Response to visual food cues, part 1

I have a problem whereby, when I see certain foods, I immediately want to eat them. For example, when I see KitKats at a 7/11, I want to buy them. When I see people eating chips on a bus, even though I don't really like chips, I immediately want to eat chips. When food is laid out in abundance in front of me, it is like I know no boundaries.

As mentioned in the last post, I don't think this is a result of being on diets or emotional eating, but simply something gone wrong in my brain that contributes to my obesity. I am both a binge eater and a plain old overeater, and I can always tell the difference between the two. The binge eating is what causes me misery and is the manifestation of my emotion dysfunction, but the overeating can create feelings of shame or guilt that feed into the binge eating.

Initial research into how I can counter my propensity to overeat and react strongly to visual (or other sensory, e.g. smell) food cues brought me to this ongoing clinical trial. It suggests that obese people perceive a greater reward when they look at food cues, and so have a stronger reaction to those food cues. Basically, it does not think that that strong response to a cue can be effectively changed; research is more on how to mitigate the eating that follows the response, or the response to the response if you will. (I disagree with this to some extent, but I will detail that below).

There are two main therapeutic means of counteracting this. One is using CBT, which is about delaying the response through distraction - a strategy I mentioned earlier that I don't think works for me very well. The other is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which seeks to get obese people to accept that they will always crave food, but don't need to act on it.

I personally think I can work on desensitising myself to cues. For example, why do I feel overwhelmed when I see so much food in front of me? I think there is scarcity. I think that I have to get in as much food as I can before it runs out. Why do I react to the KitKats? That's tougher, but maybe because I have trained myself to think that chocolate is a 'guilty pleasure', and I have always made a big fuss out of how much I looove chocolate, even when it doesn't truly reflect how I feel. I have trained myself to respond to the smell of chips, hot or cold, because it evokes past memories of how good they taste.

I don't want to completely remove the evocative power of food, but I do deliberately make a big deal out of it, and I do have issues with feeling like there is never enough food, even though I have never personally experienced scarcity or deprivation. I get very angry when I think that someone else is cutting across my food or my access to food. This post suggests that maybe it's about anxiety and feeling like I don't have enough in many areas of my life, and it's just acting itself out in the arena of food. I don't know, I'll have to think about it. But at least I am thinking about it now.