“What causes overeating?”

Someone asked this question a few days ago, and it’s the $64,000 question.

How Could You Stop Eating This Once You Start?

This is what the entire weight loss industry including supplement, drugs and fitness are trying to figure out. Whoever finds out what the answer is will become a billionaire overnight.

With that said, I don’t believe there is a single answer to this question, I think it has multiple factors including:

Genetic factors

Family eating patterns when you were a child

Emotional Issues

Stress

Lifestyle (sedentary, active)

Socioeconomic status

Environment

Food Accessibility (are you surrounded by food all day)

Lack of true understanding of the negative effects of overeating

There are likely other factors that I have left out but in general these cover most of what will contribute to overeating.

Specific food items cannot be the cause as overweight and normal weight people alike are exposed to and eat many of the same foods, so there is something else that causes one person to continue eating and the other person to stop.

In other words, 10 people can all eat the same foods for an extended period of time but all 10 people will have a different propensity to gain weight…some just stop eating before they consume enough to gain weight while others will continue to eat…so the question is why?

I’m currently writing a weight loss program that is designed to account for this variability, so the system is flexible and allows room for personal preference…because frankly nobody but you knows what drives you into moments of overeating.

With that said, there are some common strategies everyone can use to help them eat less and lose weight, and depending on what is at the root of your overeating moments one strategy might work better for you than others.

At some point in the future I think it’s quite likely that there will be some sort of drug or genetic engineering intervention that will eventually solve the overeating problem, but until then we’ve got to do it the old fashioned way.

John

Yesterday we had thanksgiving dinner (canadian style). Everything is more or less the same as american thanksgiving except it happens in October.

Of course this means a big day of eating, but how big depends on your regular eating patterns.

Baselines are always Shifting

If you’ve been following my weight loss advice you may have noticed that eating lower calories for extended periods of time get you accustomed to that calorie level.

In other words lower calories start to feel normal.

If you can get yourself to this point then any big eating day will feel bigger than it really is. In other words you can go all out and eat what feels like a lot of food but in reality you might just make it up to your calorie maintenance or just over for the day.

For me maintenance (meaning not gaining or losing weight) Is likely around 2000 on a really low movement zero exercise day and maybe 2500 calories on a higher movement day including a good workout.

Lets just use my numbers as an example:

You can actually train yourself to make 2000 calories FEEL like 3000 calories.

This is a matter of a ‘shifting baseline’…what does that mean you ask? Well read on…

Baseline Calorie Level

Your ‘baseline’ of calories is the amount you regularly eat on a daily basis. You will quickly become accustomed to your daily baseline calorie level and it will feel ‘normal’ to eat at this level most days.

If you’re baseline daily level of calories is 1300-1500 every day then 2000-2500 feels like a lot. But if you regularly eat 2000-2500 you gotta eat 3500-4000 for it to really feel like a lot.

In both cases the feeling of ‘a lot’ is similar, but the total amount of calories consumed is different, and only the second case would cause me to gain weight.

Eating low calorie every day can get tedious and is somewhat unrealistic for the long term. You’re going to want to splash in some higher calorie days…BUT the definition if ‘higher calorie’ is what can change.

Redefining “High Calorie”

If you can train yourself to perceive calorie maintenance as “high calorie” then you’re well on your way to sustainable long term weight loss/maintenance while still enjoying all the social gatherings and holiday eating events that come up throughout the year.

It’s not necessary to eat 4000 calories at thanksgiving dinner in order to enjoy it. Likewise with any other holiday, wedding, cookout or special event. Keeping your calories lower during the week and bewtween (before and after) big events like thanksgiving is what will shift your baseline lower and allow you to enjoy any big eating event without even thinking of how much you’re eating.

John

The diet industry is full of misinformation, logical fallacies, half truths and hypocritical arguments. One of the worst is the concept that calories don’t matter in food but they do matter in the gym.

Almost all treadmills and exercise bikes display 'calories burned'

There are many diet philosophies that try to ignore the basic principle of weight loss being calories in vs calories out. They’ll talk about hormone regulation, specific food items that help change your hormonal make up and ‘mobilize fat’ and other foods that can ‘impair’ your ability to burn fat blah blah. You get the picture. In general they’ll find any excuse besides the total calories.

The hypocritical part comes in when the same people talk about the number of calories a specific exercise can burn. By doing this they are contradicting the original stance taken with specific diet foods saying that calories don’t matter.

So which is it?

Is it specific foods that somehow change you into a ‘fat burning machine’ or is it the total calories burned by a special workout?

This is a case of having your cake and eating it too (literally). Or it’s just ignorance of the way the body functions (I tend to think it’s the latter)

The point is the same marketing/media source will tell you that calories don’t matter when it comes to food, but that they do matter when it comes to exercise.

The real answer is that total calories matter when it comes to food AND exercise.

If you don’t believe me try overeating by 1000 calories every day for a week with all ‘fat burning foods’ or ‘healthy’ foods and I guarantee you will gain weight.

Then try undereating by 1000 calories every day for a week eating only ‘junk food’ and ‘fat storing food’ and I guarantee you will lose weight.

Or you can skip the personal experiment and follow the progress of a university professor from kansas state Mark Haub who started a calorie reduced diet eating twinkies and typical ‘junk food’ in order to prove the point that weight loss is just a matter of calories in vs out.

He reported that after the first week he had already lost 7lbs (I’m sure some of that was water, but the fact remains he is losing weight eating what many would call the wrong food)

His next step is to overeat ‘healthy’ foods to prove you can and will gain weight no matter what kinds of food you eat as long as you’re eating too many of them.

As long as people believe that calories don’t matter they will always be at the whim of the next diet fad promising people they can eat as much food as they want as long as it is healthy. Sadly these will be the same people frustrated that they’ve failed on yet another diet.

JB

Just got back from a great weekend in Florida. Met up with some great people, ate big and saw a great football game…ok it was a bit of a blowout but the good guys won (go gators!)

Gators Won Big Time

At the tailgate we crushed some serious food…biscuits with sausage gravy, beef short ribs, sausages, burgers, bacon, eggs, 3 kinds of potatoes, parfait, apple pie, key lime pie, and some other stuff that I can’t remember the name of.

The point is at a tailgate it was perfectly fine to eat all of these foods and everyone was enjoying themselves.

But some of those same foods could be items that other people would literally be afraid to eat. I think some people are actually afraid of certain foods imagining that they can really do some sort of ‘damage’ to your body.

This is a misplaced fear directed a a specific food instead of a specific amount of food.

I’ve already mentioned the concept of toxic calories, and I think that the bigger danger to your longevity and health isn’t a particular food but too much total food.

The negative effects of eating excessive carbs, or excessive fat, or excessive sugar are very real, but they require you to be in a total calorie excess as well.

In other words, sugar and fat are perfectly fine to eat if you’re not over doing it with your total calories.

Most of the commentators on the evils of sugar or ‘simple carbs’ or saturated fat typically leave out the specific question ‘how much’.

More often than not you get a complex sounding (but highly over simplified) explanation of what they think the body is doing when you eat sugar or fat, and then tell you never to eat them again.

The concept of total calories or dose is rarely discussed and the cult of eating ‘healthy food’ instead of a ‘healthy AMOUNT of food’ continues.

In my opinion the best thing you can do for the look and health of your body is get a handle on your total number of calories. Once you’ve got that under control you can mix and match combination’s of food as you wish until you’ve got a routine that satisfies your appetite and your body image ideals.

JB

The concept of eating healthy or eating ‘clean’ (I hate that term) usually focuses on specific food types and rarely mentions food quantity. This is a fundamental mistake in reasoning as it can be clearly shown that adverse health events can be caused by simply eating too many calories (no matter what the food source).

We'll be Eating Big at The Tailgate in Florida

Brad Pilon just finished writing a new chapter in Eat Stop Eat where he covers the pro inflammatory effects of eating too many calories. He gave an advanced copy of the new chapter to Rusty over at fitness black book. Rusty does a good job of laying out the main points from Brads new chapter on inflammation and calories.

There is some new research that I have been doing with Brad that will be part of my new diet program “The Anything Goes Diet”.

We’re researching the upper limit of calories that a person can have within a given amount of time without it leading to negative health consequences. We’re essentially looking for the toxic upper limit of calories you could eat in a given day.

Exceeding this upper limit can be referred to as being at a toxic calorie level, characterized by the negative consequences of having too much glucose, fat, cholesterol, triglycerides, insulin, pro-inflammatory cytokines, etc.

In general is the concept of eating yourself to sickness and chronic inflammation and debilitating disease.

I’m not suggesting that there are ‘toxin’s’ in the food or that a given food is toxic, what I’m saying is there is a toxic level of calories.

Spending too many days in the toxic calorie zone will invariably lead to the lifestyle disorders we associate with being ‘unhealthy’ and ‘unfit’.

The point is to remind yourself that the overall amount of food you eat regardless of the composition is going to impact your health and the look of your body more than any other diet manipulation or trick you can think of.

I know it’s a boring old message, but total calories matter a whole lot more than most people think. The real trick is finding a way to eat less of them and still be satisfied, maintain a healthy social life, and not obsess about food or feel guilty eating.

Enjoying food and recognizing what it can and can’t do for you/to you is the key to staying in great shape for the long haul.

John