This is a weird tip I think I could only share with the hacker news crowd. Once I learned about gut bacteria I started thinking of my cravings as something external to me. Like instead of saying "I'm hungry and I'm in the mood for something sweet" I would realize "the hormone ghrelin is sending hunger signals to my brain and the gut bacteria in my body is asking for something that's not actually in my best interest." Being able to emotionally distance myself from my feelings let me make decisions that I knew were better for me.
Just remember that it gets easier, I think a lot of people struggling with addiction to unhealthy food try to resist temptation for a day and go through hell. They think "I can't live the rest of my life like this," but the thing they never make it far enough to learn is that it doesn't feel this hard all the time. Every night I go to bed resisting a sugar loaded soft drink I wake up stronger, and the sabotaging gut bacteria is one battle weaker than the healthy gut bacteria.
I've lately been doing the form of intermittent fasting known as early time-restricted feeding. Basically, I start eating at breakfast and stop eating after lunch. I worked up to it over a few months, starting out just tracking when I already didn't eat and then slowly expanding the window.
A big surprise for me was that both my feelings of hunger and my relationship to those feelings changed. As that process happened, I used my "reverse engineering" brain to think about why hunger exists and what mechanisms genes would build to maximize success of nomadic omnivores for whom food is erratically but non-randomly available.
It's all just unverified hypothesizing, of course. But it was really helpful to me to think, "Ah, this feeling isn't really hunger in the sense of 'body needs food now', but more 'genes asking if food happens to be available to stock up'." After all, it's bad body design to have it wander around at all hours looking for food when it isn't available.
Having that mental distance from the sensations made it much easier to just ignore them for a while to see if they subside. And they have! To my surprise I experience less discomfort from hunger when eating 6 hours a day than I did eating whenever.
This is a great point. I think my gut bacteria was something I really under estimated.
For a couple months between Nov-Jan I would constantly have cravings for ice cream and other sweets. Being in NYC I can easily order snacks now and they will be delivered within 15 mins. I just hit a point where I ate a whole box of mini cones and just thought about it and didn't really know why I was eating them. So I just started to think about it before I would eat and try to stay present at night because the cravings happen and its just paying attention to them and not acting.
I started on a meal plan and this really helped keep me focused on my diet. Since I've been doing that my cravings for sweets and ice cream are almost gone. Its takes a lot of time, and real work, but by staying present it has helped me think, is this good for me and do I really need to eat this?
Also for a weird weight loss, look up: Spirulina and Chorella algae supplements. Algae has so many nutrients and health benefits
Yes, great points. I'm the same way with sweets. The more often I have it, the more often I want it. A few mechanisms for that have occurred to me. But one of them is gut bacteria that live off sugars and have some way to make me feel bad when I'm not feeding them enough.
For others trying to break the habit, one really simple rule that has worked well for me is "no two days in a row". I do this with a lot of things that are addictive for me, like caffeine. It's simple enough that I don't need to track anything. "I can have it tomorrow if I still want it" is a great way for me to say no to a craving. And in practice, it seems to keep me from forming habits; "no two days in a row" turns out to be "weekly or less" in practice.
I take it even further. Emotionally distance yourself from your cravings, sure, but also your entire body. I now think of my body as separate from 'me,' my soul. But I do need my body to express my soul. So I take care of it, I give it what it needs, I exercise it. Counterintuitively, this practice makes me love and respect my body more than I ever did when I equated body and self.
Yes absolutely. I've found it's vital and helpful in many areas to understand that perception is not reality, and that it can be changed. This is a fact of human psychology: your brain creates sensations, and your "reptile brain" controls all the important decisions -- e.g. what you want to eat, what kind of information you seek out on the Internet, how you feel towards others, etc.
To be concrete ... in my early 20's, I drink multiple cokes every day. I was addicted to it. Now if I start drinking a can, I can't even finish it. It tastes too sweet.
So what changed? The only thing is perception; the coke is exactly the same. So I've kept 15 pounds off for 5+ years by "retraining" my taste buds. I think that this is the only sustainable way to lose weight. I don't feel hungry or deprived at all. So basically you can train bad food to taste bad, which it should.
I did that mainly by filling the gap with naturally cooked foods that I liked even more than a coke, and then expanding from there into a big world of pleasure. Michael Pollan's advice is good: you can eat whatever you want, as long as you cook it yourself. There are a lot of veggies I liked but didn't eat because they weren't ready available and it was "too much work". (I'd reframe that as undervaluing your health)
It could be partly the gut bacteria thing, but I think of it as just a decoupling of perception and reality. You shouldn't think of your perceptions as fixed. And yes it is an interesting philosophical angle to think of them as NOT "your" perceptions!
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Another way to explain it is via smoking. To some people a cigarette tastes amazing (when they're addicted), but to most people it tastes bad and smells bad. The cigarette is the same; the only thing different is the perception.
~20 years ago I was against the smoking bans because I was in favor of more freedom, and I thought "What next? Are they going to ban fast food?" Now I kinda think they should also ban fast food (not literally, but discourage it). It's addictive, and changes your perception of REAL food in a way that empirically is very difficult to get out of ... to the point that many people die of diabetes first. It's also so cheap that it warps the selection in the supermarket and at restaurants.
edit: I also agree with the sibling comment. I used to eat and snack 5-6x a day. Now I eat 2 meals a day, zero snacking, and don't feel hunger. It's purely an issue of perception. Surprisingly, after 20-30 years of those habits, my body changed its perceptions!
I've been thinking about writing a kids book with Red and Green armies waging a battle in their tummy and feeding green things helps the good guys win. Too many red (fats, sugars, simple carbs) arm the baddies. Maybe a child psychiatrist would tell me this is a horrible idea, so I haven't asked any. :)
Parents really don't like war-type stuff these days, especially for young kids. Cops & robbers or playing war or anything like that—IDK about anyone else, but, like, the main activities of my childhood ages ~4-10, rivaled only by crashing toy cars and building LEGO stuff (often for war or car-crashing purposes)—is now gauche. Play like that happening at school can get kids in serious trouble, now, too.
Consider theming it to some fantasy thing about fairies or something.
[EDIT] Oh, but I do think it's a good idea, though.
Wow. I think this applies to a lot in life. I’m struggling a hell of a lot with a bad breakup and this has helped me view things through the same perspective. Thank you.
Just remember that it gets easier, I think a lot of people struggling with addiction to unhealthy food try to resist temptation for a day and go through hell. They think "I can't live the rest of my life like this," but the thing they never make it far enough to learn is that it doesn't feel this hard all the time. Every night I go to bed resisting a sugar loaded soft drink I wake up stronger, and the sabotaging gut bacteria is one battle weaker than the healthy gut bacteria.