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What would you do if you checked into your hotel room and found there a welcoming plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies waiting for you?
I know what I’d do – I’d have a cookie. And then, because it tasted so darned good, I might eat another. And then, while I unpacked my suitcase, maybe just one more. And then, particularly if I were feeling tired or stressed or hungry, I might even say to myself: “Oh, what the heck! It’s been a hard day – and I deserve this little treat!” – and there goes the rest of that plate of cookies.
But that’s not what Dr. David Kessler decided to do when this very situation presented itself to him.
As a person who had battled his own weight problems for many years, he knew that he could have easily eaten all of those cookies in one gulp, but he also knew with equal certainty that he did not want to do that this time.
There was only one way to gain the upper hand, and he had to act quickly.
He tossed all those cookies into the trash, getting them out of his sight in order to stop what he calls this conditioned eating behaviour before it even began.
Most of conditioned eating behaviour – believing that tempting food is somehow calling our name and that we are simply powerless to refuse it – is a common cycle of overeating that’s actually fairly recent in modern society. Dr. Kessler explains:
“For thousands of years, human body weight stayed remarkably stable. Throughout adulthood, we basically consumed no more than the food we needed to burn. People who were overweight stood apart from the general population. Millions of calories passed through our bodies, yet with rare exceptions, our weight neither rose nor fell by any significant amount. A perfect biological system seemed to be in place.
“Then, in the 1980s, something changed.”
So begins Chapter One of Dr. Kessler’s remarkable little 2009 book called 'The End of Overeating: Taking Control of our Insatiable Appetite'.
As a heart attack survivor who grew up in a Ukrainian family where butter, bacon, sour cream and my mother’s luscious homemade pies were dietary staples (and where we considered dill pickles to be a vegetable course!), I simply could not put this book down.
Read the rest of this article about Dr. David Kessler's work.
- by Carolyn Thomas, www.myheartsisters.org
