If you’ve ever been to an all-you-can-eat buffet, you know how easy it is to overeat, especially when you see so many tantalizing, and usually unhealthy, food items on display. Chances are you ate well past the point where your appetite hormones told you to stop. With so many food choices to stimulate your brain and taste buds, it’s harder to turn off your desire to eat. That can be dangerous when it comes to your waistline.
Does Having Too Many Food Choices Lead to Overeating?
To look at the link between food choices and overeating, researchers gave a group of obese and normal weight women macaroni-and-cheese meals to eat. Some of the women ate the meal only once a week for 5 weeks while another group ate mac-and-cheese every day. After tallying up their total calorie consumption, they made an interesting discovery. The women that ate macaroni-and-cheese daily reduced their food intake over the course of the study. The women that had more variety in their meals didn’t.
Why the difference? When you’re repeatedly exposed to the sight and smells of a particular food, your brain gradually habituates to its enticing aroma and stops responding. If you introduce a new food into the picture with a different taste and smell, it perks up your brain along with your appetite, and you want to start eating again.
Some research shows that obese people habituate more slowly to the sights and smells of food compared to normal people. Instead of their appetite shutting down when they’re exposed to the same food, they keep eating it. At the Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center in Rhode Island, researchers gave both obese and normal weight subjects lemon juice. The normal weight subjects’ rate of salivation went down when they were repeatedly exposed to the juice. This didn’t happen with the obese subjects. They continued to salivate, a sign that habituation wasn’t occurring.
Habituation Keeps You From Overeating a Particular Food
Habituation is one mechanism your brain uses to turn off your desire to eat food. You habituate not only to the smell and taste of food but to sounds, lights and other stimuli in your environment. Some research even shows that thinking about a particular food starts the habituation process and reduces your motivation to eat it. So, focus on the image of cookies in your mind, and you may reduce your desire to eat them. Such is the power of the brain.
How can this research help you control your appetite? Limit your food choices. Keep your refrigerator and cabinets stocked with only one snack at a time so you have fewer options to choose from when you open the cabinet. With a sparsely filled cabinet and refrigerator, you’re less likely to focus on munching between meals. Don’t constantly tempt yourself with new products and foods you just “had to try” from the grocery store. Give yourself more variety only when it comes healthier, low-calorie items like veggies. That way you’ll fill up on fare that’s better for you. And whatever you do, stay away from all-you-can-eat buffets.
References:
Medical News Today. “Abundant Food Choices May Overwhelm brain, Reinforce Overeating, UF Researchers Say”
Weight Loss Surgery Channel. “Obesity, Overeating, Caused by Habituation, Study Says”
Psychology Today. “Your Brain on Food”
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