Overeating is a huge challenge to overcome for most people and rightly so, food tastes SO good. But why?
We’ve all been in a situation where you’ll tell yourself “just two biscuits with this cup of tea” only to reaffirm this statement with “just two more” five minutes later.
Get a hold of yourself is the answer, stop being greedy, get some self control you weak minded fool. Or maybe not.
Your cravings and desire to keep eating more food is no accident
Food companies like Cadbury, Nestle, Mars and a host of others that make all the foods, sauces, condiments and everything else in between are continuously dedicating millions of pounds, thousands of hours of research and months of testing and adjusting into making their products as irresistible as possible.
If you can resist it, they pay someone more money to find out why and then tweak the ingredients. I kid you not.
Yes, there really are teams of big wigs, mad scientists and people in labs purposely making it as hard as humanly possible to resist.
Feel a little better about chugging down more than you should but not because it will make you less fat but because you are pitting your will power against a well paid team of psychologists, food scientists and money men. A team against your will power. The odds are stacked against you.
Or is it?
That doesn’t mean you have to give in. There are ways to win. There are ways to not even play.
If you don’t buy the foods, they are not in the kitchen cupboard, if they are not in the kitchen cupboard you can’t eat the bloody things in the first place. 1- 0 to you.
If you must buy certain food stuffs then buy the small size.
[headline_cufon_font_centered color=”#000000″]Don’t buy the family pack, movie bag, grab size just because it’s better value for money, buy the smaller option because it’s it’s better value for health. 2 - 0[/headline_cufon_font_centered]If you don’t buy the bad juju foods you don’t have to play. Your will power doesn’t get tested, their team never gets to draw you in.
If it’s not in the fridge, it can’t turn to squidge
Some of you are probably thinking that I am just being silly about companies deliberately trying to over feed you, read on.
I recently read about a meeting of several very powerful top level CEO’s coming together in a very rare meeting of competitors to discuss the increasing number of overweight people becoming a national epidemic (In the USA).
This meeting was supposed to be a brain storming session to devise ways to help the public. Some of the big names there were even on board with the idea….but it was shot down by bigger names on the premises of why should they cut their profits to help people eat less.
The full and informative read can be found here
It’s about a bottom line, not a moral one.
Did someone say bottom line?
I have spoken with food scientists and they are paid well to do what they do. And many of them are paid to make us want to eat more.
Computer programmes analyse data on human behaviour, colour to taste matching, taste indexes, “bliss point” zones, mouth feel and more factors that all help sway our decisions to food.
If you didn’t the full article linked above it basically tells us in short that most big food companies don’t give a rats arse about our health so long as we keep eating and they’ll keep finding ways to tempt us for as little money as possible. Which would be fine so long as their marketing reflected this instead of making out their foods are great. Their fault or ours for continuing to buy?
I think the horse food scandal is starting to open peoples eyes somewhat and no matter how many times the company in the spotlight says they didn’t know doesn’t change the fact that someone somewhere did, for sure. Money is watched like a hawk and pennies are shaved off every single corner that can be.
“We didn’t know”…sure
A penny or even a fraction of one saved per packet may seem little to us but works out to be millions to a manufacturer over the course of a year. That penny saving may come from a cheaper meat supplier, a lower quality grade cheese or an ingredient sourced from a country that isn’t too hot on hygiene or child labour. A penny saved is a million earned to these guys.
And just what does any of that have to do with helping me lose weight?
It serves to highlight that bad foods are just that, bad. And often the people behind the foods are just as bad.
Stop buying the junk in the first place. Sometimes these companies really don’t deserve our money and the easy way to put an end to the poor food quality is to stop purchasing it which helps solve a moral issue and a physical one.
Their mindset is that because we want the food they will keep making it so it is up to us to stop eating it.
Read the Six Steps to Slim guide to understand why poor food choices make people fat.
Choose wisely, your life depends on it
An excuse I hear a lot for having these foods around is that it is in the house for the children.
I have always struggled to understand this argument: if you know the food to be crap, why are you feeding it to your most beloved? Would you give them cigarettes to keep them quiet.
[headline_georgia_large_centered color=”#000000″]Yes, poor food choices are as bad for your health as cigarettes[/headline_georgia_large_centered]
Diabetes
Stopping eating plastic man made food is a great first step in fat loss and health gain.
But then again it is your life and the choice is yours, just don’t be blinkered into believing these foods are even close to good for you, no matter what the food label tells you.
Your Epsom Personal Trainer,
Richard Ham Williams