Tag Archives: overeating

What Overeating Is and What Triggers It

Posted on March 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

This article, submitted by Bright Futures Treatment Center, while not exactly representative of The Anderson Method, presents some very valuable ideas and theory.

Eating is an essential part of life, but it can cause physical, emotional, and social problems when it becomes excessive. This is what is often called “overeating”. Overeating is a common problem that affects many individuals and can severely affect one’s health and well-being. Have you ever found yourself eating beyond the point of fullness or eating even when you’re not hungry? If so, you may be overeating. Understanding the triggers of overeating can help you break this cycle and create a healthier relationship with food. This article will explore and help you understand what overeating is and what triggers it.

What is Overeating?

In this section, we’ll explore the different types of overeating, the causes, and the physical and emotional effects it can have on your life. Overeating is a complex issue that can have multiple causes and affects individuals in different ways. It can range from occasional overeating, such as during holidays, to compulsive overeating. Understanding these aspects of overeating can help you create an action plan to overcome it, no matter the circumstance.

Types and causes of overeating

Overeating can take on many different forms, and it’s important to understand the different types to better address the problem. Understanding the different types allows you to gain insight into the underlying causes and develop a tailored approach to overcome overeating. Here is an overview of what overeating is and what triggers it:

  • Emotional Overeating is a type of overeating triggered by stress, anxiety, or boredom. It’s often used as a coping mechanism to deal with negative emotions.
  • Binge Eating is characterized by excessive and rapid eating, often accompanied by feelings of shame and guilt. Binge eaters may eat large quantities of food in a short period of time, even when they’re not physically hungry.
  • Compulsive Overeating is also known as food addiction. It’s a persistent pattern of overeating despite the negative consequences. This type of overeating is often driven by an obsession with food and a compulsive need to eat, even when not hungry.
  • Mindless Eating is another type of mindless eating. It occurs when individuals eat without paying attention to their hunger signals or the food they are consuming. Distractions, such as television or work, or a lack of planning and preparation can trigger this type of overeating.

Physical and Emotional Effects of Overeating

Overeating can have severe consequences for both our physical and emotional well-being. While overeating occasionally may not cause significant harm, chronic overeating can lead to a range of negative health outcomes.

Physical effects of overeating include:

  • Weight gain. Excessive calorie intake from overeating can lead to weight gain, increasing the risk of chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer.
  • Digestive problems. Overeating can cause physical discomforts, such as bloating, indigestion, and stomach pain. Additionally, it can lead to long-term digestive problems, such as acid reflux, ulcers, and irritable bowel syndrome.
  • Cardiovascular disease. Chronic overeating can contribute to the development of heart disease and high blood pressure, as well as increase the risk of stroke.

Emotional effects of overeating include:

  • Guilt and shame. Overeating can lead to feelings of guilt and shame. It is even more of an issue if overeating results in weight gain.
  • Depression and anxiety. Chronic overeating can have a negative impact on mental health, leading to depression and anxiety. This is particularly true if overeating is used as a coping mechanism for dealing with negative emotions.
  • Decreased self-esteem. Overeating can lead to decreased self-esteem and confidence because the individual may see themselves as weak or feel guilty about their changes in appearance.

Triggers of Overeating

Do you ever find yourself reaching for food even when you’re not hungry? Or do you feel helpless and powerless to stop eating even when you’re full? If so, you’re not alone. However, it’s important to remember that overeating is not simply a result of a lack of willpower or self-discipline. There are many internal and external triggers that can contribute to overeating, and it’s essential to recognize and understand these triggers to better yourself.

Internal triggers of Overeating

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most common internal triggers of overeating:

  • Emotional Factors. Negative emotions such as stress, anxiety, boredom, and depression can all lead to overeating as a means of coping. Food can provide comfort and temporary relief from unpleasant feelings, making it an attractive option when we struggle emotionally.
  • Hunger Cues. Our bodies are designed to regulate hunger. But sometimes, these cues can get off track, leading to overeating even when we’re not truly hungry. This can be due to various factors, including skipping meals, irregular eating patterns, or a diet lacking in nutrients.

External Triggers of Overeating

People often overlook the importance and effect of external triggers.

Some external triggers include:

  • Environmental Factors. Our environment can play a significant role in our eating habits. For example, social pressure to eat at certain times, the availability of high-calorie foods, or someone near us overeating can make us overeat.
  • Food-Related Cues. The sight and smell of food can also trigger overeating, even when we’re not truly hungry. This can be incredibly challenging when we’re surrounded by tempting food options. Or when we’re constantly bombarded with food-related advertisements.

Coping with Overeating

Overeating can be challenging. But with the right tools and strategies, you can take control and find lasting solutions.

  • Identify your triggers. Understanding what overeating is and what triggers it is crucial in managing this behavior.
  • Change your mindset: Focusing on positive thinking can improve your self-confidence, reduce stress levels, and improve mental health. These are just some of the benefits of changing your mindset.
  • Adopt a healthy lifestyle: Incorporating healthy habits into your daily routine, such as regular exercise, mindfulness, and proper nutrition, can help you overcome overeating.
  • Seek professional help: A therapist or counselor can provide the support and guidance you need. With their help, you’ll understand what overeating is and what triggers it for you. Furthermore, they’ll be able to help you create a better relationship with food that’ll skyrocket your recovery from overeating.

 

 

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One Appetizer Will Make You Lose Weight. One Will Make You Gain. Which One For You?

Posted on November 27, 2017 | 4 comments

bloomin-onion

This is Outback’s Bloomin’ Onion. It’s a nuclear 1946 calories! That’s 500 calories if you eat 1/4 of it when you’re out with 4 friends. Of course, we overeaters usually ate more than our share.

shrimp cocktail

This is Red Lobster’s Classic Jumbo Shrimp Cocktail. It’s only 100 calories, sans sauce. And the sauce is only  45 calories (if you use it all).

Want to solve your weight problem? You can, by learning to eat what you like and enjoy it even more than you do now.

I’ve helped thousands of people lose weight and live a healthier happier life for the rest of their lives, taking my program, reading my book, or both. Read my book or listen to my audiobook, and then take action to make your life better! This can be the year you solve your weight problem.

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How to Lose Weight and Still Eat Everything You Like.

Posted on January 1, 2017 | 7 comments

pizza-junk-food-600

Most people think you have to deny yourself your favorite foods and stick to a rigid diet to lose weight. On the contrary, the key to learning how to lose weight permanently is learning how to eat and enjoy everything you like in the right way, not making yourself go without. You even learn how to “splurge” on the weekend without gaining weight. This is not only possible, but is absolutely necessary if you want to lose weight permanently.

(The author is a psychotherapist who lost 140 lbs. when he developed his methods,  and he’s kept it off for over 30 years. Read about his method in his book at the right, or listen to his audiobook, free sample provided here.)

I was overweight and obese my entire life, well over 300 pounds at times and a miserable failure at diets and weight loss plans. I had given up more times than you can count. Fortunately, I kept looking for an answer and at the age of thirty-three, I finally learned how to lose weight for good and lost 140 pounds at a pretty fast clip. I’ve kept the weight off pretty easily for over thirty years now, and I eat everything I like. I don’t eat diet food and I don’t exercise like a health nut. I’m a Licensed Counselor now, I’ve helped thousands to succeed like I have, and I’ve written a popular and respected book about it, The Anderson Method, available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

The truth is that there are no “bad” foods or “bad” calories. Managed healthfully, they are all good! I eat everything I like, and I’ve learned how to lose weight while going out to dinner, to parties, on vacation and how to have drinks and desserts and still lose weight pretty quickly. Here’s why and how it works:

If, over a month’s period of time, you’ve eaten fewer calories than you’ve burned in normal activities, regardless of what you’ve eaten and when you’ve eaten it, you’ll lose weight. You’ll lose weight even if you’ve eaten all your favorite foods, even if they are the things that the “diet experts” say you can’t eat.

If you’ve been listening to diet nonsense on TV, in the magazines and at lunch, you may be skeptical of this, but this is science. It’s easy to verify at any university or college. Your body doesn’t operate on a 24 hour schedule. A five foot four inch woman needs an average of approximately 1400 to 1800 calories per day, depending on the individual, and will not gain weight if she doesn’t exceed that. However, if she has habits where she averages that most of the time, and exceeds it only occasionally, which is very easy, she’ll get overweight and constantly gain weight! If you’re a normal American, this has probably been happening to you.

Instead of thinking of it as a 1800 calorie per day daily budget, think 12,600 calories per week. If you keep your weekdays at 1200, you’d have to eat more than 3800 calories per day on the weekends to gain weight! Keeping your weekdays austere gives you the ability to fit in anything without going “over budget”. A piece of cake is about 350 calories. A glass of wine is about 100. A normal serving of lasagna is about 500. If you think you can’t fit those things in on a day with a budget of 1800, we need to talk about that.

However, getting these new habits in place isn’t a matter of “will power” or “just making up your mind”. There is a scientific method in how to lose weight and keep it off, but it is not so much the science of nutrition as it is the science of psychology and behavioral medicine. Will power and self discipline were never within my grasp before I discovered the methods I teach my clients, the methods of Behavioral Medicine I call Therapeutic Psychogenics.

Reprogramming habits is the result of using these therapeutic techniques, methods of behavioral therapy. Once the habits are in place, we get a different result. We become and stay the weight we want to be. You’ve seen other people do it, those people who seem to eat just like you or worse and stay slim. You can do it too! Now, we eat only our favorite foods. We waste no calories on mediocre food. Our “diet” can include every kind of meat, potatoes, pasta, sauce, wine, drinks and even desserts that you can think of, as long as they are good enough for the calories they “cost”. We deny ourselves nothing.

There is a proven way to “reprogram” your habits so the calories come out right and it becomes automatic and habitual, even easy to maintain for many. Learning how to lose weight permanently is not impossible. It’s just work, and not hard work at that.

You don’t have to live a miserable life of diet food and torturous exercise to solve your weight problem. In fact, permanent weight loss is the result of learning a more pleasurable way of living that includes some of your most cherished foods and activities, a way that becomes habitual and normal for you. You can even become one of those infuriating people who seem to eat all the wrong things and “have no problem”. Read my book and you’ll truly find out how to lose weight.

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Is Food Addiction Keeping You From Losing Weight?

Posted on July 26, 2015 | 2 comments

(First published in The Huffington Post)food addiction recovery

Have you ever thought of yourself as a food addict? If so, you are not alone.

Ask yourself these questions:

1) Do you find yourself craving and eating certain foods even though you’re not physically hungry?

2) Have you tried to have just a bit of something like ice cream or chips and find that you can’t stop, sometimes eating the whole box or bag?

3) Do you think about food constantly?

4) Do you try to cut back or abstain from overeating, repeatedly fail, and feel guilty or ashamed because of it?

5) Are there times when “too much is not enough” and you just can’t get enough?

6) Does your overeating cause you significant problems, yet you continue to do it, and can’t help yourself?

7) Does your eating get worse if you are stressed, anxious, angry or hurt?

8) Do you often feel angry or anxious if you try to limit your eating?

If you answered “yes” to more than a couple of these questions, you are like most of the clients who have come to me for help to lose weight. Like me, they had been told that diet and exercise were the answer to their weight problem. However, they just could not get themselves to diet and exercise for very long, if at all, before going back to their old ways. If they were able to lose a significant amount of weight, it wasn’t long before they put it back on.

Relax. You’re normal. You’re OK. But you might be a food addict.

In fact, it’s normal to be a food addict in America. Approximately 70 percent of us are overweight and 35 percent of us are clinically obese. And it’s not like we want to be. If fact, we spend billions on weight loss because we hate it. Yet we are still overweight and it’s getting worse.

In addiction counseling, there are often disputes with clients about whether or not they are an addict when they swear they are not. When I first started treating addictions, before I solved my own food and weight problem, an old alcohol counselor gave me his definition of an addict: An addict is a person who, when they indulge, it causes problems, yet they continue to indulge.

You see, if a person is normal and mentally healthy, and they find that some behavior is causing big problems in their life, they just stop, or change it so it no longer causes problems. For example, if you discovered that you were suddenly allergic to shellfish or peanuts and got sick every time you had it, you’d stop eating whatever you were allergic to. You don’t keep touching a hot stove.

But addicts don’t stop. They keep drinking or using even when it costs them their job, family and health, even when they try their hardest to stop. They keep smoking even when they know its damaging their lungs, even after they’ve tried to quit dozens of times. That’s the “insanity” and power of addiction. It prevents a person from stopping something they know is killing them. They are powerless. And often the addiction clouds their mind so they live in denial. I had a smoker on oxygen once tell me, “it’s not that bad” when we were talking about his COPD. An alcoholic told me he only had a “touch” of cirrhosis. I had one in jail on his third DUI tell me his drinking was really not a problem. If they were in their right minds and able to exercise their will and self-preservation instincts, they’d quit those addictions in a heartbeat. Normally, if you find that something you do is ruining your life and happiness, you stop. But addictions have a power over a person’s will and even their insight.

In America, we have a food addiction problem. It’s exacerbated by a culture that is in denial about it. We promote eating as a pastime and as a form of entertainment and important part of socializing and networking. We’ve convinced ourselves that enormous portions are normal and that overindulging is lighthearted fun. Meanwhile, the fact is that it is killing us.

I grew up overweight and spent years failing at diets. Like 35 percent of us I was obese, actually way more than obese, and I had every one of those behaviors I listed at the beginning of the article. I often joked about being addicted to Doritos and Oreos, but it was not until I started working with addicts and studying addictions and how to treat them that I realized I really was a food addict. And treating my problem as an addiction with behavior therapy finally solved my weight problem.

If you are a food addict, the routine approach using diets and exercise is not going to solve your problem. Neither will surgery. They won’t change what has to be changed because yours is not a weight problem. It’s a behavior problem, an addiction problem. And it won’t get fixed until you treat it as such.

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What is Belviq, the New Weight Loss Drug?

Posted on June 14, 2013 | 2 comments

Belviq is a new weight loss drug that just became available by prescription this past week, one of only two new weight loss drugs approved by the FDA in the last 13 years. (The other is Qsymia, which I have already written about.) It is made by Arena Pharmaceuticals. Belviq is the trade name, Lorcaserin is the generic name, and it was called Lorqess during its development.

Belviq affects the serotonin receptors in the brain, changing the neurotransmitter action of serotonin, the brain chemical you hear about related to mood. SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) are a group of drugs that are mainly used to treat depression, but it has been found that many of the drugs that affect neurotransmitters have lots of other affects, change in appetite among them. Drugs that change the action of the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine are used to treat many psychological conditions, even psychotic disorders, because they change the way we think and feel. They can create experience in the psyche like hallucinations, expansive thoughts or euphoria (good mood or feeling), or quell it, like reducing cravings and dark thoughts, or quieting hallucinations and mania. The antidepressant Wellbutrin was found to quiet the cravings of people trying to quit smoking and was then marketed also as Zyban. Some of these drugs were found to increase appetite, cravings, and drive to eat, and some have been found to reduce appetite and cravings. Pharmaceutical companies create new drugs, experiment with them, then market them for the effects that they produce. Belviq is sold as a weight loss drug, a drug to reduce appetite.

Does it work?

Reliable clinical studies have shown that people given the drug lost weight slightly more than people given a placebo, even without instruction in weight loss protocols. In studies where people were instructed in weight loss technique, people taking the drug did about twice as well as those taking the placebo. In all cases, the weight loss was slight, and the weight was regained after the trials. I have seen no reports that relate the subjective experience of appetite or craving suppression by the study subjects, which is the main thing I would like to know about. One would assume, based on the results of the clinical studies, that eating drive was reduced by the drug.

What value would any weight loss drug have?

Everyone familiar with my work knows that there is no mystical magic to successful weight loss. We must establish new behavior where we eat less, to the degree that we lose weight and keep it off. My method has been so successful because of the use of psychological techniques that are so effective in managing thoughts and feelings and so effective in changing habit –deleting damaging habits and installing healthy habits.

I know, from personal experience, as well as my work with clients and patients, that we are all different in many ways, and we have different psychological experience, like appetite, cravings and compulsion.

For those who experience uncontrollable drive that results in life threatening bingeing and uncontrollable compulsive eating, I pray that we find a drug that can mitigate outrageous eating drive without presenting unwanted and dangerous side effects. People would still have to manage their behavior with the methods I teach, but it would be so much easier if one were not tormented by the compulsion that I know some people experience. Is Belviq such a drug? I hope to find out.

Is Belviq safe?

There are so many bad side effects being reported that it is scary, even to a mental health counselor who has seen it all. Not only are psychological side effects being reported, but risk of medical problems seems high. Both the University  of California’s Wellness Letter and Consumer Reports have published critical reviews that would discourage just about anyone but the most desperate from taking it.

The Anderson Method recommendation:

To solve your weight problem, you will have to create new habits of behavior and thinking, no matter what. You will need to maintain them for the rest of your life. Many people have used The Anderson Method to do just that, some saying it was easy. If you can do that without drugs, that will be the best solution. After all, you don’t want to be taking these drugs for the rest of your life, even if they are safe.

If you are unable to manage compulsive eating and bingeing and the experience of craving is an absolute torment, drugs might help. There are a number of drugs that have helped people with unwanted eating drive, such as Wellbutrin, Lexapro and Topamax. And they have been around for a while. My advice, if you want to try a drug to help with weight control, is to find an expert in these drugs (Psychiatrists or Psychiatric Nurses) and try one that is known to be safe. Remember that no matter what, no drug is going to make you lose weight or solve your weight problem. The solution is in behavioral therapy science. A drug may make it easier to do the work, but you will still need to do the work. If you want to try a drug, try one that’s known to help some people and been around for a while. Let someone else be the guinea pig with Belviq.

 

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