Licence to overeat: 5 reasons behind your unhealthy eating habits

So, here’s what you want to do: you want to lose weight and look fit, you want to keep your cholesterol levels in check, you want to avoid added sugars and sodium to not have high blood pressure and blood sugar issues and you want to avoid getting cancer - period. And here’s what you end up doing: Despite your best intentions, you are unable to sustain a healthy diet for a whole month. Maybe if you lived in isolation, you would be able to achieve these goals. But you are human after all, and prone to distractions - sometimes without even realising what exactly is triggering your cravings for unhealthy, sweet, salty, buttery, yummy if ultra-processed food. [caption id=“attachment_8015421” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Image source: Getty Images.[/caption] Yet, knowing your triggers for unhealthy eating habits, especially overeating, can go a long way in helping you consciously avoid those situations. Here are five reasons why you probably overeat despite wanting to make a change and eat healthily.

1. That social media feed(ing) frenzy  

Recent research conducted by Aston University’s School of Life & Health Sciences showed that we eat what our peers on social media do. The research, published in the journal  Appetite, studied the eating habits of 369 subjects and found that those who felt that their friends on social media approved of eating junk actually ended up consuming more energy-dense snacks and sugary drinks. On the other hand, those who found their friends eating healthy managed to increase their fruit and vegetable intake. The lesson here is to choose the right people to follow on social media to help you stick to your own fitness goals.

2. But it says “healthy”!  

With more and more people wanting to eat healthily, manufacturers of snacks have started creating packages that say “diet”, “low-fat” or “healthy”. A study published in  Proceedings of the Nutrition Society  in 2015 found that because these snacks are labelled nutritious, consumers tend to overeat them as they feel these snacks are “healthy”. To be sure, while some of these foods may have marginally fewer calories or less fat, this doesn’t make them good, and portion control is necessary if you want to improve your health.

3. The ending pursuit of more flavour

The long-term effect of a market flooded with junk food is that most people now want extra - extra flavour, extra grammage, extra everything. As Mark Schatzker wrote in his book,  The Dorito Effect, food companies mastered the art of manufacturing artificial flavours to make sure you can’t get enough of that bag of chips and bottle of soda (to boost sales, of course). What this effectively did was to make healthy food or even real food taste bland by comparison. And who wants to eat bland food when a pack of junk food can provide you with more concentrated flavours, even though it’s unhealthy?

4. Are you on a pill?

Research done at the University of Tokyo in 2014 showed that people who were prescribed cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins developed a false sense of security and tended to overeat. You might assume that if you are taking drugs like these, or even diet pills, then you don’t need to eat healthy. Instead of taking a prescription of these potent drugs as a license to overeat, you should take this as a warning and make immediate lifestyle changes - including picking a healthier diet.

5. Can’t cook, won’t cook

With growing economic independence among millennials and a wide variety of options to order in, cooking is not a compulsion any more. If you can’t cook, chances are you won’t experiment with cooking, ever. But those who eat more home-cooked meals have better health outcomes. A study published in the  International Journal of Behavioural Nutrition and Physical Activity  in 2017 showed that people who ate home-cooked food had normal range weight and normal percentage of body fat.   So now you know exactly why your unhealthy food habits are growing. You are probably getting distracted by peer pressure and social habits, unable to control portions, unwilling to compromise on flavour and assuming that diet and cholesterol-lowering pills will give you a shortcut out of your health troubles. Eliminate these triggers and get cooking at home, and you might just discover that you’re able to sustain a healthy lifestyle after all. For more information, head to our section on   Healthy Foods_._ Health articles in Firstpost are written by myUpchar.com, India’s first and biggest resource for verified medical information. At myUpchar, researchers and journalists work with doctors to bring you information on all things health.