THE ABC'S OF BEHAVIOR

Have you ever sat down and figured out why you actually eat? You might say “because I was hungry.”

If you look more closely, you’ll find that you often eat for reasons that have nothing to do with hunger. You eat as a result of a learned behavior. The good news is that if you learned it, you can unlearn it.

We need to ask ourselves, “What is hunger?” Hunger is a physiological need for food in response to your body’s demand for nourishment. Actual hunger may account for some of your eating, but what about those other times? If you were to examine them, you’d find that many were totally unrelated to hunger.

Research shows that overweight people are more sensitive to external cues than thin people. Overweight people are more likely to be influenced by the sight or smell of food, time of day or social pressures to eat.

They are less likely to eat because they are actually hungry. Have you ever eaten something and afterward thought to yourself, “Why did I do that?” “I wasn’t even hungry.”

To be able to change your eating habits, you need to be aware of them.

Psychologists have broken eating behavior down into three parts. The ABC’s of behavior.

Antecedents:

Antecendents are the events, feelings or situations that make you eat. They can also be referred to as Eating Cues and can be further broken down into:

Personal Cues have a powerful influence on eating

These are the common causes of inappropriate eating. Then there are:

Physical Cues which include sight and smell of food, time of day and circumstances

And lastly, there are:

Social cues which are pressure from others to eat and attending social activities

Behaviors:

Consequences:

Here’s an example of all three:

The way you eat can also be a contributing factor to your weight problem.

Not all consequences involving food are negative. There are positive ones, too. The most obvious pleasure is that food gives us is our senses of taste, smell and touch. Food can also become comfort food.

However, you often fall back on this “comfort” food when things aren’t going your way. Then you overeat.

After the satisfaction, the negative consequences set in and you feel stuffed or bloated and totally unattractive. Guilt overcomes you. You reproach yourself for having no control. You feel you are a failure and doomed to be overweight for the rest of your life. Or you figure you’ve already “blown the diet,” so why not eat other things, too.

Next the resolution starts. You promise to get back on your diet tomorrow, or Monday or next month. You vow never to let another fattening morsel to pass through your lips. This leads to a vicious cycle, because unless you are perfect, you’ll eat a “forbidden food” someday.

If you’ve recognized yourself in the above, it’s time to take control of your behaviors and replace poor habits with better ones. You need to determine what your habits are. Then you need to come up with workable solutions to stop you from eating like that again in the future. But first, you need an awareness—you can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what needs to be solved.