The reason that food makes you feel better is because your brain is designed to give you that response. Your brain wants you to eat, and in order to do that, it must reward you for taking action and eating food. Although any food can stimulate the brain’s reward system, some foods give us “more reward”. These foods tend to be more reinforcing and thus we seek them out more. Highly rewarding foods are usually high in fat, sugar, and calories, and they provide the “feeling better” sensations that emotional eaters experience.

Everybody is an Emotional Eater

What people seem to misunderstand however, is that EVERYBODY is an emotional eater. We all eat food and everybody gets a release of reward chemicals in their brain for doing so. This is how humans have survived as a species. This is why we live today. Without this mechanism we would not seek out food. Everybody is an emotional eater because your brain is designed that way. It is designed to make you feel better when you eat, so you will do it again in the future.

Let me give you an example. Almost everybody has stuffed themselves so much that it almost made them sick. In fact for some people, this is quite a common occurrence! Do you know why you let yourself do this? You did it because you are an emotional eater, just like everybody else. Even in the absence of any hunger, your brain will give you a reward when you keep eating. That’s why sometimes it is hard to stop, because your brain wants you to keep eating!

The big problem however, is when people associate certain behaviors with an eating habit. They develop repetitive behaviors and always eat under certain circumstances. In essence they create a script that is imprinted in their brains and this behavior becomes so routine that they respond even before they are conscious of a stimulus. For example “every time I get stressed, I eat ice-cream”. This process is often unconscious. That is why sometimes you find yourself scraping the bottom of the ice-cream container without even realizing you have eaten anything at all!

This process is called “conditioned learning”. Basically, conditioned learning means that you have TRAINED your brain to react a specific way under specific circumstances. This is what people refer to when they say that they are “emotional eaters”. In fact eating when you are stressed or angry or lonely or sad is a learned behavior that you have created in your brain through association. It is a conditioned response.

Lets take another example. Ivan Pavlov, the great Russian scientist, found that salivation in response to the presentation of food could rapidly be transferred to another stimulus. In one of his fascinating experiments he found that a bell tone that is repeatedly associated with the presentation of food could elicit the identical physiological reactions to the presentation of food. So every time he rang the bell, it produced the physiological response of salivation, i.e the desire to eat food.

This process of association has the nice little tag line of “neurons that fire together wire together”. This is how your brain works. It makes associations by linking cognitive, motor and emotional aspects together into one chunk. This is a memory. Every time that you repeat the same sequence of events, such as always eating food under certain circumstances, you strengthen that connection in your brain. This repetition creates a formed habit, an unconscious response that you have developed over a period of time.

Emotional Eating is a Habit

The major difference here is that of goal-directed behavior verses habit-directed behavior. An example of goal directed behavior is thinking about cake, desiring cake, and then taking the deliberate steps to obtain cake. All of this requires a specific set of motivational neural circuits. If you walk into your house intent on getting some cake from the refrigerator, your activity is goal-directed and consciously reward-driven. You want that cake and you are going to act to obtain it.

But if you do that often enough, the mental process changes. It becomes a habit-driven behavior, less deliberate and more repetitive – and engages different neural circuitry. No longer motivated by a conscious desire for food, you consciously head for the refrigerator when you get home because it is a habit. Your motor behavior has become automatic.

This habit of stimulus-response is what causes overeating, not “emotional eating”. Remember, everybody is an emotional eater, but not everybody is an overeater. Every time you eat when you are angry, you strengthen the angry=eating habit. Every time you don’t eat when you get angry then you weaken the angry=eating habit. That’s neuroplasticity, and it is always in action.

Eliminate the Habit

The first step in eliminating these triggers that people call emotional eating is awareness. Try and identify your negative eating habits. For example “when X happens, then I want to eat Y and only Y.” If you can eliminate X then you are much less likely to eat Y. If you can’t eliminate X, then substitute Z for Y – a healthier option or some activity. At first you are not going to want to do this because breaking a habit can be very difficult.

But that’s what it is – a habit. You brain is a habit machine. It creates these habits for efficiency, because it likes to conserve energy. If you can change your negative eating habits by training new ones, you will escape the trap of of always desiring specific foods when you feel a certain way. Everybody is an emotional eater so your desire to overeat when you feel bad (or good) is a trained behavior. Eliminate the habit, and you will eliminate your “emotional eating”.

The first important point is that you should only change one habit at a time. The reason for this is simple. Changing your habits requires energy, attention and willpower. If you burden yourself with too much change, your brain is likely to go into a survival response which will lead you to revert to your old habits. In times of danger, your brain will always rely on what it knows best. Change means danger, so you must reduce the threat that change brings by only changing one habit at a time.

So what habit should you change? Of course this is entirely individual. In this stage of the process it is often very valuable to have a coach. A coach can see what you cannot, and can provide you with the best option for change. Alternatively you need to examine your diet and ask yourself, “What is the one habit that I can change that will provide me with the best outcome in terms of a healthy change for weight loss?”

Now read this carefully. If your weak point is that you drink 2 gallons of soda a day, don’t do what most people do and say “No more soda!”. It is imperative that you don’t deprive yourself of the things that you love, or else you are almost guaranteed to binge sooner or later. Instead ask yourself “How can I reduce the amount of soda that I drink and still feel satisfied?”, and then make the change. Maybe you eliminate drinking soda in the car, or replace the soda with water for one meal a day, or maybe you choose a day of the week where you don’t drink any soda. Eventually your new routine will become a habit, and you can continue to reduce your intake of soda until (a) you only drink a moderate amount or (b) you eliminate it altogether.

For most people this process seems too slow and often too hard. These are the people who are continually “on a diet”. It’s easy to lose weight in two weeks. Creating your new diet blueprint takes time, effort, and energy, and most importantly it requires taking small steps. Continue to gradually replace bad habits with good ones, and soon your diet blueprint will not be something you are “on” it will just be simply something that you do.

Week 4: 

Examine your current diet blueprint and ask yourself “What is the one habit that I can change that will provide me with the best outcome in terms of a healthy change for weight loss?”. The answer to this will be different for everybody, and is a major reason why simply adapting somebody else’s diet frequently results in failure.

Once that change becomes a habit (i.e you don’t have to think about it), then you can repeat the process. Remember, one habit at a time, and good luck!

This first thing that we want to identify is your current eating patterns. Human beings are hardwired to create habits because it makes us efficient. One of the fundamental and ingrained habits we have is our eating behaviors, because we do them on such a consistent basis. As you go through your journal, try and identify some of these habits and behaviors. What time of the day do you always eat? What are the foods that you eat the most? When are the times when you eat too much of a certain food? When do you eat the majority of your food?

Why is this so important? Because 99% of the things that we do, think, and feel are the same as we did, thought and felt yesterday, and are the same as we will do, will think and will feel tomorrow! This is why every single diet that you take from somebody else will fail over the long run. If you drastically change your eating behavior and habits, your brain will repel and you will go back to your previous eating habits eventually. This is why almost everybody will regain weight (and more!) during their weight loss campaign.

So how do you change? By replacing your old habits with new ones. Although that may sound easy, changing your habits can be very difficult because your brain HATES CHANGE! This is because your brain is always looking for ways to conserve energy and it literally has to burn more glucose when we do something out of the ordinary. So when you decide to “go for broke” by changing  your whole eating behavior and introducing excessive exercise, any unplanned event in your life can easily derail the changes that you want to make. Your body literally runs out of energy to manage all of the changes, and falls back to what it knows best to get through the rest of the day.

With this in mind, over the next few weeks we are going to focus on making one small change. We do this by identifying something small that we want to change, establishing a strategy for change, and then implementing the strategy. If you do this everyday (for approximately 21 days) you will create new neural pathways in your brain and a new habit will be formed. While it may be frustrating to make changes gradually, it is a much more realistic approach for guaranteeing success because it requires less energy and won’t place unrealistic demands on your body. Remember, success breeds success, so it is much better to have many small successes that add up, than to take on TOO much at once, fail, and have to start all over at square one.

Week 3:

Evaluate your current eating blueprint. What is the one change you could make that you could feel like you could accomplish? Here are some examples to get you thinking:

Cut out or reduce your intake of ONE snack

Replace ONE starch with vegetables

Reduce your intake of calories from liquids.

Remove or reduce your intake of ONE desert.

Begin eating your meals NOT in front of the T.V.

There are hundreds of different eating behaviors that you can change, but what is important is that you change the ones that are relevant to you. Next week we will observe what eating behavior will be most beneficial for you to change in order to create your new eating blueprint.

For many people such strategies can be quite helpful. They ensure that you are more mindful when you eat and that you pay attention to the signals of your body. One of the most common is – “Chew your food X number of times”. This is a good little habit to get yourself into, not so much because it will take you longer to eat your food, but because it will ensure that you eat foods that actually require chewing. Let me explain… 

Food manufacturers know that the quicker that you eat, the more you eat. The more food that you eat, the more you buy, so getting you to eat quickly is of high priority for food designers. This means that they produce foods that are specifically designed to break down immediately in your mouth.  Less chewing time means quicker consumption. Quicker consumption means more food consumed. You get the picture.

They do this in a variety of ways from putting water into chicken which makes it softer and easier to chew, to adding fat, simply to make the food break down easier in your mouth, and even injecting marinade into meat so the connective tissue is destroyed making it almost “pre-chewed”.

As you can imagine, processed foods also contain additives and chemicals that reduce the effort it takes to break them down and swallow. This means that you are often taking the next bite even before you have swallowed the first. So not only are the highly processed foods more calorie dense, but you are also eating more of them because they are designed to be eaten very fast. In most situations your brain will not register the fact that you have just eaten 1,000 calories in 5 minutes, so you continue to eat.

The most important point here is that when you are choosing foods to eat, make sure that you choose foods that you actually have to chew. Foods that don’t require chewing are designed that way, and almost guarantee that you will eat more. Foods that require chewing are usually healthier options and you will eat less because it takes you a little longer to consume them.

In the past we needed to chew a food around 25 times before we could swallow it. Now it may take you 2 or 3 quick munches for the food to be headed into your stomach. Stick to foods that you need to chew and you will magically see yourself eating a lot less.

All this chewing also gives you a fantastic side effect.  Chewing enhances flavor! It’s called savoring your food.  When the food stays in our mouth longer our sense of smell really has a chance to kick in and provide an extra flavor boost.  We all are aware of this on some level – every kid knows if they don’t like the taste of something they should try and AVOID chewing and gulp the food as quickly as possible.  

So slow down, chew and savor your food.  Eat mindfully.  Think about choosing foods that are less commercially processed and require a little more effort to chew.  Your stomach will be able communicate fullness appropriately and at the same time your taste buds can be really satisfied.

Being hungry does not mean that you have to eat immediately. It does not mean that you are going to starve if you don’t eat within the next half hour. But that is how we act. We say that unless we get something to eat that we simply can’t function. We have almost become afraid of the sensation of hunger, with food being our saviour. But this was not always the case.

Most people cannot tolerate being hungry, because they have trained themselves to be that way. Hunger is a natural process. It was not designed to paralyze you. Hunger does not mean that you must stop everything immediately, and find food. But for many people it does. Hunger is a healthy reminder that you will probably have to eat something pretty soon or later on in the day. If you didn’t get hungry you wouldn’t eat that much. But you don’t have to eat every time you feel hungry.

If you eat every time you feel hungry then you give your brain a flawless strategy to get you to eat whenever it wants. Remember your brain loves sugar, fat and calories and it doesn’t care what you look like naked. It is you, or your “consciousness” that refrains from gorging on cookies all day. Deep down however, some of your other brain structures are signaling you to give in to those urges. And the way that these structures get you to eat those delicious treats is to make you slightly hungry, just enough to get you to indulge.

Think about it. When are the most common times when you snack on little treats? For most people it is in between meals – the midmorning snack, or the mid-afternoon sugar lift. Others enjoy snacking when they are preparing meals, or when they have to wait for their meal to be ready. For other people they just have to eat the minute they come home from work. At all of these times your not really hungry, you are JUST HUNGRY ENOUGH.

That’s all you brain needs, it just needs to give you the right stimulus to get you to eat that bag of chips. For most of us that means just a little bit hungry, or a little “pickish”. But have you ever felt that urge to eat, then you forgot about it and 10 minutes later you realized that you were not even hungry anymore? Congratulations, you have just practiced some hunger tolerance.

In order to stop your incessant snacking, you need to re-learn to become comfortable with being just a little bit hungry. At first it may be a bit uncomfortable, but that is only because you have trained yourself to be that way. You have trained yourself to always eat when you feel a certain cue from your stomach (brain!). When you practice slight hunger tolerance you will quickly learn that you do not have to always eat when you feel hungry, and the sensation will often go away. 

Think of it this way.  Hunger is like a conversation that your stomach is having with your brain.  Your stomach may be temporarily empty but that doesn’t mean you are starving or even that your body needs fuel at the moment.  Your stomach is like a small child that hasn’t learned the meaning of later or patience.  But your stomach can be trained to wait just a little while and food will be available. You can learn to notice signals of hunger and defer the desire to eat immediately. The critical point to understand is that this takes PRACTICE not just understanding.  So don’t let your tummy throw a tantrum!  Your mindful brain is wiser and capable of exerting executive control.  Before too long being a little bit hungry will be a cue from your body and not a command.  After all we don’t immediately put on pajamas and go to bed every time we feel sleepy!

Practice patience and your hunger pangs can be dealt with appropriately. Over time the screaming and crying will turn into a polite request and save you from diving head first into the nearest cookie jar.

Simply watching another person perform any activity stimulates specific brain cells – ones that we previously believed were activated only by DOING the activity. Lets say you are minding your own business, going about your daily activities, and you decide to drop in to see one of your friends. You go into your friends house and she just happens to be having some chocolate chip cookies. You both sit down and begin to chat, but your attention keeps being drawn to the chocolate cookies. Why? Because as your friend goes through the process of eating the cookies your brain activates as you were eating them yourself. These are you mirror neurons. There is a problem however…you’re not actually eating any cookies. So as one area of your brain says, “Hey I’m eating cookies”, another area says “Nope, not getting any cookies here”. The common theme here is “cookies”, so all of a sudden you want cookies!

As your friend enjoys the cookies your brain tries to interpret how your friend feels about the cookies. “Are the cookies nice?”, “Does she like the cookies”, “How are the cookies making her feel?”. These processes all occur below your conscious awareness. Your friend doesn’t even need to tell you the cookies are great.  Your brain automatically monitors and interprets her body language. If she talks about how yummy the cookies taste your conscious awareness kicks in.  So you have your unconscious mind receiving information that the cookies must be really good and you have your conscious mind reinforcing this information.

Finally your brain begins to create an experience where it anticipates how wonderful the cookie would taste. Your brain knows that you have had cookies before and it uses your past experiences to gauge how enjoyable this cookie will be if you eat it. Finally, your friend asks “Would you like a cookie”. Somehow despite this intense activation in your brain you muster up the willpower to refuse your friends invitation of a delightful treat. After all you are “on a diet”.

The above example is called and ENVIRONMENTAL CUE. We experience these at multiple intervals during the day, like when you pass your favorite bakery on the way to work, or when you see an ad for burger king in-between watching a T.V show. In fact, studies show that we make over 200 conscious decisions and countless unconscious decisions about food every single day.  Environmental cues are everywhere, but the most powerful ones can come in the form of your social interactions.

Human beings have especially active mirror neurons. Many researchers believe that one of their primary functions is to facilitate social behavior.  These brain cells allow us to learn from each other subconsciously and they are responsible for many of the amazing feats we can accomplish. Unfortunately mirror neurons take in all the information around you and don’t make judgements.  They can help you learn useful social behaviors but they also indiscriminately respond to those less desirable actions that we encounter every day.

Lets take the above example of our friend and her cookies. Although you may have just eaten lunch and have absolutely no desire for a cookie, simply watching your friend eating one will ramp up your desire to do to same. In step 1, the motor areas of your brain that are required to eat a cookie are basically saying – “eat that cookie”. In step 2, the emotional areas of your brain that interpret your friends feelings are saying – “eat that cookie”. In step 3 the pleasure centers in your brain are determining how delicious it will be and are saying – “eat that cookie”. But guess what, not one of these structures work independently, so in one fell swoop you have the movement areas of your brian, the emotional areas of your brain and the pleasure areas of your brain all simultaneously telling you to “EAT THAT COOKIE”. All because you are watching your friend eat one. 

So can your friends make you fat? The answer is of course, yes. So many people are totally unaware of how their friends and social environment affect their behaviors. But here is the good news. If your friends can make you fat, then they can also make you thin. You just have to tell them how they can help you to do that. Here are some quick tips to get you started:

MAKE IT PUBLIC – Most people when trying to lose weight and change their eating behavior never tell anybody what they are trying to do. This can be a huge mistake. They are often embarrassed what people may think of them, especially if they fail to lose weight. By going public you can advise your family, friends, and others, how they can be the most helpful to you. Remember, it is very hard for people to help you if they do not know that you are trying to change.

CONTROL YOUR ENVIRONMENT – It is a lot easier to control your environment than it is to control your behavior. Read that again, it is critical to your success. When you are constantly exposed to food, you have to constantly resist temptation. One can only resist for so long. Start with your family. Ask them to get rid of foods that are problematic for you or at least make sure they are not storing them in plain view and eating them in front of you. Eliminating this environmental cue alone can make a big difference.

ELICIT HELPING RELATIONSHIPS – Seek the support of somebody that can help you with your behavior change. This can be anybody, a friend, a family member, a colleague, somebody who has already achieved the change that you want. It should be somebody who you think can understand and support you as you go through your behavior change.

FIND SOCIAL GROUPS – It can be very difficult to change your eating behavior if you feel like you are doing it all on your own. Seek out groups of people who are going through the same process that you are. You can learn from them, ask questions, find support and learn new strategies to help you along.

Changing your eating behavior to lose weight can be a long road for some people, and keeping it off is often more difficult. In order to create real change, you must understand to use your family, close friends and others to help you along. They do not have to change they just have to HELP YOU CHANGE. Make mirror neurons work for you and you will find that losing weight becomes a whole lot easier.