Your Phantom Hungers

This article is from the book Thinking Thin: The Truth About Weight Loss by Tom Nicoli, edited by Anthony R. Michalski, and is available through Kallisti Publishing -- http://www.kallistipublishing.com

Whereas eating is a purely functional activity for the majority of the animal kingdom -- or so we suspect, anyway -- it is an activity that affects humans on many different levels. Since we derive pleasure from certain foods and displeasure from others, we frequently attribute qualities to food -- and the act of eating -- that have nothing whatever to do with nourishment. If you doubt the truth of this statement, just observe the expression on the face of a chocoholic as they bite into a Belgian chocolate truffle. Think that near-orgasmic expression is just their natural reaction to good nutrition? If so, please put this book down and contact me immediately, as I have a magnificent bridge for sale, and I’ll make you a great deal on it!

We humans are very much sensory-driven creatures who tend to assign emotional qualities to our sensory experiences. There is nothing wrong with this tendency, so long as we don’t let it dominate our actions to the detriment of our physical and emotional well-being. As a matter of fact, many of our greatest pleasures are of a sensual nature. It has even been said that we only fall in love as a secondary effect of our powerful sex drive. Now, I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s impossible to deny the fact that we make many of our decisions based upon emotions, and many of those emotions are borne of some positive or negative sensory input.

But let’s get away from the science lecture and start looking at how these emotions affect our eating habits. First of all, we tend to equate some foods with either a positive or negative experience, and as a result, find ourselves either craving the food or avoiding it. For example, some people equate lobster with affluence, and if they aspire to a level of wealth beyond their current circumstance, they may crave lobster with an intensity far beyond that which their need for nutrients -- or even their enjoyment of the taste -- might inspire. Somehow, the very act of eating the lobster becomes an affirmation of their level of wealth and success.

For many people, sweets represent the ultimate culinary reward. The sense of satisfaction we receive from cakes, pies, candies and the like is hardly tied to the benefit our bodies receive from eating them. What is it about these confections that we find so compelling? Other than chocolate, which some have claimed is actually addictive, we would be hard put to identify the quality that makes us desire sweets, aside from those times when we deprive our bodies of food for so long that our craving begins to focus on an immediately accessible source of energy such as sugar. On an emotional level, however, we have a completely different situation.

As noted in an earlier chapter, many of us who grew up in the Baby Boomer generation had parents who had lived through the Great Depression. Whereas our generation and those that followed view the availability of food as a given -- an inalienable right -- our parents had experienced true hunger and learned to view eating as a cherished privilege. Since it is difficult, if not impossible, to grow up in a household and not adopt to some degree the values of our parents, we brought forward the "clean your plate" mentality, which was somehow supposed to alleviate the starving of children in some far-off country. This was reinforced by adding on yet another emotional element: food as reward and/or punishment. We were told that we wouldn’t get our cake until we ate all our broccoli. What this taught us was that cake was a reward for good behavior, while broccoli represented an unpleasant task to be completed as payment for our reward. While this was a simple means of enforcing healthier eating in children, in the long run it taught the children that sweets were good and broccoli was bad.

Unfortunately, we tend to carry these childhood lessons into our adult life, and these lessons guide some of our adult behavior with values that just no longer have merit. When we feel “punished” by some aspect of our life, we tend to seek out some reward to offset our unhappiness. Conversely, when we feel we’ve gotten some undeserved reward, we might be inclined to deprive ourselves of something that resembles a reward. We are, in essence, sending ourselves to bed without any supper.

Okay, don’t go getting all huffy and start blaming your parents for that spare tire you are carrying. As we’ll discuss later in the book, blame only gives rise to more dissatisfaction, which inspires us to seek out even more “instant happiness.” If you’re an adult, the responsibility for your actions is entirely your own.

In many cases, when we are frustrated in other areas of our lives, we tend to seek out those simple, easily obtained pleasures we discovered as children. We also tend to rationalize. Had a tough day? You deserve a banana split. So what if it’s too close to dinner? You’re a grown up and can decide what to eat. And then there is the king of all dieters’ rationalizations: “If I get the small steak, I can have the baked potato -- and an eclair for dessert. And if I skip lunch altogether, I can go all out and have the 24-ounce ribeye -- with all the trimmings, of course!”

It is our nature to desire happiness, but lacking happiness and peace of mind, we will frequently settle for whatever pleasure we can come by most readily. Although some of those pleasures are harmless enough, others can put us on the fast track to fatal diseases or the breakdown of our bodies.

By now you probably have a pretty good idea about the ways many of us are driven by our emotional hungers. But there are other influences that have as great or an even greater effect on our eating habits. Those influences can be summarized as “life in the twenty-first century.” In the previous section I talked about the fact that our schedules sometimes make it difficult for us to “eat when we’re hungry, and stop when we’re full.” Let’s take a closer look at some of the situa-tions many of us face on a daily basis.

Say it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and your department has just wrapped up a tough project. The department head invites all of you to happy hour at the local watering hole -- her treat. You knock off early and head to the neighborhood pub, which is known for its happy hour extravaganzas. You have just downed half a cold beer when your stomach reminds you that you skipped lunch to complete the project. And there, not twenty feet away, is a table covered with those big food warmers, the aroma beckoning you. You stealthily approach your prey, not wanting to be obvious about how famished you are. Lifting the lid on the first tray, you behold a veritable mountain of those little weenies, floating in tangy sauce. You load up your plate (unhappy that the proprietor has set out such small plates) and go to the next warmer, which is filled to capacity with some kind of little cheese-filled pastries. You are pleased with your ingenuity as you fill your napkin with the little morsels and head back to the table. When you are through and no longer hungry, the feeling in your gut informs you that you’ve just eaten about two pounds of fat. But it tasted so good at the time and, after all, you were just being sociable. It’s okay, though, because you will forego the dinner you had planned to make for yourself.

Or what about the friends who come over to watch the football game with you? You’ve prepared a tray of fresh vegetables and dip for everyone to share. They politely nibble at your offering, but unbeknownst to you, a couple of them have decided to be nice and spring for some “real” food—a giant pizza with everything you can imagine on it. Naturally, not wanting to offend anybody, you dig right in. Besides, the pizza does go awfully well with the beer!

These are but a couple of examples of social circumstances that can pressure us to eat when we aren’t hungry or to eat something that we might normally want to avoid. In reality, our friends would rarely think badly of us for declining their offerings or opting not to join them, but it is frequently our nature to take the path of least resistance when we are included in others’ plans. It certainly isn’t that our friends and acquaintances are bad, or even that their choices are necessarily unwise. Quite the opposite! Our friends include us because they appreciate us and the food they provide should be viewed as a gift. We need to learn to respond to our own appetites, rather than the appetites of others and to (graciously) decline the opportunities to sate a hunger that we don’t feel.

What we need most is to learn how to reclaim the power to make good decisions for ourselves, rather than basing our decisions on unconscious issues or outside influences. We need to realize that an extra helping of pie won’t make us feel better about ourselves and our lives, and that our true friendships aren’t founded solely upon our willingness to eat the same things as our friends, especially when we don’t feel hungry.