How hanger Hyde is sabotaging your healthy Jekyll at the grocery store

October 29, 2016 Ashley 0 Comments

When it comes to bad snacks vandalizing your weight loss goals, everyone says the same thing:

If you don’t wanna be tempted – don’t keep it around.

Don’t even buy it.

“It’s fewer total calories if you can fit it in your arms and don’t need a cart, right?” #logic

Seems pretty obvious, right? But what may be less obvious is how these inimical little nibbles keep making their way into your kitchen. Surely you didn’t put them there, did you? Not when you’ve been proactively trying to lose weight? Counting calories? Doing your HIIT? Trimming your fridge with images of Victoria’s Secret level thinspiration? No, it couldn’t be you sabotaging yourself.

And I’m here to tell you – it’s likely not.

No. It’s probably just the proverbial Hyde to your Jekyll at work here. Your hanger induced Hyde, specifically.

Confused? Well that might just be because you haven’t had a good meal in a few hours, so your brain’s going slow. And you wanna know what else happens when you haven’t had a good meal for a few hours? You start making bad decisions. And, aside from texting your ex, among those poor choices is something I like to call an “improvised grocery list”. Sure, you planned to haul home heaps of hemp hearts and kale and miscellaneous green things. But that died in a fiery crash when you fasted before crossing the threshold of your favorite food boutique. (Inadvertently or not.) Why? Well, when you’re deprived, your brain starts going into desperation mode. It wants the most sugary awful-for-you crap because it thinks famine’s already happening. (And it sees the fact that that’ll go straight to your azz and thighs as a good thing, ’cause you can live off it for longer.) Then, when you’re tired after work and also making bad decisions (Tired Hyde-ness is also a contributor to bad decision making, mind you), then those nuts smothered in chocolate you bought earlier start to sound like a tremendously excellent idea. Thus, you indulge. And because sugar’s addictive, you reach for more. And more. And you seek out more means to feed your sugar cravings by day, too. Then you get these blood sugar spikes and drops, which means Tired-Hyde resurfaces and starts mauling all the healthy meal plans and fitness goals you’ve ever had, while the sugar converts to fat which your ever expanding pants can confirm.

“If this cane was made of candy, I’d legit eat it.”
“Yeah… I’mma eat it anyway.”

The good news?

You can hide from you hanger Hyde.

How?

Simple: Eat a clean, green meal before forking over funds for what’s gonna go on your fork later. We’ve already said that – if it’s not around, you won’t eat it. And what is it that we don’t want loitering around the fridge, singing its siren song? Any number of those aforementioned processed, sugary, fatty crap snacks. And how’s pre-munching help you? Well, when you fill up beforehand, your mind won’t think twice about stopping for fuel and the snack-crap gas station. There’s no need for it. It’ll let you just get what you need. Don’t believe me? Then, believe the Cornell folk who did a study on it, instead. Apparently, they observed that those who filled up on healthy fodder prior to pushing their provender cart around the local grocer, made better quality food choices.

The Cornell researchers followed 68 shoppers as they clicked through an online grocery site that offered a mix of healthy choices — including fruits, vegetables and lean meats — and unhealthy, high calorie snack foods like candy, chips and soda. The shoppers who didn’t eat for four to five hours before filling their virtual food baskets bought the same number of items as the shoppers who snacked on crackers before clicking away. But the hungry shoppers selected more processed junk foods, 23 percent more on average. A follow up field test where researchers secretly followed shoppers who hadn’t eaten for several hours found much the same.

Sure, this might not demolish your entire problem pie of bad eating habits. I’ll give you that. But, when we think about how much of our eating we do at home, it’s undeniably a sizable section of that badboy. Also, when we consider how our home eating habits bleed over into our outside’ve home eating habits, you can magnify that slice. And, as we’ve seen, the studies can certainly confirm all of that. So, the fix is simple: go shopping while your belly’s brimming with nutritious goodness, and you needn’t worry. Your brain will say you’re satiated.

And healthy Jekyll can commandeer your cart and steer you into weight loss waters anew.