Junk Food Cravings and what to do

  

If you’re like every other person, you’ve asked yourself why wanting things that are fried or sweetened is automatic but we have to be convinced by an army of experts to feast on fruits and vegetables. It feels like these people don’t just understand. So let’s explore this together.

What counts as junk food?

According to Wikipedia, "Junk food" is a term used to describe food that is high in calories from sugar and/or fat, and possibly sodium, but with little dietary fiber, protein, vitamins, minerals, or other important forms of nutritional value

Highly processed food for example fast foods and snacks because the proper nutrients are substituted for empty calories. Content-wise the three usual suspects are sodium (science students remember sodium chloride?) sugars and fats.

What does evolution have to say about our need for junk food?

Why do we like junk food more? Because it looks and tastes better! But that’s not all. Permit me to bore you with a little history lesson. The thing is that unhealthy foods have not always been unhealthy.

What happened is that our diet and eating habits have evolved but our digestive system has not. We are basically not built to eat three times a day. The early man found food hard to come by and he could go a day or two without any food.

At that time, Mother Nature couldn’t stand her children starving so she solved this problem by making us crave sweet, salty, and fatty foods by default. These foods usually take longer to digest and our body gets to store their nutrients for longer. 

 

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Changes in lifestyle

If we took a trip to the year 4000 BC and we opened a fast food restaurant on every street, we wouldn’t see too many of the people there overweight and struggling with heart disease, kidney failure, and other diet-related illnesses because they spent the whole day on their feet and their bodies would have used up all the excess calories.

 

Thomas Malthus, a famous economist predicted hunger and food scarcity to end the world.  When he made this bold claim 225 years ago, humans were reproducing faster than they could feed. The introduction of technology to agriculture meant that man could produce food in far greater quantities than ever before. But the price to be paid is that the food would be of less value compared to organic food.

With more food available to us, it is not a surprise to see us eating more than we really need.

 

Helpful tips to eat junk foods

The purpose of this article is not to teach you how to eat better, you can find that information here. But I’ll still leave you with a few tips on how you can reconfigure your default setting.

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What to eat

Just to reiterate, no food in isolation is bad for you (allergies aside of course). It’s just that some are better for your body in the long term than others. That’s the whole point of balanced dieting- you get to eat what you like and also eat what you need. Just be mindful of the unholy trinity of salt, sugar, and fat.

 When to eat

When we were younger, we used to think eating a heavy meal the night before fasting would make us feel less hungry in the morning but that hack never really worked. In fact, we actually felt hungrier the next morning. That’s because your sleepy brain didn’t register the eba that you were eating the night before.

 Your metabolism slows down as the day is about to end. Whatever you eat at that time wouldn’t get enough time to digest because your body is focused on getting you to sleep. Eating at that time means your sleep could be affected. Make your best efforts to avoid late-night meals or snacks.

How to eat

It might not sound like a big deal but the speed at which you eat should also be considered. Eating more slowly is the real deal. You get to savour it better and eventually end up eating less. It takes practice to slow down on eating but it is a good way to start eating three bags of chips instead of five.

Extra tip

What snacks and fast foods have in common is that they are usually bought on impulse (remember the Hamburger you mistakenly bought last week?) A good way to prevent such unhealthy quick decisions is by meal planning. We’ve written extensively on how to do this, you can check it out here 

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