Breaking the Fast Food Addiction
Recently, a patient asked our nurse practitioner for support in overcoming his fast food addiction. He explained that he exercised regularly and had many healthy habits, but he still found himself in the drive through line almost everyday.
If this sounds familiar to you, you aren’t alone! This fast food addiction is more common than you might think. After all, fast food is literally formulated to make you crave it.
From the salty, fatty food to the sheer convenience of getting your meal in under five minutes, there are a million reasons why people choose fast food everyday, even knowing how terrible it is for your health.
While fast food can be okay as an occasional treat, your health professionals certainly would not recommend you eat it daily or even weekly. The problem is, it can be a really hard habit to break.
Don’t get down on yourself if you are someone who consumes more fast food than you are comfortable with. There are probably many valid reasons you turn to the drive through including a lack of time and energy, a desire for comfort or stress relief, and finally, simple habit.
If you are ready to break this bad habit and change your health, this post will give you five tools you can adopt to help you to eat healthier, cook more, and feel better.
Find Your Why
Before making any major lifestyle changes, we always encourage you to take the time to process and decide why you are making these changes and what they mean to you. We call this finding your why.
If being healthier was a good enough motivator for major lifestyle changes, then posts like this one wouldn’t exist. Finding a why gives you a deeper meaning behind the action steps that improve your lifestyle and better your health.
The reality is, change is hard, even when you desire a healthier body and lifestyle in the abstract.
For one person, keeping up with their kids or grandkids is a good motivator to change their lifestyle. For others, caring for your inner child makes you feel empowered to make good choices. Maybe you want to set an example for someone important to you or you want to climb the highest peak in your state.
To find your why, spend some time journaling and reflecting on what it is off the scale that motivates you. Write that why down somewhere you will see it each and every day and use it to motivate you to turn the car around when you find yourself heading towards the drive through.
Make Small Changes
Part of why breaking a bad habit is so hard is because it is ingrained in your daily routine. If you are someone who eats fast food multiple times per week or even daily, it would be near impossible to immediately start making dinner from scratch every night.
Instead of overhauling your entire routine, start by making smaller changes. For example, when you do eat out, try to make healthier choices. Maybe instead of the Taco Bell drive through, you head to Chipotle and get a burrito bowl.
When it comes to cooking, start by committing to 2-3 nights per week. Ease in by trying some convenience items like salad kits, frozen veggies, and even frozen entrees to get into the habit of cooking.
Once you start making these smaller changes, it will be much easier to start building on these existing habits. Make it fun and find a cookbook that interests you and use it to improve your cooking skills and try new recipes.
You can even get the family or your partner involved to learn together and make cooking fun rather than a chore.
Plan Ahead
To make any meaningful change, you should always start with a plan. Taking 10 minutes to plan and an hour to shop one day per week will save you so much time and energy each dat. It also makes it much harder to make excuses when you are feeling tired at the end of the day.
Don’t overcomplicate things and follow these simple tips to help you plan:
Find one breakfast that is high in protein and easy to make and eat it everyday.
Pack your lunch the night before and bring it to the office so you’re not tempted to hit the drive through on your lunch break.
You don’t have to meal prep but do decide each week what you’ll have for dinner on the nights you’re cooking.
Double your recipes on the nights you cook so that you can enjoy easy leftovers the next day or freeze them for the future.
Plan which nights you will eat out and pick a restaurant you are excited about and will look forward to so that it feels like a special treat.
Don’t be afraid to repeat recipes you like. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single night!
Most of the time, when we choose fast food, it is for the sake of convenience. Maybe you work a high stress job and are overwhelmed by the thought of making another decision at the end of the day. Whatever the reason, choosing the easier option will make you feel better in the moment, but uwill lead you to feel worse both physically and mentally.
Think of your weekly meal plan as an act of self care. Ultimately, it will save you time and energy during the week and still make you feel better than the McDonald’s drive through.
Eat Regularly Throughout the Day
Having a solid meal plan will help you get on track to eating regularly throughout the day. Many people who rely on fast food do so because their busy lives make it difficult to manage regular meals, but eating regularly will actually help you to make better choices around food overall.
If you are someone who skips breakfast or lunch, you are most likely ravenous by the time you get off work. When you are that hungry, you are more likely to make food decisions based on convenience over your health.
Additionally, when you are not eating regular, balanced meals, you are more likely to crave high fat, salty, and indulgent foods. You will also eat more and faster because your body is trying to make up for the lack of calories throughout the day.
To break out of this cycle, try to eat smaller meals, more often. Additionally, focus on consuming protein rich foods throughout the day, especially at breakfast, something we covered in depth in this blog post.
Sometimes this cycle of starvation and binging can turn into a disordered eating pattern which requires medical and therapeutic intervention to overcome. If you suffer from disordered eating, please seek support from a medical professional.
Manage Your Stress
Something you might not realize is contributing to your diet and decision making is stress. Chronic stress raises your cortisol levels which has many detrimental effects on your body. Cortisol lowers your metabolism and raises your blood sugar, making it harder to process extra calories.
Cortisol also effects your decision making abilities, stimulating your appetite and activating fight or flight. The body’s response is to crave high fat, sugary foods that will give you the biggest dopamine hit and counteract the stress hormones.
However, this hit is short lived and usually leads to an even bigger crash, leaving you feeling even worse than before.
Food is fuel and it is an important aspect of life and culture, but it should not be used to cover up hard emotions or as a reward for enduring something difficult. This can lead to unhealthy associations with food that will harm you in the long run.
Instead of relieving stress in the drive through line, find some other, healthier outlets to manage your emotions. Take up a hobby, exercise regularly, call a friend, journal or get outside. For more ideas on how to manage stress, check out this post.
Wrap it Up
Breaking any habit is difficult, especially one as prevalent as fast food. Fast food is designed to hook you, from the literal recipes to the sheer number of options on every city block.
Some of the reasons you might find yourself choosing fast food are also the things you need to work on to break out of the habit. This includes finding an intrinsic motivation to change, making small and manageable changes, planning ahead, eating regularly, and managing the stress in your life.
When you make these lifestyle changes, choosing healthier options will become much easier and fast food will no longer be a staple in your life but a special treat once in awhile.
