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No-cheating diet cures fast-food fix

While fast-food companies use neuroscience to lure you to their doors, it is also handy for breaking the habit. Dr Karl shares some tips to help halt those fast-food cravings.

Over the last few episodes, I talked about how the fast-food companies have tapped into, and exploited, some of the wonderful discoveries from the land of neuroscience.

They do this, not because they love pure science, but because they want you to buy and then eat unhealthy food, even when you are not hungry.

But even though they have big budgets and inside knowledge, there's a lot you can do to not get fooled.

The first action is to heed the famous advice of Michael Pollan, who wrote the book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. The advice is just seven simple words: 'eat food; not too much; mostly plants'.

And of course, by food, Michael Pollan means something that your grandparents would recognise, rather than some processed, freeze-dried, vacuum-packed, vitamin-enhanced, fat-reduced, purified extract of what was once a perfectly fine food.

The second piece of advice comes from Nando Pelusi, who wrote in the journal Psychology Today, a neat little article entitled 'Neanderthink: An Outsize Appetite, Courtesy Of Evolution'.

Dr Pelusi's advice also comes in seven simple words, which are: 'dieting gets easier if you don't cheat'.

The first problem with cheating is that it can make you crave and lust after the forbidden foods.

The second problem with cheating is that it can make you lose faith in your ability to control what you eat and when and how much.

It's easier to control your eating habits if you remember this little gem from the land of neuroscience: it takes about three days of cravings before your brain resets your hormone levels, and makes the food cravings much weaker.

In the long run, it's much easier if you make absolute rules about your eating habits, rather than having to make a new decision every single time. So stick to the no-cheating rule.

The third piece of advice also comes from the land of neuroscience. Sometimes, bad habits are surprisingly simple to break. How? Just change something, anything!

You can either change the environment in which a bad habit occurs, or you can change how the bad habit is carried out or, if you're really keen, you can change both.

This advice comes from Professor David Neal, who wrote a paper called 'The Pull Of The Past: When Do Habits Persist Despite Conflict With Motives?'

He looked at a very common bad habit; a movie-goer eating popcorn. He compared movie-goers who always ate popcorn at the movies with movie-goers who hardly ever ate popcorn at the movies.

And then he got them to eat either fresh popcorn, or stale popcorn that was a whole seven days old. (Yup, it was definitely stale.)

At the movies, in the familiar surroundings in which they always ate popcorn, the habitual popcorn-munchers ate the same amount of popcorn, whether it was fresh or stale. They didn't care about the taste, they just ate.

You see, over the years, they had become conditioned to eating popcorn whenever they were in a movie theatre.

But the people who hardly ever ate popcorn at the movies were different. They ate much less of the stale popcorn.

That also makes sense. They had not been conditioned to always eat popcorn at the movies, so they rejected the bad-tasting, week-old popcorn.

Then Professor Neal changed the environment. Now all the volunteers were eating their popcorn (either stale or fresh) in an office meeting room, not a movie theatre. And the result was that the habitual popcorn eaters suddenly began eating less of the stale popcorn.

The environment was different, so their bad habit was undermined.

And as you'd expect, the people who hardly ever ate popcorn at the movies again easily recognised stale popcorn, and once again, ate less of it.

And then Professor Neal changed how the volunteers ate the popcorn. He got them to eat with their non-dominant hand. So if they usually ate with their right hand, now they had to eat with their left hand.

Instead of doing automatic mindless eating, they had to think about what they were doing. Suddenly, the habitual popcorn-eaters reported that the stale popcorn was not palatable and, in fact, they disliked it. And as a result, again, ate less stale popcorn.

An example of mindless eating is that you might have a few nuts whenever you come home, or you might always have a big snack at night, or you might get several meals each week at a fast-food outlet.

You might have though that these bad habits are hard to break.

But if you follow the advice of 'eat food; not too much; mostly plants', and the other advice of 'never cheat!', and the final advice of either changing the environment of your bad eating habits, or how you carry out your bad eating habits, well then, you've got a good chance.

The knowledge of neuroscience can now be your new best friend forever.

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