FOOD AS REWARD

I love to eat. It is one of the greatest of human pastimes. I have my passions like everyone else, especially regarding chocolate. Recently I have become aware of just how much my eating is connected to rewarding myself: for getting something done, for feeling low, for celebration, for coming in from the garden. There are at least two problems with using food as a reward:
  1. The foods we reward ourselves with are usually not good for us. Often full of sugar or salt, these "rewards" make us put on weight, raise our blood pressure and degrade our heart health. Food as reward is a major cause of the existing obesity epidemic in the United States. Obesity prevalence in the US increased dramatically from 1960 (13.4%) to 2017 (41.9%).
  2. We integrate the reward habit into our lifestyle. Food becomes more of an obsession because our thoughts become interlocked with our food passions. We identify ourselves by the food we eat instead of who we are.
  3. One way we can detach ourselves from our food dependencies is to become more aware of how our brain influences them.

Structured mediation offers clues:

A structured mediation practice is deceivingly simply. Practice involves sitting for a specific period of time (anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour), doing nothing but observing your breath. One of the first realizations is that the brain generates endless messages about all kinds of things constantly: some important, but most are trivial like wondering if someone likes what you are wearing or did you turn the oven off or bickering with yourself over some difference of opinion with someone. The brain is very active. Our health and wellbeing are improved significantly if we become aware of how the brain operates in these matters because we achieve some distance from from our thinking and can react more organically as ourselves.
In matters of food, structured mediation or similar techniques, help us identify the difference between wanting something to eat and the body being hungry. One of the hallmarks of obesity is eating past when your body has had enough food. Being conscious of our thinking processes help us to identify these extra cravings as something beyond what our body really wants.
One way to learn about this approach is through fasting. Anyone who delves into it, even if it is only intermittently, will tell you that thoughts of food pass through the brain often, reminding us of how much our eating habits are oriented to how we think. And most of those thoughts seem to revolve around the concept of rewarding ourselves using food. We think about food much more than we need it.

We often feel hungry when the body actually isn't.

We don't need to eat just because we get the urge. It is a skill to learn which urges reflect real hunger versus just wanting food.

There are far better ways to reward ourselves: a good soak in a hot tub, a night out dancing, a great massage, going out to the ocean to watch the waves or simply giving yourself a great big hug are much healthier ways to congratulate ourselves.

The good news is that once you start noticing how much your mind talks about food, ignoring the messages get easier and easier

until finally the mind learns that overeating is not really a reward.

Intermittent fasting is a personal choice. Consult your doctor first.

Intermittent fasting is quite different from traditional fasting where we stay away from food for days at a time. Intermittent fasting takes place when we fast for a portion of the day instead. It has become trendy partly because the technique gives the digestive system a thorough break from processing food, a plus even for a short time. One of the huge benefits of this or any fasting is discovering that we don't need food anywhere nearly as much as we think we do.
From John Hopkins Medicine, "Intermittent fasting is an eating plan that switches between fasting and eating on a regular schedule. Research shows that intermittent fasting is a way to manage your weight and prevent, or even reverse, some forms of disease...There are several different ways to do intermittent fasting, but they are all based on choosing regular time periods to eat and fast. For instance, you might try eating only during an eight-hour period each day and fast for the remainder. Or you might choose to eat only one meal a day two days a week. There are many different intermittent fasting schedules."
Published July 31, 2023.