Coping with trigger foods

Question: When does 500 calories not fill you up?

Answer: When it’s 500 calories of your favorite trigger foods.

Yesterday the administrative assistants at my office had a cookie swap. (How come nobody ever has a fruit swap?) It was certainly not because there has been any lack of sweets at work. For weeks I’ve been avoiding the office kitchen, simply because there are bound to be all manner of sugary, gooey things on the counters.

It’s not that I never eat sweets. I just don’t need or want them in my face on a constant basis. Out of sight, out of mind–and that’s the way I like it.

But Monday, when a co-worker brought about seven kinds of cookies back to our room, I decided to eat some. Sure enough, proximity plays a big role in eating behavior.

For example, a highly popularized study showed that the less effort we have to expend to get to the food, the more likely we are to eat it. We eat more candy when the dish is on our desk and less when it’s across the room. So yeah, yesterday I proved to be an ordinary human being who ate the cookies because they were within reach.

Here’s why I’m writing about it.

Many nutritional experts talk about the wisdom of allowing oneself small quantities of “forbidden” foods in order to prevent feelings of deprivation that can lead to a binge. If you love pizza, the logic goes, enjoy a single slice. Dark chocolate? Have one small square of the good stuff on a daily basis. And so on.

I think this makes a lot of sense for some people–but perhaps not for everyone and not all the time.

I say this because some foods serve as triggers for overeating. And if you’re a person for whom pizza is a trigger, you may find it easier to avoid it altogether (or make your own super-healthy, low-fat version) than to eat one piece of a typical pie.

I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve got portion control down pretty well, and I almost always that find moderate servings of my normal foods are satisfying.

But when I began to eat cookies the other day–and I probably had five or six–each one seemed to make me feel hungrier.

Those cookies served as a trigger for me. That sugar and fat wasn’t satiating. Exactly the opposite. Once I started, I wanted more.

There’s also quite a bit of research indicating that given many food choices, we eat more. (This is why when you’re eating out, you’re safer ordering from the menu than visiting the buffet. See my post “Surviving the buffet of death.”) If there had been one kind of cookie available, I might have stopped at two.

But there were lemon cookies, chocolate-chip-and-oatmeal cookies, fudgy chocolate balls rolled in powdered sugar, Rice Krispy treats, and more.

My point: if you can eat one or two cookies in the aftermath of a cookie swap, you’re probably not triggered by sweets. If, like me, you find yourself getting hungrier as you go, you might find you do better by cutting trigger foods out entirely–at least when you’re confronted by an abundance of goodies and circumstances make it easy to overeat.

For years I’ve believed that the best way to stop craving sweets is to stop eating them altogether. I know it works for me.

Postscript: I don’t feel too bad about those cookies, knowing there was a time when I would certainly have eaten twice as many!

So what’s your experience? Has this ever happened to you? Please comment!

stock.xchng photo by alexbruda

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