunch! Many people who do this assume that they will consume fewer calories over the course of a day. However, the circadian rhythm can come calling with a vengeance if we simply haven’t consumed enough calories during the day.

Strategize for Dinner

Dinner is the most important meal when it comes to battling the “circadian munchies” that come on strongly in the evening. Dinner is really the last defense against an overwhelming urge to snack due to the fact that it’s the last meal we’re having before we go into an overnight fast.

One of the best ways to stay feeling full and satisfied longer is to have healthy meals containing proteins and healthy fats. Things like chicken breast, avocado, steak and lentils can provide that sustained energy needed to fight off the urge to snack.

Based on what researchers think they have discovered about how the circadian impacts hunger, our body is truly trying to push us toward eating our highest concentration of calories just before bed. Feeling full and satisfied may make it much easier to resist cravings for sweet and salty foods that will fill in the nutritional gaps that our bodies are feeling if we haven’t eaten complete, balanced meals that offer adequate nutrition during the day.

What If You Want to Snack Before Bed?

It’s certainly not a crime to snack before bed. Of course, it’s essential to keep in mind evidence that routinely consuming foods just before bed may play a role in rising obesity rates. If you’d like to snack at night, you may be able to “hack” your body’s strong desire for calorie density by supplying it with highly nutritious snacks instead. In fact, keto and high-protein options can be excellent choices for giving your body fuel without excess sugar. Some nutritionally dense, highly satisfying evening snacks to consider are edamame, raw nuts, carrots and celery, chia pudding, a yogurt cup or a pumpkin muffin.

Knowing How Your Hunger Cues Work Can Help You Plan the Right Meals

Ultimately, researchers are still learning more about how a person’s circadian rhythm can impact hunger. However, there is some pretty strong evidence to suggest that a desire to snack in the evening is a biological reality that has evolved over time to help humans survive when food is scarce. While we can all marvel at the way the human body is capable of adapting to survive, we may not appreciate what feels like a hijacking of our self-control once 8 p.m. hits.

Like many things in life, maintaining a healthy and balanced diet takes planning. One of the best ways to fight back against circadian diet sabotage is simply to anticipate that cravings will hit as we settle in for the evening. We can use this knowledge to plan to have snacks that provide the right amount of nutrition to avoid grabbing for the sweet and salty goodies that we may not necessarily want to consume every night.

Being smart about making sure that we’re getting enough calories by consuming things like healthy fats, whole grains, vegetables and fruits can help us to avoid a feeling of being famished that’s going to supercharge our body’s existing inclination to stock up on calories just before our overnight fast. D

You have a finite amount of willpower that you can pull from each day. Once that pool becomes depleted, making decisions becomes difficult. This has nothing to do with any weakness or personal flaw on your part. It’s simply how the human brain works. The phenomenon is known as decision fatigue. What you may not realize is that it’s impacting more of your habits than you think.

The Tricky Thing About Decision Fatigue

Decision fatigue is not the same thing as regular physical or mental fatigue. You don’t necessarily know that you’re “spent” when it creeps in. For each decision that your brain makes, the next decision becomes even more challenging. Our brains are smart enough to look for shortcuts that will spare us from having to make one more decision. In most cases, this means avoiding any activity that requires us to make more choices. In cases where we have to make more choices, our brain will do one of two things. The first is to simply follow whatever suggestion we receive. The second is to resist any changes.

You’ve probably already experienced decision fatigue, even if you weren’t aware of what was taking place at the time. Picture the way you feel at the end of a long week. After slaying all the dragons in your work life and personal orbit, you walk into your kitchen with the intention of cooking yourself a dinner that you can drag over to the television to unwind. However, you suddenly find yourself staring listlessly into your pantry or fridge. You can no longer differentiate between chick-pea pasta on your middle shelf, and the Snickers bar tucked away on the bottom shelf in terms of which one is a healthy, suitable dinner. Should you turn the burner on to boil some water? Would it be better if you washed some broccoli for extra nutrition? Of course, that might not be enough protein to help you recover from a week that really knocked you down. You wish someone could just tell you what to eat at this point. Ultimately, you just end up eating the same frozen meal or peanut-butter sandwich that you settled for all of the other nights of the week. Yes, that’s decision fatigue.

Decision fatigue doesn’t just apply in mundane circumstances. It can have some very dire consequences for humans. Researchers have observed that “time of day” can impact whether or not prisoners who appear in front of judges are granted parole. In one instance, prisoners who appeared early in the morning were granted parole roughly 70 percent of the time. By contrast, those who appeared late in the day were granted parole less than 10 percent of the time. Following a day of hearing cases and consulting with experts, judges making parole decisions were simply burned out from making so many decisions.

The Decision-Willpower Connection

Decision fatigue goes deeper than just making it hard to make a choice. We lose our willpower when decision fatigue sets in. Yes, making a series of decisions actually makes it more difficult to resist our impulses. In one instance, researchers decided to use shoppers who were partaking in a going-out-of-business sale to observe the impact of decision fatigue on impulse control. The researchers polled shoppers on their opinions of various products. Time after time, they were asked to make judgments about one product versus another. Next, the shoppers were given a very classic self-control test. They were told to hold one hand in ice water for as long as possible. Shoppers who were asked to make decisions regarding products in rapid succession by the researchers were only able to hold their hands in water for an average of 28 seconds. Shoppers who had not participated in the rapid-fire questioning were able to average 67 seconds.

If you’re relating this experiment to your own life, some big bells might be going off. Decision fatigue may be preventing you from reaching the goals that you’re setting. What makes this especially tricky is that it’s all happening on a subconscious level.

How to Fight Back Against Decision Fatigue

Decision fatigue is something that happens naturally to everyone. While being aware of this tendency can help us to be more aware of the pitfalls of trying to make too many decisions in a short amount of time, it won’t necessarily shield us from the problem. The point isn’t to avoid decision fatigue in the moment. The point is actually to set up our lifestyles to protect us from the effects of decision fatigue. For many of us, that simply means planning choices in advance to stagger our decision-making responsibilities. We can make decisions when we are in an open, clear-headed state that will benefit us when we’re in the thick of decision fatigue. There are plenty of examples of people doing this in real life.

During the 2020 quarantines, various subscription services helped many people enjoy an elevated quality of life by providing the antidote to decision fatigue. More specifically, the rise of book-subscription services provided people with a way to unwind and relax without the stress of having to choose their own titles. Throughout 2020, Australia saw a year of record book sales as people subscribed to popular options like the Literati Book Club, WellRead, Bookabuy and Bionic Book Subscription. Using algorithms that predict personal reading preferences, these subscription services delivered curated picks that made lockdown a little brighter for Australians!

It might be surprising to hear that a book subscription could become a runaway hit in an age when anyone can download a book in seconds on Amazon. However, the availability of millions of titles at the click of a button from a platform like Amazon is precisely what makes a book subscription service so valuable. For many people, the limitlessness of Amazon’s selection brings on a serious case of decision fatigue because it’s impossible to know where to start. There is also the crippling fear of making the wrong decision. That causes many of us to simply decide that it’s not a good time to read a book. For others, we may simply click on a suggested title that ends up being a dud. When we hand the decision over to an expert literary curator, we get the excitement of being delivered a hand-selected gem while also delegating the task to someone else.

As one best-selling author recently discovered, the freeing aspect of subscription services doesn’t end with book subscriptions. Neil Strauss has made a living as a best-selling author and journalist. If you haven’t read his books, you may have spotted some of his articles in the New York Times and Rolling Stone. Strauss gained a lot of attention recently when he revealed that one of his secrets for being so productive in his career as a writer is to rely on food-delivery services for all of his meal prep. Far from being an extravagant choice, this is actually a way to eliminate the need to make tons of small decisions throughout the day that keep a busy professional like Strauss from focusing his full attention on his work.

In deciding to clear decisions from his plate, Strauss is tapping into some well-known research that confirms that the small decisions we make each day chip away at our cognitive ability. In studies, it has been shown countless times that asking people to make a series of “microdecisions” actually depletes their abilities to perform more complex tasks. For instance, people are more likely to give up on solving a complex puzzle if they’ve just finished grocery shopping because they used up their cognitive stores while making decisions in front of grocery shelves. When using mall shoppers as study participants, people who have spent more time shopping are more likely to give up on puzzles sooner.

Designing a Life That’s Resilient Against Decision Fatigue

There are things we can do to orient our lives to be more resistant to decision fatigue. The best way to protect your brain is to cut down on the number of decisions you have to make daily. A good routine can eliminate many of the unnecessary or frivolous decisions we make. Start by thinking about what your typical morning looks like. Do you start by opening up your favorite news website or social media feed? You’re already putting yourself in a position to decide what to click on. If you check email as soon as you open your eyes, you’re facing an onslaught of decisions that range from which email to open first to what to buy with the coupon you see in your inbox. That equals dozens of snap decisions being made all within moments of waking up! Next, your breakfast situation may be riddled with questions. Time spent staring into your cupboards is time spent with dozens of culinary scenarios running through your brain. If you head to a grocery store or restaurant to pick up breakfast, you’re walking straight into a battlefield of even more decisions. Repeat that for three meals a day and all of your snacks to see how much productivity you’re losing.

The key to shielding yourself from brain fatigue is automating as much of your routine as possible. For many people, that means having healthy meals delivered to their doors. In addition to insulating you from the stress of deciding what to eat in the moment, a pre-planned meal strategy also protects you from the possibility of making an impulsive decision that doesn’t align with your goals. Take some time to examine how decision fatigue may be robbing you of productivity while zapping your quality of life. For many people, decision fatigue is the silent, undiscovered saboteur in their lives that can be defeated with just a little bit of forethought.

References:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iqiRCQWRmA&feature=youtu.be
• https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html
• https://www.health.com/mind-body/decision-fatigue
• https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/feb/15/handpicked-and-home-delivered-the-book-subscription-services-combating-decision-fatigue