nevermind

Compulsive Overeating and How to Stop It

A former FDA commissioner explains why people overeat -- and how to end poor eating habits.

Does the ice cream in the freezer keep calling your name? Can't resist a jumbo bucket of popcorn at the movies?
Powerful forces you don't recognize may be driving you to overeat, according to a new book by former FDA Commissioner David Kessler, MD. The culprits: fat, salt, sugar, and brain chemistry.
Kessler stops short of calling Americans' love for sugary, fatty foods a "food addiction." But he believes there are similarities between why some people abuse drugs and why some of us can't resist every last deep-fried chip on a heaped plate of cheese-smothered nachos.
Knowing what's driving our overeating behavior is the first step to changing it, he says.
"For some, it's alcohol," Kessler tells WebMD. "For some, it's drugs. For some, it's gambling. For many of us, it's food."
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Kessler, a Harvard-trained pediatrician and medical school professor at the University of California, San Francisco, started researching what would become The End of Overeating after watching an overweight woman talk about obsessive eating habits on The Oprah Winfrey Show. It sounded familiar. Kessler's own weight has zoomed up and down over the years, leaving him with suits of every size.
"For much of my life, sugar, fat, and salt held remarkable sway over my behavior," he writes.
And so the man who tackled tobacco companies while leading the FDA started researching why he couldn't turn down a chocolate chip cookie. He pored over studies on taste preferences, eating habits, and brain activity, conducted studies, and talked to food industry insiders, scientists, and people who struggled with overeating.
His theory: "Hyperpalatable" foods -- those loaded with fat, sugar, and salt -- stimulate the senses and provide a reward that leads many people to eat more to repeat the experience.
"I think the evidence is emerging, and the body of evidence is pretty significant," Kessler says.
He calls it conditioned hypereating, and here's how he says it works. When someone consumes a sugary, fatty food they enjoy, it stimulates endorphins, chemicals in the brain that signal a pleasurable experience. Those chemicals stimulate us to eat more of that type of food -- and also calm us down and make us feel good.
The brain also releases dopamine, which motivates us to pursue more of that food. And cues steer us back to it, too: the sight of the food, a road lined with familiar restaurants, perhaps a vending machine that sells a favorite candy bar. The food becomes a habit. We don't realize why we're eating it and why we can't control our appetite for it.
Once the food becomes a habit, it may not offer the same satisfaction. We look for foods higher in fat and sugar to bring back the thrill.
Kessler points to these factors as the cause of a dramatic spike in the number of overweight Americans in the past three decades
Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, sees similarities between situations that trigger drug abusers and those that make some people automatically order popcorn when they see a movie.
"It's the same biological mechanism," says Volkow, who studies dopamine connections to drug abuse and obesity.
The institute is studying brain chemistry to develop strategies to help people control those urges to overeat.
"People need to learn to handle their eating behaviors better," Volkow says. "Be aware of your conditioned responses. You can avoid that activity."
Taking Control of Your Eating Habits

Kessler believes conditioned hypereaters can take back control. He also calls for the food industry to take another look at how it makes and markets products that he believes manipulate eating behavior.
"It's become pretty egregious across the board," he says. "You look at most appetizers and main dishes at where America eats, and they're just layered and loaded with fat and sugar and salt. And it's not obvious."
The last time Kessler took on an industry, as FDA commissioner, he fought unsuccessfully to give the agency the power to regulate tobacco and was involved in efforts to secure a hefty settlement from tobacco companies to recover public health costs. With food, he wants to raise awareness of the cues that set many people into a hard-to-break cycle of overeating.
Instead of simply going on a diet, conditioned hypereaters need to change the way they approach food, he says.
Here are some of his tips:

• Structure your eating -- knowing when and how you're going to eat. That plan helps you avoid the situations or foods that trigger overeating and establishes new eating patterns to replace destructive ones.
• Set rules, such as not eating between meals. If you know you're not going to eat something, he says, your brain won't be as stimulated to steer you to that food.
• Change the way you think about food. Instead of looking at a huge plate of french fries and thinking about how good it will make you feel, he advises saying that it's twice as much food as you need, and will make you feel bad. "Once you know you're being stimulated and bombarded," Kessler says, "you can take steps to protect yourself."
• Learn to enjoy the foods you can control.
• Rehearse how you'll respond to cues that set you up to overeat.

the original title was something like "seems interesting and helpful" I had to edit because part of the article included opinions from someone who said something I found offensive to overweight people.