Picture this.

You’re lying on the couch watching Netflix and the thought pops into your head to go and get a cookie. You hit pause and walk to the kitchen and open up the cupboard. ”I’ll just have one” you think to yourself. You start eating it as you head back to the TV, but before you can sit down, you decide “maybe just one more”. You spin around and head back to the kitchen. Five minutes later, the box of cookies is empty and you’re left wondering…what the hell just happened?

Can you relate?

Well let me share with you exactly what is happening.

When we start eating those delicious high-calorie, pleasurable foods, and can’t stop, we might think that there is something incredibly wrong with us, that we’re out of control, but in fact our brain is doing what it’s meant to do.

Our brain has been biologically designed to seek out pleasurable foods, because these are the foods with the highest amount of calories. The pleasure and reward circuits in our brain, sends us urges and cravings to seek out high-calorie foods.

Why? Well calories are a unit of energy, which means high calorie = high energy. As a survival technique, our brain wants to ensure that we have an adequate amount of energy in the form of calories to ensure that we can function properly.

Thousands of years ago these pleasurable high-calorie foods were rather scarce. We would spend days scavenging and gathering foods like sweet berries and hunting to kill the bear for its meat. This biological drive to seek out pleasurable foods is what allowed us to survive.

This drive to seek out the reward of pleasurable foods is thanks to dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter for the anticipation of reward and is associated with pleasure.

Dopamine is a powerful neurotransmitter in our body that motivates us to seek achievement and reward. It’s what would allow us to overcome the fear of killing the bear with the anticipation of the reward we would receive once we’ve killed it.

Flash forward to today and we have easy and convenient access to high-calorie foods in abundance .

However, regardless of the difference in our food availability, our brain is still operating the same way when it comes to seeking out these highly pleasurable foods.

Which means when we start to eat the cookies our brain becomes flooded with dopamine. When the cookie is finished however, it means there is no more reward, so our brain sends out another fit of dopamine to get us to eat more.

When we taste the delicious food it reinforces the rewarding behavior because our amygdala, the part of the brain that assesses the emotional value of stimuli, and our hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with memory. Combined it reminds us of how good we feel when we keep eating the cookies. This is what we can refer to as a reward circuit that is taking place in our limbic system, aka our emotional brain.

Thousands of years ago this reward circuit would look like this,  “remember how delicious that bear tasted, let’s go hunting to get more” where as today it’s, “remember how delicious that first cookie was, let’s go back to the kitchen and get more”.

Why we can’t stop eating after 1 cookie is because when we’re in our emotional brain and our reward circuit is activated, it inhibits our prefrontal cortex.

Our prefrontal cortex, also known as our thinking brain, is the part of our brain that has to do with planning complex cognitive behavior, logical and rational reasoning, decision making, social behaviour and impulse control. Essentially it’s us at our best.

So what happens is that we decide to have one cookie, and then our emotional brain takes control, almost as though we’ve been hijacked by our desire to seek out and have more reward.

Our emotional brain is running the show, not our thinking brain. As a result, we tend to keep eating even if we’re no longer hungry or if only a few minutes earlier, we had only planned on eating 1 cookie.

So what do we do about that? Thankfully there are a lot of things we can do!
Let’s run through just a few of them.

1.  Don’t let ourselves get too hungry. Hunger means our body is low energy which our brain doesn’t like. We might notice that as we become increasingly hungry, we’re more likely to reach for the chocolate bar over the salad. Why? Because the lower energy we get, the more our brain is driven to seek high calorie foods to get our energy levels up ASAP.

2.  Practice strengthening our prefrontal cortex (thinking brain) which enables impulse control. We can do this through meditation and breathing exercises. We should try out different meditation techniques until we find one that works for us and start small and build the practice over time.

When it comes to breathing exercises we can try 4-7-8 breathing, inhale for 4, hold for 7 and exhale for 8, or box breathing, inhale for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4 and hold for 4. These are just a few but there are many more to discover! These are like taking our thinking brain to the gym!!

3.  Have awareness of our reward circuit in action. Before we start eating high calorie foods, bring awareness to the fact that we’ll have a dopamine surge and be filled with pleasure and reward and might want more.

By naming what is going on we take the power out of it through understanding our own biology. We can tell ourselves, “I might want to eat more than a few cookies but I know it’s just my emotional brain wanting more and I don’t need to listen to it.”

Try these out and let me know in the comments below how it goes.