According to Traci Mann, who teaches psychology at the University of Minnesota and has been studying eating habits, self-control, and dieting for more than 20 years. Over the course of her research, largely conducted at the University of Minnesota’s Health and Eating Lab, Mann has repeatedly asked these sorts of questions and always found that all this time, doing studies in the lab, almost every single study, without really meaning to, showed some other thing that made dieters overeat.
I have found time and again that it’s actually some other thing that causes dieters to lose control of what they’re eating.
The first is neurological. When you are dieting, you actually become more likely to notice food.
Basically, your brain becomes overly responsive to food, especially to tasty-looking food. But you don’t just notice it — it actually begins to look more appetizing and tempting. It has increased reward value.
So, the thing you’re trying to resist becomes harder to resist. So already, if you think about it, it’s not fair.
Then there are hormonal changes, and it’s the same kind of thing. As you lose body fat, the number of different hormones in your body changes. And the hormones that help you feel full, or the level of those rather, decreases.
