Are you addicted to food?

Maybe you intend to have just one square of chocolate, but only stop when the whole bar is finished. Maybe you just have to have a pizza, or find yourself eating the left-over chips from your partner’s plate, or you even find yourself eating when you are not actually hungry. Then again, you’re eating when you are emotionally disturbed. These are all signs of an eating disorder, and thats an addiction.

Let’s be clear, this is not necessarily about lack of will power, it is more likely to be the result of a chemical addiction to processed foods that contain sugar, fat and processed white flour. It seems that sugar is the root cause of the problem. And you will find sugar in not only sweet foods, but in most processed savoury foods.

Eating the sugary food that you crave does two things. Firstly, it triggers the pleasure centres in the brain, and secondly, it retards the mechanism that tell your brain that it has had enough. So, you just keep on going back for more and more and more …. You become powerless against the brain’s drive to get more pleasure.

Currently action is gaining momentum against those food companies that knowingly design the foods to have these addictive qualities. For the producer these substances keep you buying, and buying, and the cash registers ringing. But this practice is contributing directly to national health issues. So start to read food ingredient labels in order to identify the sugar content; but also be aware that sugar is often disguised in all sorts of names – like high fructose corn syrup.

Click  HERE  for a list of alternative names for sugar.

Recently, researchers from Yale and Harvard Universities found in their research that the top 10 most addictive foods are the following:

1. Pizza
2. Chocolate
3. Crisps
4. Cookies
5. Ice Cream
6. Fried potato chips
7. Cheeseburger
8. Sugar sweetened fizzy drinks
9. Cake
10. Cheese

And here are the 10 least addictive foods:

1. Cucumbers
2. Carrots
3. Beans
4. Apple
5. Plain Brown Rice
6. Broccoli
7. Banana
8. Salmon
9. Mealie (without butter or salt)
10. Strawberries

For an addiction free diet choose from the list above and the following foods:

Good protein: fish, organic eggs, small amounts of lean poultry, tree nuts, and legumes

Good fats: oily fish, extra virgin olive oil, unrefined coconut oil, olives, tree nuts (not peanuts), seeds, and avocado

Good carbs: beans, vegetables, whole grains, and whole fruit,  not fruit juice – it is too concentrated and therefore rich in sugar.

For information about a good healthy way of eating log onto the MEMBER PORTAL and scroll down to Road to wellness: General Health for general wellness tips. Or log onto MYPLAN to set up a personal eating plan.

But now kicking a sugar addiction is so darn hard; some researches have, in severe cases, likened the power of a sugar addiction to be similar to that of a cocaine addiction. So for extra help explore you can this site, simply click HERE.