Having spent over a decade helping clients improve their eating habits, it fascinates me how everyone has different eating patterns and behaviours and motivations as well as how different they all respond to even the same eating plan.
Because we are all wired differently, which is part of the issue as, according to the research (Wansink/ Sobal, 2007), we make, on average, close to 230 food decisions every single day and close to 95% of those decisions are completely unconscious, believe it or not.
This means, we may not be in control of our food choices as we would like to believe. The point of this article is to bring to your awareness what those factors are as, once you have an awareness of them, it may be slightly easier to be more mindful about food choices you make and make alterations to your lifestyle in order to accommodate healthier eating patterns.
And once you practice mindfulness for a certain amount of time – new patterns start appearing with new eating behaviours. So, we feel more in control as a result. And results follow too.
Influences on our eating behaviours can be due to social factors, our own physiology, psychology, hormones, visual factors such as food marketing, olfactory (influenced by the sense of smell), etc. It gets even more complicated when it is not just the single factor as, most of the time, it is more factors at once influencing our decisions and food choices. Here are some of the factors and I have left the most fascinated one for the end, so, stay tuned.
Take SLEEP as a one single massive influencer. There are numerous studies linking sleep deprivation with weight gain. University of California, Berkeley study concluded that lack of sleep made us desire food more and, at the same time, made our brain incapable of evaluating our appetite, whether we were hungry or not. Sleep deprivation has also been shown to increase stress hormone CORTISOL and higher cortisol levels – higher the fat and sugary food consumption, as another study at University of California concluded.
It is all linked to STRESS, which leads to an increased appetite and brain’s inability to make right decisions and controlling our emotions. So, managing stress and improving our sleeping pattern could mean improving the amount we eat and choice of food we eat. Aim for 7-8 hours of good quality sleep.