Have you ever considered that food is not making you happy?
The hedonic treadmill (also known as hedonic adaptation) is a theory positing that people repeatedly return to their baseline level of happiness, regardless of what happens to them.
Do you feel happier now because of something you ate three Sundays ago?
If we acknowledge food does not make us happier, and any short term chemicals our brain releases are overridden by dread and regret in the medium or long term, would it not be absurd to keep gorging ourselves? What exactly is causing us to gain weight? Is it because we love the taste of food? We eat, and eat, and eat, with the salts, sugars, spices, and sours hitting our tongues, releasing chemicals in the brain to give us short term glee. But why do we stop eating then?
Sometimes we choose to stop eating, knowing that gluttony will lead to sadness in the long term. Sometimes the good chemicals our body releases are overridden by the pains our body gives in the stomach or the chest. Both examples are completely irrelevant to the real decision, which is why do we indulge in something that feels good when we know it does nothing but a short-term glee. Why would we eat rather than injecting heroine if this truly were worth it?
Think of any example, food, drugs, smoking, sex. Whether we do it or not, when, with who, and how are all largely determined not by our own rationalization of it, but rather society’s acceptance and normalcy.
So what do we do with this information? I suggest we spend less time obsessing about what we want to eat, and we try to treat food more as necessary energy to pursue things we value. Once you finally realize food will not make you happy, you will no longer have as many absurd urges for it, and all the time you spent trying to figure out what you were going to eat can be spent on more important things in life.
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