The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

by Michael Easter

Kashey knew that even though weight gain or loss is mainly driven by how much food a person eats, how much food a person eats is driven by everything that is happening in his or her life. Consider: People eat 550 more calories—a whole extra meal—after nights where they sleep just five hours versus eight, according to research conducted at the Mayo Clinic. Another experiment found that 40 percent of people eat significantly more food when they’re stressed. And they’re not bingeing on wheatgrass shots. Stressed people were more likely to snack on M&Ms rather than grapes. That’s thanks to another life-saving evolutionary mechanism. Kashey explained that humans essentially have two reasons for eating. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call them real hunger and reward hunger. The first is set off when the body requires food to function. It fills a physiological need. It’s like the body has an empty gas tank. The second is spurred by a psychological or environmental cue. Reward hunger turns on when the body actually needs food and is experiencing real hunger, or else we wouldn’t eat. (This is like sex. If sex weren’t pleasurable, we wouldn’t be as driven to procreate.) But reward hunger also and more frequently pops up by itself, in the absence of real hunger. Because a clock says so, because food eases stress, because we’re celebrating, or because food is simply there and why not eat it? It fills a psychological want. Real hunger is an honest dialogue between the brain and the stomach.