Overeating: Why We Eat More Than Enough

We need a certain amount of food to stay alive. But beyond that, we tend to eat more than we need. Anthropologists call this “overeating.” It seems obvious that overeating is bad for you, but anthropologists have been puzzled for years about why we do it.

Overeating is a bad habit. But why do we do it?

One reason is that the simple answer to the question of why we eat more than we need is “Because it tastes good.” However, everyone knows that eating more than you need feels bad, so there must be something else going on.

There are other explanations. For example, some people say that overeating is a way of compensating for too little exercise. Certainly, exercise can make you hungry. Another explanation is that people overeat when they feel depressed or lonely. But overeating doesn’t make you feel depressed, and overeating isn’t necessarily associated with loneliness.

Perhaps the real answer is that overeating is a bad habit. And bad habits are habits for a reason. Habits are not determined by their consequences. Smoking is bad for you, but that doesn’t mean you smoke because you’re a disgusting slob. Habits are determined by their consequences, but habits also have built-in motivations. Habits are triggered by cues that make us expect a certain outcome. The strength of these cues determines whether they trigger the habit or not.

Overeating is a bad habit. The only way to get rid of a bad habit is to 1) understand how it works 2) set up an environment that helps us do what we want 3) replace the bad habit with something better. The first two steps are easy, but many people skip right over them and go straight to the last one, which is why they fail.”