Shortcut: 4 Ways to Break Your Junk Food Habit
Do you find yourself mindlessly reaching for a quick snack of potato chips, or eating pizza more often than you’d like? There’s solid science behind these habits—our bodies have evolved to seek out high-calorie food, and the food industry makes these foods addictive. But by getting back in touch with our natural hunger and fullness cues, we can resist the pull of junk food. In this article, we’ll look at advice from four authors on how to do that.
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Break the Addiction
Everyone knows we should avoid highly processed foods like chips, soda, and sweets. But junk food is designed to be addictive, and it can be hard to resist. To break the control that high-calorie, low-nutrient foods have over us, experts recommend reconnecting with our body’s natural hunger and fullness signals.
1. Eat Slowly
In In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan writes that it takes 20 minutes for our stomachs to signal to our brains that we’re full. Unfortunately, many of us eat our meals at a much faster rate, meaning we continue to gorge on food before our bodies have time to react. Pollan recommends eating slowly, allowing your stomach to properly signal your brain when you’ve eaten enough.
2: Eat Early
In How Not to Diet, Michael Greger writes that eating junk food leads to a catch-22 scenario where we crave ever more junk food: When your body digests healthful foods, it releases a steady stream of nutrients from that food into your bloodstream, creating hormonal changes that make you feel full. Because junk food lacks nutrients, this process of satiation isn’t triggered, and you end up feeling hungry again soon after you’ve eaten—and craving more junk food.
To break this damaging cycle, Greger recommends working with your body’s natural digestive clock. The amount of time and effort your body spends digesting food decreases during the day—in other words, you burn more calories digesting food in the morning than you do in the evening. Thus, if you eat your largest meal in the morning and your smallest in the evening, you’re aligning your eating with the rhythm of how your body wants to receive food. Then, if you fill that morning meal with whole, plant-based foods (including fiber and foods that contain natural water, like vegetables), your body’s satiation signals will be fully triggered, and you’ll set yourself up for an easier day with less appetite.
3: Re-Learn Your Body’s Cues
In Intuitive Eating, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch write that after spending years with a “clean your plate” mentality, you’ll likely have to work at getting back in touch with your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues. You may not even recognize comfortable fullness, having become accustomed to feeling “stuffed.”
To reacquaint yourself with these cues, Tribole and Resch recommend eating mindfully by assessing your hunger levels before, during, and after each meal. This means pausing in the middle of a meal to check in with your stomach and your taste buds—if you’re still feeling hungry and the food still tastes good, keep eating. If you’re starting to detect emerging fullness and the food isn’t as pleasurable anymore, stop.
The authors also emphasize the need to distinguish between physical hunger and emotional hunger, to ensure you’re not eating to fulfill needs other than physical nourishment—for example, if you’re eating as a coping mechanism for anxiety or boredom. If you do detect that you’re reaching for food because of an emotional hunger, find healthy and appropriate ways to meet those needs that don’t involve food. For example, you may benefit from going for a walk to ease your anxiety or listening to a podcast to quell your boredom.
4. Practice Intermittent Fasting
In Fast. Feast. Repeat., Gin Stephens also writes that to eat well, you must reacquaint yourself with your natural hunger cues, noting that as infants, we naturally sense the hormonal signals our body puts out indicating when we’re hungry and when we’re satisfied, but as we get older, we lose touch with these signals, leading us to overeat. She argues that the best way to reverse this process is by practicing intermittent fasting, in which you cycle between periods of fasting and periods of “feasting,” or eating.
Fasting is not dieting, Stephens writes. Dieting is limiting your overall calorie intake consistently and permanently, whereas fasting is incorporating periods of no-calorie intake into your day or week. Dieting doesn’t work because long-term calorie restriction, though it might be temporarily successful, leads to metabolic adaptation, where your body burns fewer calories and produces more hormones to increase your hunger because it thinks you’re starving. This is why, after dieting for a while, people often end up binging on junk food, undoing any results of dieting they’ve achieved.
Fasting, in contrast, works with the way our bodies have adapted to periods of scarcity and abundance, and thus doesn’t trigger a starvation response. In fact, fasting actually decreases our hunger hormone (ghrelin) and increases our satiety hormone (leptin). Because of this, it doesn’t compel you to gorge, and you can be confident that when you do feel hungry, it’s a reliable indicator of an actual need for nutrition.
The Bottom Line
Resisting temptation is never easy, and is even harder when an entire industry bases its profits on our inability to do so—as the food industry does. But by reacquainting ourselves with our true, natural urges, we can sever the pull of junk foods and gain control over our eating habits.
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What junk foods do you find hardest to resist? How do you manage your cravings when they grab you? Share your comments!