Vatican Saying 59 says: "The stomach is not insatiable, as most people say; instead the opinion that the stomach needs unlimited filling is false."
I found this interesting article on how to deal with eating too much.
Here are a few excerpts:
Your Brain Wants the Food—Not Your Body
Remember the last time you ate so much steamed broccoli, you could barely get off the couch but just kept going back for more? Probably not. Hedonic hunger tends to be activated by calorie-dense foods that are pleasurable to eat; in other words, anything fatty, fried, salty, or sweet.1 When our ancestors were scrabbling for nuts and berries, hedonic hunger wasn’t a thing. But then someone figured out how to turn milk into butter, and someone else figured out that potatoes taste amazing when you cut them into sticks and drop them into a vat of hot fat, and everything changed.
“Over the course of our evolution, our taste range has gone from ‘This tastes awful but will keep me alive’ to ‘This tastes good’ to ‘Holy cow, this is so delicious.’ It makes it hard for us to hold back,” says Michael Lowe, PhD, a psychology professor at Drexel University who coined the term hedonic hunger to distinguish it from homeostatic hunger, which stems from your body’s need for energy (i.e. that rumbling in your stomach when you haven’t eaten in hours).
How “The Variety Effect” Factors In
What else makes us more inclined to eat for pleasure? Having a bounty of options on hand. The more we can choose from, the more we’re likely to consume, a phenomenon known as the variety effect. And working alongside the variety effect is sensory-specific satiety: Imagine you eat all the brisket and green beans you think you can hold, and the sheer delight of those first few bites has faded—but then cheesecake shows up, promising to tickle a different set of taste buds, and you suddenly have “room.”
How to Stop Overeating and Manage Hedonic Hunger
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with hungering for delicious food. By all means, rejoice and be grateful to spend this holiday eating meals you love with people you love. But if you’re consistently wishing you could reduce the cravings a bit, here are a few ideas that may help soothe the neurochemical urge to eat every single thing. They may sound like often cited chestnuts (mmm, roasted chestnuts), but that’s because they’ve been repeatedly proven by research.
The article also includes further tips:
-- make sure you are getting enough sleep, manage stress, identify what kinds of situations are triggers, consider the consequences, visualize yourself sitting in a beautiful and relaxing environment, get some exercise, try cognitive behavioral therapy.
Read more on this here:
