Jim Katsoulis breaks down why food dominates your thoughts: evolution wired us for scarcity, processed foods are chemically engineered to be addictive, and marketing hits you with thousands of food cues daily. These forces amplify each other. He suggests eating whole foods and doing counter-marketing by reading labels and understanding what processed items actually do to your body.
Chapters
So many people that want to lose weight wonder if there's something wrong with them because they're thinking about food all the time. No, you're not unusual because you think about food all the time. You're a human being and human beings think about food all the time. Because that is literally what we have evolved to focus on for millions of years. We evolved in a food scarce environment where pretty much the number one factor in your life was how much food you had access to. And so we have evolved for millions of years in that environment. We start with a biology that is wired to be obsessed with food and, and then we add on top of it hyper palatable food that's constantly around us. So we add into the environment hyper palatable addictive food. And then we also add non stop marketing to trigger you to think about these hyper palatable addictive foods all day long. On top of a biology system that has been wired over millions of years to think about and focus on food consistently and nonstop. Let's start with the food itself. We're constantly surrounded by foods that, that are literally engineered to be as addictive as possible. The more of these foods that you actually eat, the harder time you're going to have, the more food noise you're going to have. They really hook into your mind in an addictive way. So the easiest way to stop thinking about food so much is to start eating more whole natural foods. But psychologically, it's gonna quiet the food noise down because you're gonna find that the food noise that revolves around salads and whole natural foods is, is a lot quieter than the food noise that surrounds hyper palatable processed foods. Now the other piece is the marketing. And we are exposed to so much marketing that it's almost hard to even appreciate what levels it goes to. At this point. We are literally exposed to over a thousand foods ads a day, it's estimated. Because you have to remember, every fast food restaurant and logo you pass by is marketing. Every time you walk into a convenience store or supermarket, all those packages are all marketing. Never mind the ads. You see the radio jingles, you hear all of this stuff here, the coupons you receive in the email for special deals, this is all marketing. And again, it just triggers, triggers, triggers. It's just Pavlovian. We live in this environment where we're constantly being triggered to think about food. And so obviously that leads to the food noise and it leads to you thinking about it all the time. And when you combine the two together, it's challenging. So with the marketing I think the first step is to start to become aware of it. But when you start paying attention to some of the challenge foods, one of the things you can do is kind of counter market to yourself. So if you kind of challenge with candy bars, don't just accept that I'm going to say no to candy bars. Do a little bit of research on candy bars. See what the ingredients are, look up sugar, see what sugar does to your body, how it affects you over time. Start to research what some of these foods do, because that is literally like marketing, but it's just in the other direction. We're always being conditioned to think about these foods in the most addictive way possible. We always get ads for people getting ready to eat and eating. We never see ads for people a half an hour after they finish the ice cream and how shitty they feel and how they just sit there and don't feel well. We don't get ads for that. Okay. So you have to fill that in and you have to start advertising to yourself what these foods really do to you long term. And that's a beginning step to kind of help that. But again, these are the two big challenges we have are the exact foods that we're eating and the marketing that we're constantly exposed to that ultimately ends up becoming the internal dialogue that we think in. And so if you want to start changing the internal dialogue you think in, go get the free hypnosis session that I give you. It's called the New Thin Me and it's literally designed to do exactly what I just said to help improve your internal dialogue and get you connected and motivated to want to eat whole, natural foods that make you feel really good and start to move you in the path you want to go to so that you can get to your goal weight and then live the rest of your life. There's again, this session is completely free. It's about 10 minutes long, and it's my gift to you so that you can experience a different way to manage your weight.
