Page 75 - Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon PDF Program

control of what we eat and how much we eat. There are just too many environmental
factors (like advertising and fast food availability) that are working against us!

The role of taste and smell in motivating a person to eat (and in the foods they select

to eat) is fairly obvious. Perhaps less obvious is the role of habit, social influence and
cephalic reflexes.

For the most part, I believe that hunger as you and I understand it is a conditioned
response created through the mix of tastes, smells, habits, and social influence. In
other words our desire to eat is determined by a combination of our body’s response to

the amount of food we have eaten, and our mind’s response to all of the
environmental factors around us (such as TV commercials and snack food packaging
colors, fonts and graphics.)

While it is easy to suggest that ‘hunger’ and ‘cravings’ are purely learned phenomena,
developed from infancy until we are adults, others argue that hunger is actually more
of a biochemical phenomenon.

It has been argued that our constant desire to eat may even be related to a form of
addiction. In the best selling diet book, “The South Beach Diet”, author Dr. Arthur

Agatston refers to our love of sugar as our ‘Sugar Addiction’. He may have been on to
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something with that statement.

According to a recent article in Scientific American Mind, by psychiatrist Oliver Grimm,

recent research suggests that drug addiction and binge eating are very similar in
‘neurobiological terms’. Put more simply, the brain reacts to food (not just sugar)
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the same way it would react to a hardcore narcotic like cocaine.

In another article from Scientific American, Nora D. Volkow, Director of the National
Institute of Drug Abuse stated that food and illicit drugs both excite areas of the brain

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