In wise Latin, «inter» means «internal», «extra» — «external». If internal eaters eat “in themselves”, then external eaters eat “as if not in themselves”. What to do? Very important advice for those who can’t stop.
But seriously, internal nutrition means the absorption of food based on internal signals of the body, on signs of hunger and satiety, external nutrition is triggered and stimulated by any external properties of this food that are not related to hunger. Looked appetizing. It smelled good. This cake was eaten with appetite by a disgustingly thin blonde at the next table (that is, she can, yes, but me ?!). This gigantic billboard oozing with fat and voluptuousness popped up and attacked you from around the corner. Couldn’t resist? Congratulations, you are an external eater.
The good news is that it’s not so offensive: we are all, to one degree or another, external eaters. There is no person who is completely indifferent to the influence of professional culinary photography and the magic of appetizingly arranged shop windows. Food should excite our appetite with its sight and smell, this is completely normal: back in 1956, the French physiologist Jacques de Malignen (Jacques de Malignen) described the phenomenon of sensory-specific satisfaction, partly consisting in the fact that after saturation with one kind of food, the sight and smell the other whets our appetite again. The problems begin when you can’t miss a single barbecue, a single sandwich without trying to eat it, and once you start, you can’t stop.
In modern culture, eating behavior has completely supplanted sexual behavior in terms of morality. It didn’t happen right away. Some 100 years ago, a woman with a developed sexual appetite was considered licentious, immoral. As a result of the sexual revolution, the situation softened somewhat — a woman was allowed to change partners, experience sexual interest, want not necessarily officially registered relationships, but also simple, ordinary sex. However, the trap slammed shut on the other side — sexual freedom had to be paid for with food freedom.
- Regain the pleasure of eating
The now loose and weak-willed woman is the one who allows herself to lie on the couch and, while everyone else enthusiastically builds cubes on her stomach in the gym and weighs 28 grams of ice cream peas on the scales, eats cakes, one after another. The promiscuous is the one that can afford not to control what she eats. Nutrition has become a new morality, food asceticism and sports penance — new forms of holiness. Those who want to earn the respect of others must overcome the devilish test with cake, kebab torture, torture with juicy steak and potatoes, and those who have not overcome must atone for sin with chicken breast, steamed vegetables and barbell squats.
In no era did the saints give the impression of mentally adequate people, and this is not so now: the highest scores “for righteous behavior” are received by orthorexics, bigorexics and “under control” anorectics. When you meet a zealous health follower, ask if they have a history of addiction. Sports and diet are hard drugs like amphetamines and heroin. External feeders are the most unlucky in this situation. It is they who find it most difficult to resist food that is within the reach zone — and it is they who most often receive moral assessments from others, comparable to definitions pronounced in a half-whisper in French in some secular salon in Moscow a little more than a hundred years ago. They are food libertines, practically carbohydrate whores, who cannot resist a third piece of brownie or pass a basket of cookies. External eaters themselves most often also refer to themselves as weak-willed, weak-willed creatures. Meanwhile, this is not the problem at all.
Overeating is not related to willpower or weakness, because a person who is able not to overeat naturally does not use volitional mechanisms to control eating behavior. Eating behavior is regulated differently.
- Nutrition Yoga
We don’t know exactly why a person becomes an external eater. It is likely that some people are born with a tendency to form these behaviors. It is assumed that in people with a developed type of external overeating, the nervous system is hypersensitive and unstable in relation to any stimuli. Food stimuli — the type of food, its smell — are among the strongest, and they are the most difficult to resist. Just as people who are hypersensitive to sounds cannot stand loud music or harsh shouting — they experience physical pain, people who are highly sensitive to food stimuli cannot walk past a bowl of sweets without putting their hands into it.
Hypersensitivity is an innate property of the nervous system, it is impossible to change it. However, this does not mean that we are completely powerless over external overeating. When the hand reaches over and over again for a basket of cookies, a bag of chips, or a bowl of nuts, it seems to us that there is a loss of control, but this is not entirely true. What we lose in this state is nothing but awareness, presence in the present moment. We don’t eat cookies, we don’t eat chips, we don’t put nuts in our mouths — we are doing something else, our consciousness is present in another place. Even if you’re not busy reading a book, watching a movie, or surfing the Web, you might be thinking about work, planning a vacation, or preparing for a serious conversation with a loved one.
Therefore, the first means of coping with external overeating is to increase awareness. In addition to the obvious and one of the best ways — meditation — there are simple effective exercises that allow you to return to the experience of the present. Those interested in specific techniques are referred to my earlier texts or to my recently published book.
The cultural ban on pronounced female sexuality and the moral condemnation of it gave rise to pornography, the secret trade in images of the naked female body, and methods of representing the female body as provoking voluptuousness.
The cultural prohibition against enjoying delicious food has given rise to food porn and the hidden tricks used by restaurateurs and gourmet vendors to get us to buy and eat more, first, and faster. The fitness porn industry is booming right now, and while part of the world may be at risk of premature death from morbid obesity, another part is at risk of equally premature and brutal death from diseases caused by excessive training.
Food porn is worth a closer look. Catering establishments are focused on lowering your level of awareness (music, TV on in front of your eyes) and provoke you to external overeating (intense smells of delicious food, beautiful dishes on carts and windows). There are companies that produce and sell the smells of delicious food to restaurants and cafes. For example, at McDonald’s they supply the smell of apple pie so you don’t forget to buy dessert, coffee houses — the aromas of coffee and chocolate. If the restaurant hall smells cozy of coffee, cinnamon, fresh almond croissants, this may have absolutely nothing to do with what is currently being prepared in the kitchen.
Psychologists who work with overeating and eating disorders, in turn, have a set of Top Secret Techniques to counter this. It has nothing to do with diet or willpower, and many of these tricks you already know from life experience. If you apply them systematically, several at a time, you can greatly reduce the level of your external overeating. Shall we try?
1. Size matters
It seems that everyone has already been convinced of this. The larger the plate, the more insatiable the external eater. The same goes for the bento box, the plastic container, any container you eat from. Unfortunately, mainstream dietary thinking has made this principle an oxymoron: I have seen recommendations to eat from a jam socket. Sockets. For jam. For fans of food nanoculture (the less, the better), I suggest not to waste time on trifles, but to visit a pet store and buy a hamster feeder, for those who managed to keep their sanity, I will say this. If you eat from a saucer, then you are absolutely sure that you have eaten little, not enough — and there is a great risk of making five approaches to the pan with this saucer. But the average plate size, as opposed to the now popular large one (because “first of all, it’s beautiful”) is a good solution for an external eater. Your usual portion will fill the middle plate completely, giving the brain a calming signal: «There is a lot of food, you will be satisfied without difficulty.» For lovers of exact numbers, the optimal size of a plate for a non-glutton is 20-22 cm. Any restaurant plate and most plates from dinner sets are larger. Yes, any restaurant is really interested in you to eat and order more. If beauty on the table is important to you — put a large plate-stand, and on it — the middle one, in which you put food.
2.Clean Plate Society
What a culture shock it was for me to discover that this phenomenon exists everywhere! External eaters tend to eat and drink to the end, to the last drop, to the last crumb. What is happening? It’s very simple: there is no contact with saturation signals, saturation is not recognized as such. Then it becomes necessary to use some external signals to stop eating. What signal is the easiest and most convenient? Lack of food. Brian Wansink, one of the well-known mindful eating experts, conceived and conducted the widely cited «Bottomless Soup Bowl» experiment. The group of subjects who ate from intricate bowls that were invisibly filled under the table with soup as it dwindled to a single constant level consumed much more than the control group that ate from conventional soup bowls, in which the level of soup apparently decreased as it was eaten. .
The understanding that food itself triggers the process of eating often leads to the widespread belief among compulsive overeaters, «The refrigerator should be empty.» The chronic absence of “dangerous” food at home leads to unconscious attempts to “disregard food” — to steal a few slices from a partner’s plate, to eat in the car on the way home, because this “does not count”, and, in the end, develops into chronic deprivation and serious food disorders. breakdowns.
Can this be regulated while remaining within the principles of Intuitive Eating and not falling into dietary control? Certainly. Having put a portion of food for yourself, look at it with a critical eye, estimating the level of your own hunger on the Hunger Scale. Do you really want to eat it all? Are you really hungry for this portion? Or are you afraid that you won’t get enough, and impose with a margin? Please note that these questions have nothing to do with the question «Can I eat that much?» The answer to this question is always the same: you can. If it seems to you that you may have overdone (in 70% of cases this is true), put a portion of the portion back, telling yourself that you are always entitled to a supplement. After eating what’s left, pause and re-evaluate your hunger level on the scale. Want more? Overlay. If you’re in a restaurant known for its generous servings: Set aside a portion of the serving in a container prepared ahead of time. Those who are especially shy can tell the surprised waiter that they cook absolutely wonderful food in this restaurant and you really want your beloved grandmother, aunt, dog to try it too.
- How You Eat: What Your Diet Says About You
3. Drama at the buffet
These buffets. These establishments with «infinite number of approaches» and «all-you-can-eat». Faced with a choice of a large number of alternatives, the poor external eater is lost. He wants to give himself everything. Twice. There are too many stimuli, and the reaction is also too strong. Is there a way out other than to drink valerian and stop going to restaurants? Of course have. Tell yourself that for each set you can take no more than two different dishes on a plate. The other two are in the next approach. This will force you to choose much more carefully what you really want to eat now. And don’t let the waiter replace dirty plates — they serve as a soothing reminder of how much you’ve already eaten.
4. Social food
The external eater is the social eater. This means that, just like the appearance of food, the community of eating people stimulates appetite. Even worse, studies have shown that external eaters match the rhythm with which the fastest at the table eats their portion. The more people at the table, the more food we consume. The average woman, when she marries, puts on 10 kilograms on average in the first years of marriage, because after a life of loneliness she begins to eat in the company of an extremely handsome (I hope) man. In other words, others eat and force us to eat. What to do with all this? Hang out. Start eating after everyone has already taken pictures of their dishes, posted them on Instagram (an extremist organization banned in Russia) and started eating. After everyone has already begun to eat, observe and determine which of the participants eats the slowest of all (he, most likely, will be the most slender). Synchronize with him: eat at the same pace as this participant. He is a piece and you are a piece. He puts down his fork and you put it down. And of course, do not forget that all these recommendations are not worth a penny if you understand that their use destroys the most important thing — the pleasure of eating.