How To Beat “Appetite Amnesia”

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝My only problem is that I start a meal eating mindfully but quickly I forget and before I know it I’ve eaten everything and am serving myself more, ending up eating more than I planned to. This isn’t a huge problem, but it can’t be ideal, any suggestions?❞

Firstly: a lot may depend on your environment. Is there something to distract you from your food? Even if it’s just another person (which is not an inherently bad thing—eating as a social activity has been important for our species for as long as we’ve been cooking food, if not earlier), one cannot be truly mindful of food if one’s mind is full of things other than food.

Secondly: it only takes a brief lapse to “lose” the mindfulness. A less extreme version of how when a person decides “I will only drink two glasses of [preferred drink] tonight” but by the time they’re getting the second one, that has gone out of the window because of the effect of the first one.

In the case of food, it’s not so much that it has the same kind of chemical effect on the brain, but it does still have an indirect chemical effect on the brain, namely, dopamine response. We take the first bite; it tastes so good, and countless millennia of evolution stack up to prompt a “feeding frenzy” response that, while not being quite like sharks or such, nevertheless tells us “yes yes that was good, that was right, keep doing that, quickly now, eat it all before something interrupts our chance to eat!”

Now, this does not mean that dopamine is the enemy. See also: The Dopamine Myth

But it does mean that in that moment we are vulnerable to the instincts that have got us to where we are today, but that don’t always serve so well in the comfort of our well-stocked homes as they did in the Savannah of old.

There is a step concurrent with the dopamine response, though, and that’s our insulin response. This will be most exaggerated in people with diabetes or prediabetes, but it affects us all to a greater or lesser degree. We reviewed an interesting book on this topic not long back:

Stop Overeating During Low Blood Sugars With Diabetes – by Ginger Vieira

If we are not diabetic, then we can still bear this factor in mind; it’ll just be easier for us than if we were diabetic. And, beyond mental discipline of various kinds, the trick is to avoid insulin spikes, which in most cases means avoiding blood glucose spikes.

For that, see: 10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars

If you only implement one of those 10 tips, we recommend:

❝Eat foods in the right order

The order is:

1. Fiber first
2. Protein and fat second
3. Starches / sugars last

What happens here is… the fiber perks up the gut bacteria, the protein and fat will then be better-digested next, and the starches and sugars will try to jump the line, but they can’t because the fiber is a physical speedbump and the proteins and fats are taking the prime place for being digested. So instead, the starches and sugars—usually responsible for blood sugar spikes—get processed much more gradually, resulting in a nice even curve.❞

The next tip in that list is “add a green starter”, and is a very good way of ensuring getting a good bed of fiber down in advance of your meal itself.

And that means your mindfulness will be less likely disrupted/derailed/defenestrated by the “oh wow, glucose, my favorite!” physiological response.

Finally, about that “Appetite amnesia”

Sharp-memoried readers may have been wondering when we’re getting to “appetite amnesia”.

Well, we partly did when we covered the idea that a brief lapse in mindfulness is enough to lose it, because then one forgets what one’s intentions were (much like with the second drink of the evening).

And this is about memory! Specifically it’s about working memory, also called executive function. That’s the brain faculty that, when it fails sometimes, you will find yourself in a room thinking “what did I come in here for?”.

So, part of the way to address this issue (with regard to its effect on mindful eating) is to improve working memory generally.

Here’s how: Get Past Executive Dysfunction

The other part is about how short-term memory gets encoded, and it’s why people with dementia often forget that they’ve just eaten something and then set about getting something to eat, resulting in overeating.

We covered the encoding of memories in our article How To Boost Your Memory Immediately (Without Supplements), which was mostly about getting things into long-term memory, and/but this requires first getting them into short-term memory.

When it comes to eating, this means that if we eat non-mindfully (say, while watching the TV), the meal will go into our stomach without going into our memory. From context clues we’ll know what meal we had, but we’ll have very little actual memory of eating it, compared to, for example, memory of what was happening on TV.

And this in turn makes further mindful eating more difficult, because the brain still thinks we haven’t eaten yet, so is still at the “consume all things!” stage.

For example:

❝Encoding and remembering critical information surrounding food consumption is advantageous to efficiently guide future eating behaviors. Foraging, for example, is facilitated by the retrieval of previously stored spatial information about the location of food sources.

Even in the modern environment where food is easily accessible, meal-related memories play an important role in the regulation of eating behaviors.

For instance, the ability to recall a recent meal robustly influences subsequent hunger and satiety ratings, as well as the amount of food consumed during the next meal.❞

Read in full: Ventral hippocampus neurons encode meal-related memory

In short:

• If you’re struggling with mindful eating, see if there are any distractions you can pare back
• Give your brain an indirect helping hand, by flattening your initial blood sugar curve with a green salad to start
• Treat the meal as an experience that you want to remember every moment of, and savor it accordingly

Enjoy!