We have a tendency to consume more food and drink when we dine with other people. We use other people’s eating behaviors as cues for how we should be eating. So, if everyone is eating-eating-eating around the restaurant table and we’re using everyone else’s behavior as a guide for our own, we’re going to keep eating. And so are they.

We’re all bouncing our behavior off of each other.

When’s the last time you went out with a bunch of friends and didn’t stagger home, filled to the point of bursting?

And when we’re distracted by conversation, laughter, good times, we’re not even aware that we’re shoveling food into our mouths.

I’m a huge distracted eater. Always have been. When I sit down to read a book, which is pretty much every day since I was 8, I usually have a bag of sunflower seeds, pistachios or peanuts with me. It’s not uncommon for me to finish the bag.

ALCOHOL

Um, so booze pretty much makes us do everything stupidly, from driving to arguing about politics to saying that thing to your boss that you shouldn’t have said to overeating. It suppresses our inhibitory systems which can lead to overeating and all kinds of regrettable behavior.

When’s the last time alcohol was listed as a “performance enhancing drug?” Yeah, never.

Which is why I don’t drink anymore. But that’s another story.

LIMITED WILLPOWER

When we’re faced with something that we WANT to do but know we SHOULDN’T, or something we DON’T WANT to do but know we SHOULD, we draw upon our willpower reserves. If you draw on it too much, it won’t be there when you need it.

Willpower is finite. If you’re using it as your first line of resistance when it comes to overeating, you’re screwed. 

Think of willpower like a smartphone. It’s all charged up at the beginning of the day, but as you use it, the charge drops.

Willpower should be your LAST line of resistance, used only when everything else has failed. 

Designing your environment is key to this. You need to intentionally engineer an environment that promotes health, not temptation (more on this at another time).

HORMONES

When your cortisol-leptin-ghrelin hormones, which loom large in managing your appetite and satiety, get thrown off, you’re going to struggle.

This is a very involved subject and I’m not an expert. I’ll just say this; sleep deprivation will upset this balance hugely. It makes you HUNGRY and hungry for energy-dense, sugary foods. 

So will stress and dieting.

Other factors are involved, too; how much body fat you have, how quickly you lose weight, what kinds of food you eat, and more.

ENGINEERED FOODS

Here’s a dirty little secret; processed food manufacturers, like General Mills, etc., hire food scientists to engineer foods that will trigger your “bliss point.”

The Bliss Point is the point at which they have optimized the balance of fat, sugar and salt in an industrialized food so that it delivers the maximum amount of enjoyment.

In short, the Bliss Point is the point at which the food activates the pleasure centers of your brain and stimulates the release of neurochemicals that produce feelings of reward or the anticipation of reward.

Let me restate this. Food companies are intentionally manipulating the formulation of foods to trigger neurobiological responses in your brain that make you desire and crave it.

Just like Big Tobacco did.

You are a profit center for them. They want you to BUY more of their foods, so they are constructing it to appeal to you in ways you’re not even aware of. 

EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

I often return to this. Evolutionary science explains why we do what we do because of how we adapted and evolved as a species for millions of years.

For millions of years we evolved in an environment where calories were scarce. We developed many mechanisms for coping with this environment.

One of those mechanisms is overeating in the presence of abundant food.

When you live in scarcity, it makes sense to grab all you can when it presents itself. If you lived at the poverty level and money starting raining down from the heavens it would be perfectly sensible to scoop up as much of that money as you can.

After all, survival is at stake. And it’s not likely, considering your environment of poverty, that abundant, free money is going to fall from the skies anytime soon, so grab it while you can.

The same thing applies to calories, which our body interprets as “survival.” Since our bodies biologically believe that we still live 50,000 years ago in conditions of scarcity, we are compelled to store excess calories when they present themselves. 

That served us well in the paleolithic. The problem is that our environment has evolved into one of abundance while our behavior has yet to adapt appropriately.

A few years back I asked the smartest guy I know (my brother, Kurt Aluzas, who is a wildlife biologist) about obesity in animals and humans. Among many other amazing things, he shared this:

“The change in food availability and other associated survival benefits, post-industrial revolution, has occurred over the course of a hundred plus years or so – a blink of an eye on the evolutionary scale – whereas these genetically programmed behaviors have taken tens of thousands of years or more.  We are changing the rules faster than nature can keep up with and hold us accountable. Now, it will eventually catch up, but until the impacts start hitting humans before they have a chance to reproduce and pass on genes, it will be left to us to make conscious choices societally and individually to avoid the situation.”