Why You’re Overeating & How to Finally Stop
We’ve all been there: The office party, the night out with friends, the willpower-crushing walk past a pastry shop or favorite food truck… the demon of overeating comes for us all.
Too often, we wander into the dark forest of dieting with only our Sword of Willpower to protect us. We think we can suffer through, grit our teeth, and make it out the other side if we just want it enough. But this has some serious flaws, and we’re going to see exactly why.
If you’re overeating on a weekly or even daily basis, if it’s something you feel you can’t control, you may need to talk to an eating disorder specialist or a doctor. This article isn’t going to cure diseases, but it will empower the rest of us with the tools we need to kick hunger and beat bad habits. Let’s learn why overeating is so hard to overcome, and the foolproof ways we can banish it from our lives.
Why We Overeat
If we had infinite, iron willpower we could all move full-tilt through even the deepest, darkest diets. Hunger? Stress? Water off a duck. But we don’t live in that world. In our world, we have to put in the mental work every time a box of donuts sits in the conference room. We have to resist.
In our world, we wear down, we get tired and hungry, and our willpower is decidedly finite [1]. The more we resist, the more “fatigued” we get, and the more likely we are to see that “iron” will bend and eventually break. In studies looking at ego depletion (let’s just call this “willpower fatigue”), subjects who had to resist eating a tasty snack now had more trouble resisting other urges later on [1]. It’s easy to imagine why days and weeks of dieting can weigh on you until you finally crack.
What’s worse, a look at 83 studies on willpower fatigue showed that even tasks that have nothing to do with food or dieting — things like making financial or work choices — still affect our ability to use willpower later [2].
Overeating is very common, and it’s rooted deep in our emotions [3,4]. The most powerful triggers of binge eating are boredom, depression, anxiety, tenseness, and sadness. These emotional sources are followed closely by the physiological issues like hunger. That’s why normal, restrictive diets are so hard to stick to, and why so many of them eventually fail [5]. When you restrict yourself, you wear yourself down; and when you deny yourself the things that make you happy, you feel stressed and overwhelmed.
We lean on the joy of eating, then fall into the pit of despair.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! You can diet with freedom instead of unnecessary restriction, and you can take the stress out of weight loss by keeping things flexible. Let’s see how…
Be Happy, Not Hangry
Rigid, restrictive diets almost always take away the foods you love. Without fail, this leads to stress and discomfort — two things you could do without while going hungry. Scientifically, rigid dieting has been associated with greater BMI, symptoms of eating disorders, mood disturbances, and excessive concern with body size and shape [6]. Correlation isn’t everything, but it points us in the right direction, especially when we know that flexible dieting can serve us better. In the same study, which compared rigid and flexible dieting, the flexible group wasn’t associated with any of those problems. In another study, flexible dieting was connected to lower body mass, lower levels of depression and anxiety, and — the best part — the absence of overeating [7].
It makes sense. Giving yourself the freedom to eat what you want can make life, and dieting, a lot easier. And when dieting is easy, when it doesn’t feel like a marathon of suffering and restriction, not overeating gets easier, too.
That’s why tracking macros — the protein, carbs, and fat that give food its calories — is such a powerful tool. Keeping weight loss simple (count your macros) and flexible (eat what you want) is a recipe for success and an exception to the rule in a world of diet failures.
(Speaking of recipes, macro-friendly meals are a gamechanger. This is where the freedom starts: You can make delicious foods that actually help you reach your goals, instead of enticing you away from them. We’ve got a lot of great ones here.)
Fill Up on Fiber
But, even with all the flexibility in the world, diets will still have a big downside… hunger. No surprises here: hunger can lead to overeating [3]. If it stands between us and success like a wall, we have to figure out a way around it… or through it. And that’s where controlling satiety comes in. Let’s talk about fiber first.
Fiber is a type of (mostly) indigestible carbohydrate. Because it moves through our digestive tract untouched, fiber has some useful properties that help stave off hunger. For one, high-fiber foods like vegetables and whole grains stay in your stomach longer [8]. This makes you feel full sooner while eating and leads to prolonged satiety (the feeling of fullness) after the meal is over [9]. That’s why high-fiber diets are very useful for people who struggle with hunger (meaning: humans) and may even decrease the amount of energy you take in over time, even without changing anything else [10].
You can get all the fiber you need (at least 25–30g per day) from whole, regular foods, or you can reap the same rewards from adding a fiber supplement to your diet [10]. The choice is yours!
Put simply: Fiber can help you feel full faster and for longer, which can be a big help when it comes to overeating.
The Power of Protein
If you only do one more thing to control satiety, I hope it’s eating plenty of protein. Just like getting lots of fiber, protein could change the way you look at dieting.
Protein influences satiety more than the other macronutrients, more than fiber, and more than any other aspect of food besides meal size. It has a powerful, positive effect on fullness — so much so that high-protein diets have been shown to increase weight loss compared to other diets [11].
And protein could be a godsend for overeaters. In two studies where subjects were told to overeat on protein only (meaning they didn’t add extra calories from carbs or fat) the subjects didn’t gain any extra weight [12], and actually improved their body composition [13]. And we’re talking lots of extra calories: 400–800 calories worth. It’s a little unclear how this is possible, but protein’s satiety-boosting, energy-burning effects are probably at the heart of it.
This doesn’t mean you can eat as much as you want, so long as it’s protein. But it goes a long way toward saying that high-protein diets could change your life.
Set Your Meal Timer
There’s a lot of conflicting guidance about when to eat, and how much. Well — we know how much is the problem… but choosing the right when could be a solution.
We’ve all heard the advice that we should eat small, frequent meals to boost our metabolism — and while this probably isn’t true [14], there might be a benefit to spreading out your meals. If you only eat two or three large meals a day, there will be long stretches between them — and here there be hunger. If you space out your meals, or rearrange some macros from breakfast or dinner, you could fill those voids with high-fiber, high-protein snacks that get you back to full and happy.
This might not work for everyone. Some people prefer large, satiating meals that coast them through half the day. But if what you’ve been doing — whatever that might be — leaves hunger gaps in your day, try rearranging meals to fill them up. Maybe you eat a big breakfast and go to bed hungry; maybe you skip breakfast and dine like royalty later… either way, the urge to overeat can strike when you’re on the long road from one meal to the next. If you can play it smart and ration out your macros for the times you really need them, you might be able to kick some urges to the curb.
Reverse Your Way Out
When you reach a point in your diet where the calories are just too low, the hunger too strong, and the urge to overeat almost unavoidable, it’s time to reverse diet.
Dieting (the regular kind) slows down your metabolism, making it harder to lose weight over time and easier to gain it back when the diet is over [15]. This is a sad example of how your metabolism can change. On the opposite side, we know that your body will also adapt to eating in a surplus, as less and less of the extra food you eat gets stored as fat and muscle [16].
There’s good news here. It means that, while you can train your metabolism down, you can also train it back up again. And that’s the goal of reverse dieting.
After you finish a diet, or when you hit the dark place where dieting becomes physically and psychologically impossible, the reverse diet is your way out. By slowly, carefully increasing your macros each week, a reverse diet boosts the food you eat each day while minimizing weight gain. This could help in two ways: (1) a meal, planned or unplanned, that would have been “overeating” before might just be regular old “eating” now, because your metabolism has sped up; and (2) you’re less likely to feel unstoppably hungry because you’re eating more food.
That’s why we recommend a reverse diet to anyone — at any stage of their journey — who feels like they can’t control the urge to overeat.
There’s a lot more to say about this, so check out The Complete Guide to Reverse Dieting.
Use Your Resources
When you’re up against the ropes, it’s good to have friends in your corner. Luckily, we’ve got you covered with every tool and trick to help beat overeating. Here are some great resources that will put more weapons in your arsenal:
Everything You Need to Know About Dieting
How to Plan Ahead and Stay on Track with Your Diet
Willpower is Limited: Here’s the 5 Steps You Should Take After a Binge
6 Ways to Beat the Urge to Binge
Again, all of this is designed to help the people who can — with encouragement and smart planning — make a change in their own lives. If you use these resources, try all the tips and tricks, and still can’t avoid overeating, it may be to time to seek help from a registered dietitian or doctor, as well as a support program like Overeater’s Anonymous.
When You Fall…
Nothing you do in a single bout of overeating can ruin you. What gets you is the repeated offense: coming back to the indulgence again and again, rationalizing each individual time without looking at the big picture.
This gives us two pieces of advice: First, don’t stress yourself out about falling off the wagon. Just pick yourself up and get back on. Second, know that even small falls, over and over again, can break bones.
Dieting isn’t just about willpower. As we’ve seen, expecting willpower to overcome emotions and hunger just won’t cut it: we have to play it smarter. That means banishing hunger where we can by eating plenty of fiber and protein. It means escaping hunger when we need to by reverse dieting. And it means not over-restricting — keeping happiness in our diet wherever possible.
The journey might not be easy, but the destination is worth the work. With flexible dieting, you can take control of your body again and stop overeating.
References
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