i’m kinda convinced that obesity is mostly caused from some obscure and poorly-understood mental health condition. i remember reading that people who are depressed have a much higher rate of drug abuse. well, that might seem obvious. but excessive eating can be seen as a drug as well. it’s not healthy, people do it as a coping mechanism. so it’s really more like bad mental health -> excessive eating -> sickness, but it’s more the bad mental health that causes it all and not so much the excessive eating itself. like, if you were mentally healthy but still ate a lot, then the eating wouldn’t hurt you so much. it’s really more the mental health issues, i suspect, though it’s difficult to study that because the mental health issues aren’t really measurable so well. they’re deep inside.
Anything that triggers the reward pathways in your brain has at least some addictive potential and eating is no exception. Not all foods are created equal, either - adding ex. sugar boosts the reward and makes the food more addictive. Now many foods have huge amounts of added sugars for the sake of preserving shelf life and getting recurrent customers, that sort of thing increases the power of the reward. Over time you become habituated to it though so you can’t get quite the same good feeling with the same amount you ate before - you have to eat even more to get there.
It’s certainly a weaker effect than in drugs, but unlike them EVERYONE has to eat food to survive and over their entire life. There’s a lot of money to be made by enhancing the addictive potential of food so many efforts have been made towards that over time, plus as the obesity rate has risen and people eat more cultural expectations around food on portion size and the like have also been increasing. When I cut weight some years ago after getting overweight and almost at the edge of obesity some of my coworkers were wondering why I was bothering to do so because in their eyes I was a relatively skinny guy, even though I was 197 lbs.
obesity is caused from eating too much and your metabolism not burning it off.
yes, some people have disregulatory eating habits. i have the myself. when i get stressed out all i want to do is shove gallons of ice cream down my throat.
but i don’t do it, because of the consequences. i control my impulses, the don’t control me.
i’m kinda convinced that obesity is mostly caused from some obscure and poorly-understood mental health condition. i remember reading that people who are depressed have a much higher rate of drug abuse. well, that might seem obvious. but excessive eating can be seen as a drug as well. it’s not healthy, people do it as a coping mechanism. so it’s really more like bad mental health -> excessive eating -> sickness, but it’s more the bad mental health that causes it all and not so much the excessive eating itself. like, if you were mentally healthy but still ate a lot, then the eating wouldn’t hurt you so much. it’s really more the mental health issues, i suspect, though it’s difficult to study that because the mental health issues aren’t really measurable so well. they’re deep inside.
Anything that triggers the reward pathways in your brain has at least some addictive potential and eating is no exception. Not all foods are created equal, either - adding ex. sugar boosts the reward and makes the food more addictive. Now many foods have huge amounts of added sugars for the sake of preserving shelf life and getting recurrent customers, that sort of thing increases the power of the reward. Over time you become habituated to it though so you can’t get quite the same good feeling with the same amount you ate before - you have to eat even more to get there.
It’s certainly a weaker effect than in drugs, but unlike them EVERYONE has to eat food to survive and over their entire life. There’s a lot of money to be made by enhancing the addictive potential of food so many efforts have been made towards that over time, plus as the obesity rate has risen and people eat more cultural expectations around food on portion size and the like have also been increasing. When I cut weight some years ago after getting overweight and almost at the edge of obesity some of my coworkers were wondering why I was bothering to do so because in their eyes I was a relatively skinny guy, even though I was 197 lbs.
obesity is caused from eating too much and your metabolism not burning it off.
yes, some people have disregulatory eating habits. i have the myself. when i get stressed out all i want to do is shove gallons of ice cream down my throat.
but i don’t do it, because of the consequences. i control my impulses, the don’t control me.