Food, Food, Everywhere: Managing the Constant Urge to Eat

Ashley Mason, PhD is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Director of the Sleep, Eating, and Affect (SEA) Laboratory, and Core Faculty at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. She is an expert on compulsive, mindless, and mindful eating.

What: Helping you manage your eating when tempting food is all around you.
• Structuring your environment to maximize positive choices and minimize choices that detract from your health goals
• Planning for temptations
• Using mindfulness principles to clarify the true effects of mindless eating

When: Try these techniques at home, other places where you spend significant time, and social gatherings that offer foods that you find difficult to stop eating (i.e., foods you find it easy to overeat!)

Effectiveness: Research has shown that there are certain circumstances and environments that encourage us to eat more than we should. Researchers have conducted experiments in the laboratory as well as in the field that demonstrate that how we structure our surroundings, and how we plan for temptations, can impact our consumptive behavior.

Mason, A. E., Epel, E. S., Aschbacher, K., Lustig, R. H., Acree, M., Kristeller, J., Cohn, M., Dallman, M., Moran, P. J., Bacchetti, P., Laraia, B., Hecht, F. M., & Daubenmier, J. (2016). Reduced reward-driven eating accounts for the impact of a mindfulness-based diet and exercise intervention on weight loss: Data from the SHINE randomized controlled trial. Appetite, 100, 86–93. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.appet.2016.02.009

Ogden, J., Coop, N., Cousins, C., Crump, R., Field, L., Hughes, S., & Woodger, N. (2013). Distraction, the desire to eat and food intake. Towards an expanded model of mindless eating. Appetite, 62, 119–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2012.11.023