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

You can give each design a star rating and leave a comment about what you like and what you would change (if anything).

…Now onto the post that goes with todays title.

It’s pretty obvious that some sort of purposeful dieting is required for weight loss (as most of us don’t just accidentally lose weight)

But it sure seems like we can accidentally gain weight.  So what gives?

I have a theory that for most people in north america (and most other industrialized countries) weight gain is a direct result of frequent social event based eating and the social pressure and acceptance to over consume food and booze. I call this “Weight Loss Sabotage“.

Everyone overdoes it at thanksgiving

This is my short list of the times of year when it’s totally normal and socially acceptable to completely gorge yourself with food and/or overdo it with booze.

Christmas

Thanksgiving

Halloween

Easter

Your Birthday

Your family and friends birthdays

Weddings

National holiday (4th of July for USA, 1st of July for Canada etc)

Anniversaries

New Years

Superbowl

Any summer cookout or BBQ

And this list doesn’t include the occasional random dinner out with friends or eating while watching your favorite sporting event.

The "Snackadium" Pure enjoyment, pure weight gain!

You could easily gain 5-10lbs per year just by overeating on these 20-30 days each year.

That means the other 330 days per year you’re likely eating just enough food to maintain your weight.

I believe it is this kind of ‘special occasion’ eating that causes people to slowly gain weight…then 5 years later they wonder how the hell they gained 50lbs!

The key to avoiding the weight gain is to have low calorie days that offsets each high calorie occasion.

The problem with this situation is that it’s easy to overeat 2000-3000 calories at each of these occasions but it probably takes 2-3 days of dieting to reduce your calorie intake by this same amount.

In other words 20-30 days of overeating likely require 60-90 days of dieting to take that weight back off (and that’s just to get you back to where you started) if you want to lose even more you gotta diet for even longer. As you can see this starts adding up to a good portion of the year spent dieting.

It’s all just simple math.

Every calorie you eat above your maintenance level is going to get stored on you as bodyfat. If you don’t have a few low calorie days to compensate you’ll never burn that body fat off.

This is why you never hear of people who just accidentally lost weight.

Pick and choose your overeating days wisely and remind yourself that it’s probably going to take 3 days of dieting to erase the weight gain of one big eating day.

There are other things you can do to avoid overeating at some of these events. One of them is simply sharing food when you go out for dinner so you can still eat what you want and lose weight.

Another thing you can do is use some tricks called “dieting hacking” to get through some of these big eating events without consuming as many calories as everyone else (without looking like an outcast) the way Brad Pilon describes here: Diet Hack

Every little trick helps.

John

Once the Train is Rolling it's Hard to Stop

I’m in New York for a conference and I’ve been eating more food than I would normally have if I weren’t away at an event. There are open bar dinner and cocktail parties with free food. Free chocolates all over the trade show floor. And a constant invite to go out and have breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, late night snack etc with so many different people.

It’s very easy to end up overeating at events like these.

No matter what starts the overeating train going it seems that a few days of overeating are enough to keep the overeating train chugging along.

In other words, it seems that overeating itself is enough to keep you overeating.

It might be a psychological thing, it probably has to do with eating too many high sugar, fat, and salt foods (like pizza). But overeating can become a habit if you don’t stop it before it gets rolling.

I’ll be taking it light today to put the breaks on this patter because the past couple days were a bit too much. But if I don’t consciously do this today it could easily turn into a week of overdoing it.

This is the sort of thing that can easily get away on you if you’re not paying attention to it.

If you know you’ve overdoing it a bit with your eating, stop and take a moment to re-evaluate what your goals are and decide if you need to purposely take a day to go light and put the breaks on the overeating train.

John

Many researchers are looking for answers in the wrong places.

This might make sense in a clinical research setting when the process involves writing a grant to ask for money from a government organization.

But it doesn’t make much sense to you or me who are just trying to find something that works in our life that we can apply today.

Here is just a short list of factors that most likely contribute to the way we eat:

1. Exercise

2. Country we live in

3. Family upbringing

4. Emotional stress

5. Work environment

6. Commute time for work

7. Physical activity levels outside of the gym

8. Workouts (if you do them at all)

9. Relationship status

10. Family status (married or single, kids or not, living with other family members)

11. Genetic factors

12. Socio-economic status (how much cash you got!)

As you can see the genetic component is just one of many factors that impact how you eat. However most of the weight loss research and interventions you hear about focus on just this area.

It’s the proverbial “you’re broken and if we just get enough research funding we’ll be able to build a drug or food program that can fix you”…BS!

The sum total of all the items on the above list (and I’m sure there are others I’ve missed) is what will determine you’re weight loss success.

In the case of weight loss I’m afraid that it will never be possible to truly study it with real effectiveness.

Next monday’s podcast we will cover this topic in detail. You can find it here: Adonis Lifestyle Podcast

John

I can't stop eating prime rib in vegas!

Eating at buffets has reminded me of the inherent contradiction to the healthy eating mantra of eating a ‘variety’ of foods.

It’s pretty common to hear health/fitness marketers advise eating a diet with as much food variety as possible…the proverbial ‘everything in moderation is ok’ or ‘eat lots of colors’ etc.

But there is a catch 22 with this story…the more foods you have available the more chance you have to overeat. You could almost say that you get ‘full’ on one type of food or flavor/taste, but you still have room for other types of foods and flavors. (the ‘eat variety’ story should be qualified with ‘eat a variety of fruits and veggies’ specifically)

The reality is we need far less food variety then we might think. Most of our nutrients can be found in a few foods, and most of us (when we’re not lighting up a buffet in vegas) eat a routine selection of the same dozen or so foods. And this works perfectly fine for the bulk of the modern world.

You can easily make the argument that the option for eating a wide selection of foods has only become available since the modern industrial revolution anyway. So we’re not evolved to need the type of selection your grocery store offers (how the hell would someone in canada get access to a banana in the winter before the industrial revolution).

In other words, you can get by just fine with far less food variety than you think, and you most likely eat less food variety than any healthy eating mantra ever speaks of anyway. (try to think of all the different foods you’ve eaten in the past 7 days, I’ll bet it’s not as varied as you might like to think)

And that might not be such a bad thing. The more available and affordable different food choices are the more chance you will eat more of all of them.

Thanks for the suggestions on eating venues, I’ll try to check them out, but I gotta say that I’m having a hard time going anywhere besides the various buffets simply to eat prime rib and whatever else happens to be available!

John