How do you deal with the treat foods that lead you to overeat?

People often tell me that their way of dealing with the high calorie foods they find hard to resist, is to keep them out of the house.

Their reasoning is that if something’s not in the cupboard, they are far less likely to eat it.

This makes total sense, and for some it works well. For others, particularly those who share their home with family or friends who love those foods too, this isn’t such a straightforward strategy.

When you catch sight of someone else’s stash of treats, your abstinence can hit the buffers. You remember the taste, and your dopamine system kicks in, driving you to repeat the experience. In no time you’re craving the thing you’d sworn would not pass your lips.

 

What have cravings got to do with weight loss?

Food cravings are associated with decreased quality of life, increased calorie intake and drop-out from weight loss programmes and people often report feeling out of control of their eating generally if they struggle to manage cravings.

People may give up on weight loss attempts precisely because of difficulty managing strong cravings that arise from our ready access to highly palatable calorific foods.

 

A key issue is how to deal with those foods that we crave

Improvement in the control of foods we crave is associated with greater long-term weight loss (Dalton et al 2017).

Roe and Rolls (2020) carried out a year-long study with 186 women who were overweight to find out the most common ‘problem foods’ (ones that are difficult to resist eating) and which types of strategies might help manage consumption of these foods.

What they found was that people in the study each tended to report several foods they found difficult to resist eating. The most commonly named foods were sweet and salty snacks: ice cream, crisps, chocolate, biscuits, and starchy carbohydrate foods such as bread and pizza.

In terms of strategies, initially the most commonly used practice of the study participants was to avoid keeping them in the house and avoid buying them. The next most frequent strategy was eating a small amount as a treat and limiting the portion size. By the end of the year these two types of strategies were used equally frequently, and people often used a combination of the two.

Only one type of strategy was associated with weight loss

By the end of the year, the strategy related to the greatest weight loss was limiting the portions of problem foods. The women who used these strategies more lost more weight by the end of the year (average 7.2kg) than those who used them less (average 3.8kg).

Although people commonly reported using avoidance strategies (avoiding keeping problem foods available, avoiding buying them or avoiding eating them), none of these was related to the degree of weight loss after a year.

Roe and Rolls wonder whether this is partly to do with how hard it is to maintain avoidance strategies in shared homes, and in the face of ubiquitous exposure to sweet and salty snacks in our current eating environment.

 

Limiting portions helped

So, the only reported management strategy that was related to weight loss in the study was limiting the portion size of problem foods. Adopting and maintaining strategies to manage portion sizes of your favourite foods, rather than trying to avoid them, is likely to be a more useful approach for weight loss.

 

Action plan for incorporating treats into your weight loss plan

1. If you find it difficult to manage portion sizes of your hard-to-resist foods, buying pre-portioned items may help. This is particularly relevant if you tend to buy a sharing pack with the aim of saving cash – it is only a saving if you manage to serve yourself the small portion. For many of us, buying a multi-pack of portioned amounts may make it easier to stick to eating just one small portion at a time

 

2. Plan the timing and amount of your treat. Look forward to it and make a mini-occasion of it

 

3. When you sit down to enjoy your planned treat, give it your full attention. That is the only way you’ll get all the pleasure that’s available in that treat. If your mind is elsewhere – scrolling through your phone or watching Netflix – you won’t fully experience the pleasure and are likely to feel short-changed. Eating mindfully means getting all the deliciousness food has to offer.

 

Nothing works for everyone

It’s important to remember that we are all different and that there will be some people for whom the avoidance strategies do actually work better. Using trial and error you can discover what works best for you as you develop a pattern of eating which is sustainable and life-enhancing.

 

Want to learn more about psychological techniques to help your clients overcome cravings?

If your job involves helping people change how they eat, you may be really interested to learn much more about the psychology of cravings, and how to overcome them. It is such a fascinating and important area that I have developed a Masterclass on Cravings.

On the Masterclass I present the Elaborated Intrusion Theory of cravings, and teach you the techniques developed from Motivational Interviewing and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that can really help your clients overcome cravings.

Colleagues from all professions are welcome to attend this Masterclass which is on zoom, and is recorded so that you can attend live, or watch the recording, or a mixture of the two.

The Masterclass is approved for CPD by

• The British Psychological Society (BPS)
• The British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine (BANT)
• The UK and International Health Coaches Association (UKIHCA)
• The Naturopathic Nutrition Association (NNA)

We’d love you to join us and you can find further details of the Masterclass and booking here.

 

References

Dalton, M., Finlayson, G., Walsh, B. et al. Early improvement in food cravings are associated with long-term weight loss success in a large clinical sample. Int J Obes 41, 1232–1236 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2017.89

Roe and Rolls (2020) Which strategies to manage problem foods were related to weight loss in a randomized clinical trial? Appetite, 151 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2020.104687

Photo by Heather Barnes for Unsplash