Do You Know You Overeat?

Is there a time of the month when you feel depressed or cry for no reason? Do you have sugar or other cravings at a particular time of the month? Do you have excessive hair on your face, chest, back or buttocks? Do you have oily skin or acne? If your female hormones are not in balance, you may want to eat more. As you approach menopause, your oestrogen levels drop. Your body then stores fat around your belly, as this fat can produce oestrogen to offset declining levels. You are also more likely to store this weight around your belly. How come some people naturally eat the amount they need, yet for you it’s a real effort? Are they just lucky, or is something else going on? Do you know you overeat, but find it hard to cut back? Perhaps you find hunger such a horrible feeling that you need to eat to get rid of it. Or maybe you frequently want to reach for food, even when you are not hungry. This could be because the system that regulates your appetite and works to keep your weight constant has been disrupted, so your body is not telling you you’ve had enough. Or another system may have been triggered that drives you to eat, regardless of whether you actually need to. Julie reckoned she had tried pretty much every diet out there. This time, she would stick to it. She’d buy all the right foods, follow recipes to the letter and do really well the first few days. But then it would start to get tough.

Tell Me Why

Why do I do it? she asked me rhetorically. I’m not usually one for sweet foods. Crisps are generally my downfall. When she was on day shifts, Julie found it easier. She’d come home and put on music to help her unwind while she cooked dinner. Julie tried to watch her portion sizes, but had a tendency to reach for food just because it was there. She knew she ate too much, but found it hard to cut back because she then ended up feeling hungry and grumpy. She found it hard to adjust her sleep patterns to her work shifts and was lucky if she got six hours sleep. This sleep deprivation was interfering with the hormones that told her when to eat and when she’d had enough. They were out of balance. However, when she checked the ingredients, some of them were high in salt and contained hidden sugars. Symptoms might include stomach cramps, tremors, irritability, headaches, weakness and fatigue.

The Circle Game

There are two systems that regulate your appetite. Your homeostatic system works to keep your body weight constant. Your hedonic system motivates you to find food then rewards you with a sense of pleasure when you eat it. This system works through chemical messengers. Some stimulate your appetite, whilst others suppress it. It is the balance between these signals that regulates your appetite. If you have more of the messengers that increase your appetite, you feel hungrier. If you have more of the messengers that decrease your appetite, you feel less hungry. Because this system wants to keep your body weight constant, the more excess weight you carry, the more it reduces your appetite. So if this system is working properly, as you gain weight you should want to eat less. Is this your experience? Do you find yourself eating less whenever you gain weight? If your answer is No, this may be because your homeostatic system has been disrupted. A big cause of this problem is modern diets and lifestyles.

What's Done Is Done

Additionally, it can be overridden by the hedonic system. When this system is triggered, you will eat even if you are not hungry. The hedonic system worked well at a time when food might be scarce. And processed foods high in sugar and fat did not exist. Not only do these foods reduce your response to signals that you have had enough to eat, but they also activate the hedonic system, triggering you to eat more. This can be a bit of a vicious cycle, as these ‘comfort’ foods, in turn, trigger you to eat even more. If you answer Yes to three or more questions, then your appetite may be making it harder for you to lose weight. Do you find it hard to know when you are genuinely hungry? Do you find it hard to know when you have eaten a sufficient amount? Do you often feel hungry even when you have eaten recently? Do you eat more than you need? Do you eat what is on your plate even if you have had enough to eat? However, many aspects of modern life can disrupt this system. When your hedonic system is triggered, this overrides your homeostatic system and drives you to eat. Are those pounds creeping on again? Perhaps you a have a winter weight and a summer weight. Or maybe you always carry extra weight, regardless of the time of year, and it doesn’t seem to want to shift! Since she was a little girl Amira had loved cooking. Her mum, from South India, had taught Amira many traditional recipes. She loved visiting her mum’s family in India, especially in winter. Last year had been particularly hard going. She’d coped quite well with the lockdown at first. But after a while, being cooped up in a flat with young children and a garden the size of a postage stamp began to get to her. Plus, her daughter had recently started nursery and seemed to pass on constant colds and runny noses. For the past months, living in jogging bottoms, she hadn’t noticed the pounds slowly sneaking up. Almira hadn’t been out in the sunshine so much over the last year. Being low in vitamin D was increasing her susceptibility to the colds and the bugs she kept picking up. And it may well have been a factor in her increasing weight. This can become a cycle.