Food control: It’s complicated

In David A Kessler’s bestselling The End of Overeating: Taking Control of Our Insatiable Appetite, the author, a former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, charts in boggling detail the way American food has been designed to seduce an increasingly obese nation. According to his research, in 1960 American women aged between 20 and 29 averaged 9st 2lb. By 2000, the average weight had reached 11st 3lb. Over here, meanwhile, fewer than one in 10 Britons was obese, while one in four is today. And this is happening because “motivational pathways in our brains … activated by stimuli in the environment … generate an emotional response, which then drives our behaviour”.

In other words, if it’s there, we’ll eat it. And the food that is there, in fast-food outlets, in themed chain restaurants, and in the ready-meal aisles of supermega-hypermarkets, has been expressly designed to make us want more, loaded as it is with fat, salt and sugar, which stimulate the brain’s “reward centres”. Eating certain foods, Kessler says, “stimulates us to keep eating — and eating and eating…”.

While some of us are defaulting to food that makes us feel good in the short term, unsatisfied in the longer term, and then — because we try to fill this literal and metaphorical hole — eventually makes us unhappy, and fat, the food industry is conspiring to provide the most scientifically successful combinations of fat, salt and sugar to create food that is “hyperpalatable”, thus speeding up the cycle.

Sugar, fat and salt make food “compelling”, “indulgent” and high in “hedonic value” — food that makes us feel “better” even as it makes us feel worse. It is, in short, not really food, it is a drug.

I didn’t want to cook for myself — I wanted somebody to do it for me, I wanted to be looked after Kessler’s book makes for a chilling read, but I contend that we can have just as unhealthy a relationship with being “healthy” as we can relentlessly consuming a diet high in saturated fats, and that an obsession with fighting the onslaught of “bad foods” can also go too far. In our quicksand western society, in which we feel increasingly fraught and stressed, for many of us — particularly women — what we eat (and when, and how much of it) is a way of controlling the otherwise uncontrollable aspects of lives lived in fast-forward.

We are rarely “in the moment” when it comes to our bodies, busy hankering after what was (the halcyon day of being size 10) and what may yet be (the possibility of being an 8).

And we’ve all been at the dinner party or restaurant meal hijacked by the faddy eaters: wheat-intolerant, dairy-averse, no additives, no sugar, only organic, thanks very much, “Can I go off-menu?”, “Could chef leave the béchamel out of the wheat-free lasagne?”

Sometimes we’ve even been one of those guests. And while everybody is entitled to their fads on home ground, I now find myself firmly in the camp of the host who has little truck with adults who can’t force themselves to stray from their “diet” for just one night and take a black run into a bowl of eton mess. I mean, how much damage can one small bowl of pudding really do to a reasonably healthy body — especially when compared to the damage that refusing it could inflict on the relationship with the person who baked the meringues for you, with love?

Oddly, I was at my slimmest for many years shortly after my second pregnancy (during which I had ballooned to a whopping 13st: my second son was 10lb, which accounted for 10 of those pounds, obviously, but not the rest). The reason I was slim? I was unhappy. “You look great,” everybody said, but I felt like a woman who knew the relationship with the father of her two children was over even before the second of those two children had stopped breast-feeding.

In the aisles of my local Tesco Extra, this newly single mother-of-two, with few friends in a town she still didn’t feel able to call home, whiled away the free time between school runs and work deadlines. The basic elements of a family food shop were acquired swiftly and without particular pleasure.

I enjoy cooking, and I’m pretty good at it, but I’d now “treat” myself to a previously unthinkable ready meal. I hadn’t grown up with ready meals or TV dinners, and we were a largely sugar-free household. My paternal grandmother even described refined cane sugar as “white death”, though my mother made a stupendously mouthwatering chocolate cake, strictly reserved for the most special of occasions.

So, single once again, it was in Tesco Extra that, after buying the basics — a process I could easily control — I succumbed to a takeaway Indian meal for two (and ate it all) and a Finest branded meal deal — main course, veg, pudding and bottle of wine for a tenner, no emotional investment required. The fact that I could cook a better meal myself wasn’t an issue. I didn’t want to cook for myself — I wanted somebody to do it for me, I wanted to be looked after. And if I didn’t have somebody in my life who loved me enough to do that, then Tesco could do it. The weight piled on.

If, as it claims on the cover, Kessler’s book “will change the way you eat”, then the trickily (if not downright off-puttingly)-titled Women Food and God, by Geneen Roth, promises “an unexpected path to almost everything”. Championed by Oprah Winfrey, Roth has built herself a self-help empire.

My self-help manual years are pretty much behind me. Through my teens and twenties, I devoured each bestseller as it came along, and then, one day, in my mid-thirties, I decided I never wanted to read another ever again, so it was with a certain degree of reluctance that I picked up Ms Roth. Her schtick is best summed up in one of her oddly addictive homilies. Diets fail, Roth says, “because if you wait to respect yourself until you are at the weight you imagine you need to be to respect yourself, you will never respect yourself, because the message you will be giving yourself as you reach your goal is that you are damaged and cannot trust your impulses, your longings, your dreams, your essence, at any weight”.

I may not like the way she says it, but that’s just a style thing, for there is something to her argument. If we start a new, “good” relationship with food — a diet, typically — on the basis that we are already in a “bad” relationship with food, then making a “good” relationship is a battle we are very likely to lose, because food is so far away from being mere fuel; it is, for many of us, entirely bound up with primal ideas of love and loss, of comfort, escapism and safety — of feeding the soul, of being “looked after”.

And so, finally, because it took this latte lover’s breath away, the last word goes to one of Kessler’s interviewees, a venture capitalist specialising in the food industry. Starbucks had “responded brilliantly to a cultural need”, he told Kessler, and “the caffeine and the sugar, with their energising effects, were part of the equation. But”, he added, “the chain offers something much more primal. It’s about warm milk and a bottle. If I could put a nipple on it, I’d be a multimillionaire”.

Eating certain foods “stimulates us to keep eating — and eating and eating" (Jonny Storey)

How to take control

Weight problems are evidence, in part, that we have been given a lot of bad advice. New diets are constantly being developed to help us change our behaviour. What’s missing is the understanding of how we lost control of eating in the first place. It’s time to go into food rehab.

Just-Right Eating
Choose food in appropriate quantities. For most people, a just-right meal will keep hunger away for about four hours. A just-right snack should keep you satisfied for two hours. Think in advance about what a meal should look like, then put only that much on your plate. Serving yourself just-right meals is a safeguard against the habit of mindlessly going back for more.

Choosing Foods that satisfy you
Choosing what to eat is as important as deciding how much to eat. Protein reduces hunger and makes it easier for us to comply with calorific restrictions. Foods high in fibre, such as wholewheat flour, brown rice, meat and fruit, empty more slowly from the stomach and keep you satisfied for longer, whereas sugary foods empty at a rate of 10 calories per minute, satisfying you for only an hour.

Figure out what leads to overeating
Make a list of food and situations you can’t control. Knowing what generates an urge to overeat will allow you to erect barriers against it. Refuse everything you can’t control by staying away from restaurants that serve huge meals, and don’t buy highly processed foods from supermarkets that are high in sugar, salt and fat. If someone puts something you overeat in front of you, push it away.

Dealing with urges
Thought-stopping is a definitive decision not to respond to the pull of a reward. The more seconds you spend thinking about what to do in front of an urge, the greater the chance you’ll ultimately give in to it. So learn these responses to thoughts of food:
“Eating that food will satisfy me only temporarily.”
“Eating this food will make me feel bad.”
“I’ll be happier if I don’t eat this.”
“I’ll weigh less tomorrow if I don’t eat this.”

Exercise as an alternative reward
Science tells us that exercise engages the same neural regions as other mood-enhancing rewards and produces similar chemical responses. Learn to depend on the positive effects it produces, rather than from the positive effects of food.

Extracted from The End of Overeating: Taking Control of Our Insatiable Appetite by David A Kessler (Penguin £9.99)