In Ramadan. Being overweight is not originally about hunger!

Introduction to translation:

The month of Ramadan is a very special case in our relationship with food that involves a clear paradox, although we abstain from food for about 14 hours a day, the majority of people are overweight during the holy month, so it seems that there is a need to pause and question our relationship in general with food. In this article from Psychology Today, Dr. Nat Connell gives us a very strange idea of this relationship, which may help us a little in understanding the secret of the huge spread of obesity in our Arab world.

Translation text:

According to the National Institute of Health, 68.8% of people in the United States are either overweight (BMI of 25 to 29.9) or obese (BMI above 30). Body mass index (BMI) is a tool for assessing normal weight or weight gain by examining the relationship between body height and weight. This means that only 31% of people are either healthy or underweight.

Obesity poses a major threat to human health, as it is closely linked to serious diseases such as heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and cancer. In 2008, the United States incurred losses due to medical costs estimated at $147 billion. In an attempt to tackle the problem of overweight, many Americans have realized that dieting is inevitable, and according to some organizations concerned with eating disorders, up to 25% of men follow diets, and women up to 45%, but ironically, 95% of them regain the weight they lost in a few years (one to five years). This brings us to the most important question: Why do humans always fall under the weight of failed attempts to lose weight?

To explain why, Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, explains that humans evolved craving sugar, which served them and their brains as a source of energy in times of scarcity. Things have not changed much in our modern era, despite the availability of sugar, the habit of humans to binge on it continues, then the excess sugar in our bodies in turn turns into accumulated fat that affects us and makes us prey to obesity.

But regardless of the abundance of sugar and food products in general, why do we continue to eat even after our bodies have gained enough energy? Is it reasonable that we do it for fun? Or out of boredom? In fact, the real cause of obesity is not physiological hunger (our body's true hunger for food), eating high-calorie meals in fast-food restaurants, or overeating even after our stomach is full.

Psychological causes of hunger

The idea that "people feel hungry only when their stomachs are empty, and are full as soon as they are full" is completely wrong. The reason for this is that even in the absence of physiological signals associated with an empty stomach, known as internal signals, external signals appear to replace them and make us feel hungry, and these external signals are generally divided into two categories; the first is known as "normative signals", such as the size of the food portion that indicates the appropriate amounts of our food consumption, and the second is called "sensory signals", such as smell or taste that add pleasure and pleasure to food.

In 1968, the American psychologist Schachter saw that obese individuals are more responsive to external signals and less responsive to internal signals than others, so it is natural that they are more inclined to eat even when their bodies are not sending physiological signals. In a more recent model of this study published in 2008, psychology researchers Herman and Bolivi suggested that while normative cues affect everyone, obese individuals are more likely to be affected by sensory cues than others.

These sensory cues challenge the simple notion that we only eat when we're hungry, and stop as soon as we're full. To prove this concept wrong, in 1991 psychologist Lambert and colleagues conducted an experiment in which they exposed hungry and satiety people to one of three types of sensory cues, and compared their desire to eat chocolate before they experienced this type of external stimulation and their desire after it was exposed. These sensory cues include taste (allowing them to taste a piece of chocolate), vision (by viewing a picture of the chocolate), and perception or cognitive ability (by reading the chocolate description).

At the end of the experiment, the researchers found that sensory cues fueled participants' desire to eat more chocolate regardless of how hungry or full they felt, or the type of stimulation they experienced. As we can see, this conclusion explains that a variety of external sensory signals are able to motivate people to eat more even if they don't feel hungry.

External normative signals (such as serving size, for example) have also been shown to affect the amount of food we eat. People tend to finish the food on their plates, and given the huge volume of diets in America (and our Arab world) compared to France, it's no wonder that the obesity rate in America is 35% according to the CDC, while in France it is only 7%. In America, candy bars are produced 41 percent larger, soft drinks by 52 percent, and even yogurt cans are 82 percent larger than in France.

In 2005, Dr. Vinsink, a food psychologist at Cornell University, and colleagues conducted an experiment demonstrating that the standard signal to finish your plate could lead participants to eat more without even realizing it. During the experiment, some participants received a regular bowl of soup, while others received a bowl that could be refilled without realizing it (it was attached to a tube from under the table without them knowing).

Participants who received the soup in a refilled bowl ate about 73% more than those who ate on regular plates, but still did not believe that they ate more, and did not report that they felt fuller, for example, than the other group. As we can see, the results of this experiment show that satiety is not necessarily related to how much we eat and how full our stomach is, but rather to the standards of our dietary consumption.

Remembering the last meal we ate is another normative signal that influences our decisions about whether or not to eat again soon. To explain this, Paul Rosen, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a 1998 experiment on patients with memory loss, the goal of the experiment was to test whether or not patients would consume several meals in a row in a short time, knowing that participants do not remember what happened a minute ago, and of course are unable to remember if they had just eaten a meal or not.

Rosen and other scientists hypothesized that the main reason for determining when the next meal would start depends on the individual remembering the last full meal they ate. If participants don't remember eating and are served a next meal, they'll easily eat it without thinking. The results of the experiment have already proved their speech correct, as patients ate lunch for the second time just 10-30 minutes after the first meal, and started eating lunch for the third time after the same period of the second meal. Patients ate their lunch several times even though their stomach was full, and this is the biggest indication that the desire to eat is not only related to physiological motivations, but also to normative signals.

Interestingly, it's not just for people with memory loss, it's also true for healthy people sometimes. This is what a 2012 study by Dr. Susan Higgs, a professor of psychology at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, showed when she asked participants to think about what they had for lunch that day. The results showed that participants ate less than they would have had if you had asked them to think about what they had eaten for lunch the day before.

Social Impact

Besides sensory and normative cues, social facilitation (improving an individual's performance when dealing with other people, or more precisely the influence of the group on an individual's behavior) is another type of external cues that can influence our eating behaviors. In 1992, psychologists John de Castro and Reed conducted an experiment on college psychology students who had a choice between eating either alone or with others. The researchers discovered that students who ate with others consumed more food and drink than those who ate alone. Experience has shown that eating in the company of others can cause people to consume more food than they eat alone.

As we see, external signals play a big role in determining when we feel hungry and in estimating how much food we choose to eat. Despite this key role played by external signals, we often don't realize them, as demonstrated by one experiment that allowed couples of participants to eat a meal together. During the experiment, each party passed some signals to the other, so that if one partner ate more, the other unconsciously imitated him. At the end of the experiment, the participants were not convinced that the amount they ate had something to do with their partner's behavior, but rather the taste of the food and the feelings of hunger that dominated them. Hence we understand that a lack of awareness of external factors may make it difficult for humans to solve the problem of overeating.

Other psychological factors may also push us to eat unnecessarily, the most famous of which is stress, which has been shown to play a terrifying role in our consumption of more food. That's what a 2011 study by Lisa Grossz, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, found that only women were the biggest driver of women's desire to eat.

Similarly, a 2006 study found that feeling stressed and stressed changed the appetite of 81% of participants (either increasing or decreasing), and that 62% experienced an increase in appetite. The study discovered that those who enjoyed an increase in appetite were more inclined towards sweet or mixed foods such as desserts or burgers. Interestingly, 80% of participants reported eating healthy at their usual times, but this percentage quickly dropped to 33% when they were stressed. This increased rush to eat in general (and unhealthy meals in particular) may explain why stress may contribute to obesity.

Now that we have realized that many psychological factors have been the main cause of overeating and falling prey to obesity, the important question remains: why is obesity more prevalent among some people (such as Americans, for example) than others? Perhaps this is because there are fundamental differences in Americans' attitudes toward food: they think of food according to their biological, nutritional, and health needs, consider it a material commodity and use it as a reward, while the French, on the other hand, associate food with pleasure.

In 2012, a study by French researcher Carol Werle discovered that while Americans associate "unhealthy" food with delicious taste, the French on the other hand associate "healthy" food with delicious taste, Americans treat healthy food and unhealthy food with the principle of "right" and "wrong," while the French usually associate food with pleasure and health, and even consider it part of social life.

Alongside all that, we should never forget the principle of "forbidden is desirable" that may explain why we associate unhealthy foods with delicious taste, a culture that is passed down from parents to children as well, as one study showed in 2008, when researchers monitored non-Hispanic girls between the ages of 5 and 9. During the experiment, some parents allowed their children access to food, while others did not. The results of the study showed that girls who were denied access to food were more likely to eat even at times when they did not feel hungry, compared to girls who had free access to food.

To sum it up, we need to understand that overeating and obesity not only cause financial problems, but also pose serious health risks to hundreds of millions of people around the world. To assess the nature of the problem, it is important to be well aware that we do not stop eating once our stomach is full, but other factors play more complex roles in motivating us to continue eating, such as the way we determine whether we are really hungry or not, what we should eat and what it is, as well as that the amounts of food we eat are strongly influenced by psychological factors such as sensory signals, normative, social facilitation (the influence of the group on the individual), and our memories of another. A meal we ate, stress also plays a role, and we must not forget our cultural attitudes towards food.

If we study these psychological processes extensively, we may come up with more effective solutions to tackle obesity. Of course, this will not be achieved by following traditional methods of calorie counting and adhering to diets that make us gain weight again in a few years, but we need to recognize the role that the psychological signals behind our hunger play and use this knowledge correctly to help us determine when our stomach is really empty, and when it is full but our minds are deluded into empty.

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This article is translated from Psychology Today and does not necessarily reflect Meydan's website.

Translation: Somaya Zaher.