Your Eating Habits May Be Why You Can't Lose Weight

Your Eating Habits May Be Why You Can’t Lose Weight

By: Sanders Legendre

Humans have more access to food than ever before in history and it might be the reason that obesity rates are increasing every year. Our brains are designed to always think about our next meal unconsciously which means you will always be reaching for food. The only way to break out of these unconscious eating habits is to develop new habits.

What Are Unconscious Eating Habits?

Whether you know it or not, your brain is programmed with unconscious eating habits.

An unconscious eating habit is defined as a habit triggered by external or internal signals from your brain that makes you eat without considering your hunger.

Unconscious eating habits can appear in multiple ways. One example is that it is common to unconsciously start looking for food when you walk into the kitchen.

You were not hungry when you walked into the kitchen and you probably were not looking. But being in the kitchen or any other place where you commonly find food will trigger your brain to look for food to eat.

That trigger to eat unconsciously is a biological response formed over 1000s of years of evolution.

Humans have not had a stable source of food for a long time. So it is in our DNA that when we are around food to eat as much as you can because you might not know where the next meal will come from.

This way of thinking is out of date with the current way that most people live their lives. The human race at this moment in time has more access to food than we have ever had in history. But our brains have not caught up to this fact yet.

Our brains are still programmed with unconscious eating habits that our ancestors needed to stay alive but today they are the cause of rising obesity rates around the world.

The good news is that you can identify those unconscious eating habits that you have and stop yourself before you act on that urge.

How To Find Your Unconscious Habits

We are not consciously aware of every decision that we make.

Most of the time your body simply reacts to signals that come from your brain. When you continuously react the same way to the same signal we begin to react unconsciously.

Can you remember the last time that you scratched your noise?

That signal triggers a behavior so frequently that you become unconscious to the habit.

Now if you have a rash or a pimple on your nose you might not scratch your noise the same way. You become conscious of that habit that has previously been occurring unconsciously and once you do that you can change the behavior you have around that habit.

This works the same with any habit that you have around eating.

The best way to tell if you have any unconscious eating habits is to ask yourself "Why am I Eating".

That question is a powerful question that will completely change the relationship that you have with food.

You will begin to realize that most of the time that you eat is not because you are hungry but just because there is food around right now. Or maybe it is because you walked into the kitchen and you were bored so you found something to eat. Or maybe it was just because you were watching a movie and you always eat when there is a movie on.

These are all realizations I noticed about myself when I asked "Why I am eating?".

Build Habits Against Your Unconscious Habits

Studies show that 40-50% of what we do everyday is the product of habits. This means that half of our life's is completely done automatically and without conscious effort.

It takes an average of 66 days to create a new habit. But some can be able to start a new habit as soon as 18 days.

It is much easier to start a new habit than it is to break an old habit.

The key to building great habits is to make them simple and easy.

The ultimate guide on habit is the book called Atomic Habits by James Clear.

In his book he explains the Four Laws of Behavior Change

  1. Make It Obvious
  2. Make It Attractive
  3. Make It Easy
  4. Make It Satisfying

Those four rules are what you should use when creating new habits.

You should notice that these rules are actually not very hard to follow and that is intentional. The harder and more complicated a habit is to do the harder it will be for you to do that habit everyday.

So when you have a goal to make a new habit it is best to start small, simple, and easy. For example, if you have a goal of trying to eat healthy, that is a hard and ambiguous goal to have. A better goal would be to say you want to add vegetables into all of your meals.

That goal is obvious because it is defined, it is attractive because your goal is to get healthy, it is easy because adding a side of vegetables is not much more work, and it is satisfying because your body will feel better when you do it. After you make adding vegetables to your meal a habit you would build off of that to reinforce your new habit of eating healthy.

The best way to implement this to counter your unconscious eating habits is with a technique called habit stacking. With habit stacking you combine one activity with a habit that you have.

The way to habit stack is to build a new habit that you practice whenever you are going to eat. This habit will center your thoughts and remind you to think of your hunger whenever you are about to eat.

For example, build a habit around drinking water before you eat or taking deep breaths.

These rules are simple but the hardest part about creating new habits is doing them everyday instead of the old habits that are already programmed into your mind.