Hey people!
It’s Darrin Eaddy, “Your Starting Over Coach”. What if I told you that our attraction
and loyalty to many of the foods and places we eat are influenced by outside
powers with the simple intention of lining their pockets by leveraging our own
bad habits. Today we will talk about the choices we make when it comes to what
we eat, where we eat, how often we eat and how much we eat. Believe it or not, each
of us has adopted an actual lifestyle when it comes to these choices. Furthermore, I hate to break it to you but
the truth is that many of the food choices we make are in fact made as a result
of a deliberate and outright ploy by companies with huge marketing campaigns to
control our mindset and influence how we preserve value.
In
today’s society we will enthusiastically and without second thought eat an
entire $5.00 foot long sub and find no fault in supersizing at our favorite
fast food chain for less than the price of a soda. An All-You-Can-Eat buffet for
$5.99 is considered a good deal! But even though you may not feel it in your
wallet, trust me, you are paying for it on the inside. The problems caused by
these choices cost so much more than what you may spend on the value menu in the
long run. So here comes the choice: The “Value Menu” or valuing your health?
Anything done in repetition eventually becomes habit, so if you begin to accept
overeating as a normal and healthy habit and justify it because of a low price
point, eventually you will begin to accept the
unhealthy lifestyle that will inevitably accompany it. These habits come
with costly and sometimes deadly consequences. Normally consuming foods high in
sugar, fats and salts are believed to be triggered by a hormone called ghrelin,
commonly known as “the hunger hormone.” It is believed that this hormone when
triggered, induces individuals to indulge in high-calorie, high-fat comfort
foods in response to stress. This in turn begins to interfere with your brain’s
response to feeling full.
My question
for you is, if we eat to live and we are over eating, are we over living? That’s
just a play on words but think about it. We indulge in food all the time as I
mentioned earlier because we want all we can eat for that dollar. So what is
the real problem with over eating? The truth is that for the average person overeating
is hard to control. It becomes habitual and habits once established are hard to
break. Once you start to overeat you want to keep over eating. For example, one super sized meal leads to
two, two to three and then before you know it every meal is super sized. Yes
that’s a problem! So I ask you, why do we truly like over eating? The first probability is the physical satisfaction
we experience when we overeat. When consuming
a meal we will normally get high doses of sugar, fats and salt that combine to
trigger a “feeling full” mechanism in your brain that tells you to stop eating.
Now let’s
talk about the emotional and mental processes that take place with regards to eating.
Being hungry is not always the main issue but since we have adopted bad lifestyle
habits like social eating, this complicates an otherwise simple process. We simply like to eat because it is a way to
meet and greet people. Eating also gives us a sense of pleasure so we feel
emotionally satisfied when we eat and associate this with a feeling of
completeness. Let’s not forget programming. We are programmed to overeat and
indulge in unhealthy meal choices by many social influences such as television
and magazine ads. We are bombarded with subliminal messaging in restaurant
advertising that makes us fall for the “best
meal at this price” trap. Let’s be real! Having the option to save money
greatly influences our decision on what we choose to eat as consumers. This
tactic makes it very hard to resist! So
the next time you make a choice about eating, think about what we have
discussed and decide if that “order of gluttony and a diet coke” is worth it.
