The mission of the
American Council on Exercise (ACE)is to get people moving.
By Kelsey Graham
Overeating is easy to do, especially when you're indulging in a delicious meal. It's also easy because there are many factors that cause us to overeat, including stress and noshing too fast—both of which we likely experience or do almost daily.
Fortunately, there are many tactics you can use to stop overeating once and for all, from slowing down to learning your body's hunger cues. Use these tips to get your eating on track so you can feel fueled and satiated instead of full and frustrated.
1. Look Ahead
If you're constantly surrounded by unhealthy food, it can be easy to eat all day long, whether or not you are hungry. Here's one way to avoid this temptation: Think about how you'll feel after you eat too much—like those times when you know you're full, but there's still food on your plate.
A similarly powerful tactic is thinking about how you'll feel if you don't eat the food. In almost every case you feel proud, happy and more satisfied than if you'd indulged unnecessarily.
Stop Overeating Once and For All Tactic 1: Before you grab the doughnut from your office kitchen—especially if you've already had a full breakfast—think to yourself: How will I feel when I finish this? Better yet: How will I feel if I walk away right now? Make this a habit, doing it every time you reach for an unnecessary snack. Sometimes you'll want to indulge and that's OK. But you may find that you say "no" a lot more often than you say "yes."
2. Eat Slower
It takes time for your stomach to tell your mind you're full because the process of feeling satiated takes time.
"Stretch receptors in the stomach are activated as it fills with food or water. These signal the brain directly through the vagus nerve that connects the gut and brain stem. Hormonal signals are released as partially digested food enters the small intestine," explains Ann MacDonald, a contributor to Harvard Health.
This process of sending signals from your gut to your brain can take anywhere from five to 20 minutes, which is why it's important to eat slowly. Eating too fast is a surefire way to overeat because we get this cue well after we've already eaten too much.
Stop Overeating Once and For All Tactic 2: The next time you eat, set a timer for 20 minutes and see how long it takes you to feel full, paying close attention to the cues your body is sending. This will give you an approximation of how long it takes your body to feel full, which you can use to stop overeating. Continue eating slowly until you notice that "I'm full" feeling. Note that those with type 2 diabetesmay not get these same hunger cues, which makes this tactic less effective.
3. Eat Mindfully
In our on-the-go world, we're often eating breakfast in the car, rushing through lunch at our desk and half-heartedly noshing on dinner while watching our favorites shows. In these situations, your focus isn't on the food you're eating. It's on driving, working or watching television, which can lead to overeating.
When you're not paying attention to your body, it's easy to miss the "I'm full" cue—just like when you eat too fast.
Stop Overeating Once and For All Tactic 3: Make a rule to eat at least one meal a day without doing anything else. Notice the difference in recognizing your satiation (feeling full) cues and how satisfied you are. Slowly increase this to two meals each day and eventually to all three.
4. Get Your Stress Under Control
It seems there's always something to stress us out, whether it's a meeting at work or a family issue. This stress not only wreaks havoc on your body physically, causing everything from chronic high blood pressure and diarrhea, to headaches, chest pain and more, it's causing you to overeat.
When stressed, your body releases cortisol, which also increases appetite. Whether you're hungry or not, your body is craving food, and to quell that "hunger" you eat. In many cases, you end up eating high-fat, sugary foods, making the overeating worse.
Stop Overeating Once and For All Tactic 4: If you can't reduce the stress in your life right now, the next step is to recognize the potential for overeating and stop it before it starts. When stressed, rely on portioning your food, and when you go out to eat, get half of your meal put in a box for later before you even start eating. If you're hungry for a snack, when you normally aren't, check in with yourself: Is this stress or am I really hungry? Take author Michael Pollan's advice: If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're probably not hungry.
5. Eat Before You're Hungry
This idea may sound odd, but think about these two scenarios:
- You eat dinner a little early, not because you're very hungry but because you know you're going out with friends and don't want to order out—or wait until you're starving and eat post-drinks. So, you take your time making dinner, eat until you're relatively full and then head out.
- You decide not to eat before going out because you're not hungry. You wait to eat dinner at 8 p.m., after you've gone out for drinks. Now you're ravenous. You dive into your cabinets looking for whatever is easiest to make and dig into the first thing you see. You eat fast you don't realize how full you are—and now you're stuffed and wish you hadn't eaten so much.
In the second scenario, you're so hungry that you may be experiencing slight nausea or a headache from the hunger. And you may eat unhealthy foods because you'll likely eat the first thing you find—forget about taking time to make a healthy dinner.
You may have similar experiences if you wait too long to have lunch at work or eat breakfast late in the morning.
Stop Overeating Once and For All Tactic 5: Most people tend to eat around the same time every day. Set an alarm on your phone for an hour before you'd normally eat each meal so you remember to nosh earlier than usual. You'll quickly find that you're more likely to make rational healthy choices about what you're eating and how much.
6. Give Yourself Time
How many times have you looked at your plate, knowing that you're full, and cleaned your plate anyway? When you're done, you feel full and mad at yourself: Why did I eat the rest of that? I didn't need it and now I feel like crap. It's hard to resist food in the moment, thanks to our need for instant gratification. But giving yourself time to decide whether to finish may be exactly what you need.
Stop Overeating Once and For All Tactic 6: The next time you're in a moment where you would normally eat more, but know you shouldn't, stop for 10 minutes. Give yourself time to decide if you want to eat the rest of the food on your plate. When the 10 minutes is up, you'll almost always be happy to toss or save the rest of the food.
7. Pay Attention to All Your Hunger Cues
If you're waiting for your stomach to growl, you may be setting yourself up to overeat, because we don't all experience the same hunger cues. Sometimes it shows up as a headache or a bad mood that comes on suddenly. A nutritionist once said, "I always know I'm hungry when I'm happily working on something and all of a sudden I'm annoyed by what I'm doing."
Knowing how hunger can show up in your body is key to recognizing it before it's too late. Potential hunger signals include:
- Growling stomach
- Nausea
- Headache
- Low energy
- Sudden irritability ("hangry")
Stop Overeating Once and For All Tactic 7: Make note of which hunger cues you experience each time you eat. Slowly you'll discover how your body signals "I'm hungry," allowing you to eat right away rather than waiting until later, when you're ravenous and therefore more likely to overeat.
Stop Overeating
It can be so hard to say no when food is right in front of you—and so easy to ignore that full feeling and eat until you're so full you need to lie down because it hurts to sit or stand. Stop the cycle of overeating once and for all with these simple tips. Test them to see which one works best for you and then stick with it.
Once it becomes a habit, you're more likely to say no when you're full and indulge when your body needs the fuel.
A version of this article originally appeared at ACEFitness.com.
