Do you have a complicated relationship with food? If so, you’re not alone, according to Dr. Judson Brewer’s new book, “The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We’re Not Hungry and How to Stop.” Dr.
Brewer, an addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist, has seen “as many different ways to have a bad relationship with food” as he has patients. Dr. Brewer wrote “The Hunger Habit” to address why we form bad eating habits and to challenge readers to break them using a 21-day plan.
If we can understand what’s going on in our brains when we “can’t stop eating,” we can stop feeling guilty and frustrated about our inability to stick to a conventional diet plan, he says. “The Hunger Habit” zeroes in on “habit loops” that can keep us trapped in what he calls “food jail,” unable to break free from overeating. The sheer abundance of food in modern society contributes to the problem.
“If food isn’t around, we can’t make these associations,” Dr. Brewer pointed out. More importantly, processed food is “engineered to be addictive,” he said.
The addictive quality of unhealthy food, along with its ability to affect our moods, combine to complicate our relationship with food, Dr. Brewer said. It’s very difficult to eat the way we know we “should,” he told The Epoch Times, because “our thinking brain is not nearly as strong as our feeling body.
An urge to eat is much stronger than [the thought] we shouldn’t.” What you can’t have, you want m.
