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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”.

Hey everybody,

Conner here, and I have a very special announcement to make! For the past few weeks I have been working on creating an ebook containing some of the best diet strategies that I have learned over the past few years. I finally got it finished today, and have called it:

52 Guaranteed Strategies To Lose Weight And Keep It Off

It contains 52 of the very best strategies and tips on weight loss and creating a lasting change….and because I feel that everybody should have access to these strategies, I am giving it away completely free! You can access it by clicking the link above or by clicking here.

I am extremely confident that if you apply what is in this book to your life, you will create the lasting change that you have been looking for. Let me know what you think of it by leaving a comment here, or if you are on twitter then send me a tweet,

I would love to here from you!

Take care, enjoy the book, and don’t forget to actually use some of these strategies because they work! Talk to you soon….

Conor

1. Complacency: One of the major mistakes that dieters make is that they tend to get complacent at exactly the wrong time. Once your clothes fit better, you feel great and everybody begins to comment on how great that you look. As a reward you decide to indulge in your favorite treat. No big deal, you have been so good up to now, right? Unfortunately, an indulgence like this leads to a second, and then to a third, until finally, in a few days, you have undone all the hard work that you have done over the past few weeks. When you have decided that you want to lose weight, it is imperative that you NEVER get complacent. Being thin is a lifestyle, and it is difficult to change your whole life in a few weeks. Change takes time, and just because you lose weight, does not mean that you lose vulnerability.

2. External Cues: Your clothes are one of the most powerful external cues when it comes to preventing weight gain. There is nothing that sounds the warning siren faster or motivates people to act more than when their clothing gets too tight. When you have loose fitting clothes however, you can gain inches without even knowing it! You can’t hide from your clothes like you can with a weighing scale. People tend to listen when there clothes get to tight, and you probably will too.

3. Convenience: If you do not get rid of your larger fitting clothes then you will always have a subconscious excuse for re-gaining weight. Saving these larger clothes makes it far to easy to switch back to them instead of acting to correct any errors. Knowing that you only have one size of clothing adds a powerful incentive to maintain your weight loss. Unless you can go out an buy an entire new wardrobe every time that you gain weight, keeping one size of clothing can be extremely effective for most people.

4. Reward: Buying new clothes can act as a very powerful reward for somebody losing weight. When you do something difficult, like losing weight, it is extremely important that you provide yourself with a reward. This makes it more likely that you will perform that activity again in the future. During weight loss this can be a problem because for a lot of people their reward is eating highly palatable food! To counter-act this you need to replace your food rewards with non-food related rewards. If you enjoy buying new clothes then this may be a very effective strategy for you. For one you are rewarding the act of losing weight with something that you enjoy – buying new clothes. Secondly you are eliminating loose-clothing complacency, implementing a new powerful external cue, and providing yourself with more motivation because you will want to continue to wear the new clothes…what a fantastic strategy!

I hope that by reading this you will realize the power that clothes has on your weight loss and maintenance. I am not saying to buy new clothes every time you lose a pound. Instead I am asking that you be aware of the potential this strategy has for your success. Try it out…you may be surprised with the results!

One of the most powerful and yet underused weight loss maintenance strategies is “clothes management”. Strange I know,  but if you learn how to use your clothes to your advantage, you can maintain your weight loss quite effectively.

To demonstrate the risk of wearing loosely fitting clothes let me refer you to an amusing and eye-opening example. During a survey of prison inmates, it was discovered that those with an average sentence of six months, mysteriously would end up gaining 20-25 “prison pounds” during the course of their stay. This is very surprising, as the food being served is not of very high quality, and the inmates have access to exercise facilities.

The true reason for the weight gain was unveiled when the prison mates were questioned. Not one of the inmates blamed the weight gain on food, exercise machines, or even emotional reason’s. Instead they explained how the baggy orange jumpsuit that they had to wear for six months was the result of their weight gain. Because the overalls were so loose-fitting, most of them failed to realize that they had progressively gained weight, which is quite easy to do if you are not paying attention. It was not until they were released and had to try and squeeze back into their old clothes that they all realized that they had gained so much weight!

To understand this better, lets take a look at what Brian Wansink call’s “Signal Clothes”. Wansink proposes that losing weight, for example 20 pounds, is an abstract concept. But being able to fit into your favorite jeans is not at all abstract. To dieters, such clothes are called “signal clothes”.

To illustrate this point Wansink conducted a survey of 322 people and he asked them what were the top 8 signals that they used to know when they had lost weight. Here are the results:

• “When my jeans feel comfortable again.”
• “When I have to start wearing a belt.”
• “When I suck in my stomach, and I can see some definition, like a four-pack.”
• “When my belt notch moves back to where it used to be.”
• “When I don’t get tired walking up two flights of stairs to my office.”
• “When I can see my cheeckbones.”
• “When I don’t have to inhale to button my pants.”
• “When my friends or colleagues ask me if I’ve lose weight.”

Fascinating. Out of the top 8 signals that people use to know when they have lose weight, 4 (yes half!!) are related to the clothes that they wear! Do you think that this has ramifications for weight loss? Or, more importantly weight maintenance, the most important stage for a weight loss campaign? The answer of course is a resounding, YES!! In tomorrow’s post I am going to explain exactly why and how using signal clothes is one of the most powerful weight loss and weight management strategies known to man…See you then!

Despite this process being quite simple, it is certainly not easy. Most weight loss information will have you believe that you can lose all the weight that you want in 30 days, and that rapid weight loss is the key to success. I wish this were the case, but sadly, it’s not.

Your brain and body are hardwired to GAIN weight, not lose it. Moreover, your brain HATES change and it does so at quite a slow pace. So when you make huge changes in such a short period of time, your brain never really changes and that is why you will always gain back the weight that you have lost. If there is one thing that you must learn here then it is this…You will never change your weight unless you also change your brain. Yes you may have short term change, but you won’t have lasting change.

It really is that simple and yes, that is the “key” to weight loss. In fact neuroplasticity is the key to all change and behavior modification. The “problem” of course is that you won’t lose “7 pounds every 11 days”. The good news is that you will not have to lose weight ever again, whereas in the other example you will be losing 7 pounds in 11 days for the rest of your life!

Week 5:

Rinse, wash and repeat. Now that you know how to change, it is simply a case of continuing the process. Choose one activity that you want to change and that will contribute to your weight loss. Create strategies that ensure that you will make this change and continue until you have made this change into a habit. Once you have a habit in place, you will no longer have to think about it. This will free up some of your brain power to repeat the process. Continue to rewire your brain and your eating blueprint and weight loss will never be an issue for you again.

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.

So why is it so important to write down everything you eat? There are a number of reasons. First of all, we all have unconscious habits, especially when it comes to eating. This means that you will eat food at various times without even noticing it. Writing down every time that you eat makes you more aware of these occasions. Once you have enough data you will notice when these habits are most likely to occur. The next step is to either eliminate the habit by changing it, or replace the problem habit with a new and better one. But it is essential that you remember habit changing requires mindful diligence to the new behavior. Ritual makes habitual.  

Next, writing down every time you eat will give you a good indication of when you eat the most calories. You will soon recognize when this is. For most people it will be dinner or late at night. Another common time is during the weekend, because you have lost the structure of your Monday to Friday routine. Many people are also surprised to discover that a large portion of their calories come from snacks or nibbles.  Make sure you include every bite or sip you consume in order to have an accurate assessment.

Finally, writing down everything you eat will reveal to you what it is that you actually eat. When asked, most people give a totally different representation of their diet. What is more remarkable is that they actually believe what they are saying, even though it is so far from actual reality. Yes it is true …  our memories, even the strong ones, are often completely inaccurate.  When you write something down it will always be there, and you will not have to rely on your memory for an estimation of your average daily or weekly diet.

There are numerous other reasons that are just as important for writing down everything that you eat. Don’t worry this is not something that you will be doing for the rest of your life, but it is a fundamental step in creating your own blueprint. If you have not yet done so, buy yourself a journal where you can write down all of your information and keep it on one place. 

So the exercise of this week is to repeat last weeks exercise. Even if you are a part of the 1% who completed last weeks exercise, doing it again is still extremely beneficial. And when I say write down everything I mean everything, ESPECIALLY snacks!

Week 2:

Write down everything that you eat. Sounds simple right? Actually, writing down everything that you eat is very time consuming and requires attention and awareness. The goal of this exercise is to make you CONSCIOUS of what you currently eat. Most people are unaware of approximately 30-50% of the calories that they consume on a daily basis. Simply becoming aware of your unconscious eating habits and what you eat during the day will have a profound affect on your success in the future.

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.