Free yourself from junk food: a complete guide for adventure-lovers
Do you struggle with cravings, emotional eating or late night binges? Does your diet sometimes implode after a long stressful day at work? Although each of these struggles is unique, they all have at least one thing in common.
Junk food.
No one craves carrots or uncontrollably binges on steak salad. No one drowns their sorrow in spinach. Freedom from junk food means freedom from unhealthy eating behaviors. It means a longer life. And it means a leaner body.
In this article, I’ll lay out the key reasons junk food dominates our appetites. From there, I’ll show you four ways to free yourself from junk food.
Junk food is engineered to cause cravings
I’d like to start by pointing out the difference between cravings and hunger.
Hunger is associated with things like a rumbling stomach, lagging energy, irritability, an empty stomach, etc. When you eat a healthy diet, with enough protein and micronutrients, hunger is kept manageable, even if dieting. Moreover, hunger can be satisfied with healthy whole foods. In other words, natural hunger doesn’t need junk food to be satisfied.
Wanting/craving is associated with a desire for specific types of food and is independent of hunger. It is often tied to our mood and solves a problem unrelated to nutrition. For example, we want junk food when we’re bored, stressed, sleep deprived, lonely, anxious, depressed, etc.
How it works
We all like the same tastes: sweet, salty and savory. These tastes correspond to specific reward pathways related to glucose (sugar), fats, salt and glutamate. When you taste something sweet, salty or savory, you receive a little hit of dopamine. You get a little encouragement to do it again.
This process kept our ancestors motivated to track down and consume all the nutrients they needed. If they only liked things that tasted sweet, they would get sick from a lack of fats and proteins. If they only liked things that tasted salty and savory, they’d miss out on energy dense and nutritious fruits, honey and tubers.
For this reason, everyone likes the same basic tastes.
The makers of junk food take advantage of this process. First, they refine their food down to increase the amount of dopamine it produces. Over time, this increase in dopamine intensifies our desire for junk food. They do this by making the food calorically denser and intensifying the flavors. Everything gets sweeter, saltier and more savory.
Second, the food companies carefully balance two or more flavors. Have you ever tried a spoonful of plain sugar? It isn’t great. But if you mix salty with sweet (think salted caramel ice-cream), now you’re in business. It’s as if everyone has a unique code, and when you find a food that has the right balance of flavors, it’s love at first bite.
Food companies have other tricks too, but you get the idea. It’s no coincidence that we crave junk food. It has been designed to have that effect.
Junk food fixes problems
If you struggle with junk food, odds are high that junk food is solving a problem for you. The problem could be chronic stress, sleep deprivation, anxiety, boredom, loneliness etc. Junk food is just a means to an end. The end is the dopamine hit that offers relief from a challenge in life.
You can see this in research too, which shows that cravings and emotional eating are based more on mood than on addiction. This means, that you can go on a diet or cut out junk food, and you will not experience an increase in your craving for junk food.
The problem then isn’t an addiction to the food per se. The problem is that you lose your solution to a problem. You lose your coping mechanism.
Consider the following example. You have a particularly long and stressful day at work. This happens a few times every month. You are stressed and anxious. When you get home, you dive into your favorite junk food. Instant dopamine hit. Instant feel good relaxation.
What happens if you go on a diet or cut back on junk food? You lose that solution. You get home after a long stressful day, and you struggle to find relief and relaxation.
Long story short, if you deprive yourself of junk food, your craving of that junk food is unlikely to increase. Similarly, going on a diet is unlikely to increase your craving of junk food. Instead, you struggle, because you lose access to a quick and easy dopamine hit, which is helping you cope with a challenge in your life.
We can rewire our brain
Fortunately, it isn’t all bad news. Our brains can rewire themselves. None of this is permanent. Study after study has shown through FMRI (brain scans) that as you reduce your consumption of junk food, you reduce your cravings. Your brain heals and your reward pathways normalize.
Similar results have been found using questionnaires to measure people’s cravings. According to one study, the individuals who lost the most weight while dieting experienced the greatest reduction in cravings. In other words, diet success gave the participants relief from their cravings.
Research has also shown the reverse. Our cravings increase further, when we repeatedly eat high reward junk food. If you drink a Cinnamon Roll Frappuccino on Monday, it’s probably not going to haunt you on Saturday. However, if you drink one every weekday, there’s a good chance you’ll be itching for one on Saturday.
In other words, the intensity of your cravings is directly related to how recently you’ve eaten junk food. And if you reduce your consumption of junk food for six months, your brain will rewire itself.
4 ways to free yourself from junk food
The first two strategies I lay out below are indirect and foundational. I don’t recommend trying either of the last two strategies until you’ve made some progress on the first two. For some people, the first two might be all you need to achieve your goals.
The third strategy I lay out directly works to normalize your reward pathways. This is more likely to be effective if you are not using junk food as a coping strategy.
The last strategy directly works to provide healthier coping strategies. You need a solution to life’s many challenges. The goal isn’t to leave you bereft of support. Instead, you want to find healthier ways to sooth, comfort or confront life’s challenges.
1) Eat plenty of nutritious food
The quality of your diet affects your appetite. Are you eating a balanced diet with enough micronutrients? The answer matters. Junk food is nutritionally poor and low in fiber. If your body is missing key nutrients, it will affect your hunger, appetite and cravings.
Macronutrients matter too. For example, are you eating enough protein? Research shows that eating enough quality protein can help reduce cravings and late night eating. Many people find it much easier to pass up junk food, once they start eating enough healthy food.
If your diet could use some work, a great place to start is by working on food quality and portions. I’ve written a series of articles on food quality and portioning. They’re broken down into four food categories. You can check them out below.
2) Shape your environment
Tell me if this experience seems familiar. You resolve to stop eating a pint of ice cream after dinner. Then 12 hours later after another stressful day at work, you’re on the couch crushing yet another tub of Rocky Road ice cream. How does that happen?
In the book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard , the authors use a brilliant metaphor to describe this experience. Picture a rider atop an elephant. The rider is your rational brain. It has all kinds of ideas about eating healthy, training every day and crushing some future obstacle course race.
The elephant is your emotional brain. It has very different ideas about health and fitness. It’s primarily interested in getting that dopamine hit from junk food. Unfortunately, it has a six-ton advantage. The rider is at a disadvantage because our biology gives our emotional brains enormous control over our actions.
Tell me THAT isn’t a familiar experience.
Under those circumstances, who would you bet on, the rider or the elephant? Fortunately, there’s a solution. The rider can shape the path ahead of the elephant. He can control the environment, and thereby outsmart the dumb animal.
In other words, your environment can and does control the majority of your habits. For example, according to one study, people who store junk food on their kitchen counters are often 30 pounds heavier than people who keep a clean counter top. By shaping your environment, you can make it easier to free yourself of junk food.
Ask yourself. . .
What’s on my counter tops?
What’s in the fridge?
What’s in the pantry?
Long story short, your food environment matters. Whatever is in your house is going to be eaten.
If you want to learn more, my article Why is it so hard to stop overeating dives more deeply into organizing your food environment.
3) To kill a craving, starve it
Individuals vary considerably, which is to say that there is no one right path to free yourself from cravings. Consequently, this won’t resonate with everyone. But one sure fire way to kill a craving is to starve it.
As discussed above, the foods we like are strongly related to how intensely we can remember them. In the absence of the foods you crave, you’re brain will rewire itself. The cravings will go away. So here’s the question: What foods do you crave? Are they helping you achieve your goals? Is it worth it? Are you prepared to starve them out?
There’s no right answer. It’s up to you. But here are two things to consider.
First, cutting out junk food will open up all kinds of new flavors. Junk food desensitizes your tastes. If you cut out junk food, you will suddenly appreciate new flavors. You will appreciate the subtlety of vegetables. Your whole approach to food will change. Your palate will become more nuanced.
As a result, cutting out junk food requires no depravation. In my experience, I enjoy food MORE now that I eat a mostly whole food diet.
Second, although there are many different paths to diet success, the final destination looks very similar for everyone. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you need to be consistent. Once you lose weight, diet consistency predicts long-term weight loss maintenance.
According to the data, 20% of overweight individuals are successful at losing some weight and keeping it off. But they credit that success to consistency. They eat a consistently lower calorie and healthier diet.
All of this is to say that eventually, you are probably going to starve out your cravings to achieve your goals. If you have already built a foundation of healthy eating and a decent food environment why not start today? I know it sounds tough, but there’s more to you then you realize.
4) Find healthier solutions
Like I wrote above, for many people junk food is solving a problem. It’s helping them cope with stress, sleep deprivation, anxiety, loneliness, depression etc. This is a completely normal part of modern living. However, eating too much junk food makes it hard to maintain a healthy weight, live well or perform your best.
So what can you do about it?
First, you need to pay attention and discover the root problem that junk food is helping you fix. If simply paying attention isn’t successful, you can keep a journal for a week or two. Whenever you have a craving, jot down some notes.
What were you feeling when you had the craving?
Did anything happen earlier in the day to spark the craving?
Once you’ve discovered the challenge that is the source of the craving, you need to ask yourself a question. Can I solve this? In some cases, you can. In others, you can’t. For example, if you have a difficult, high stress job, then it’s unlikely you can suddenly become stress free. If on the other hand, you’re sleep deprived, there are things you can do to improve the quality of your sleep.
If you can’t solve the problem, then I recommend finding an alternate way to cope. There are positive ways to get dopamine hits. The goal isn’t to see who can handle the most unpleasant life. We are not robots, and we don’t want to be. So spend time doing things you enjoy. Limit time doing things you hate. Look for constructive sources of positive emotions that help you relax, recover and cope.
Here are a few ideas:
listen to music
meditate
read a book
dance
watch a movie
socialize
take a hot bath
do something creative
Play with your kids
spend time in nature
Finally, all of this is hard. If it wasn’t hard, there wouldn’t be an obesity epidemic. So I recommend treating yourself with a fare bit of self-compassion. Treat yourself the way you’d treat one of your kids.
Studies have shown that when we’re nice to ourselves, we’re better at solving problems, we’re more productive and we even find it easier to turn down junk food.
Thanks for reading!
