What are your trigger foods?

Last updated on Fri, 21st Oct 2022

It’s a common problem. You’ve been on-plan all week, you’ve batch cooked loads of dinners, counted those syns, and knocked it out of the park with all that body magic!

So you deserve a treat – a bit of chocolate, a glass of wine, a slice of pizza, or a bag of chips. But before you know it, you’re laid out on the floor groaning from eating your own body weight in junk food!

You’ve fallen foul of your trigger foods, lost control, and weren’t able to stop!

Food addiction

For some it’s hard to think of food as something you can be addicted to. We all need to eat to live, but for some of us eating becomes much more than pure survival. Just looking at or thinking about certain foods triggers the reward centres of the brain – the same area that’s triggered for alcohol and drug addictions.

A release of dopamine makes you feel good, heightens your awareness of the food, and encourages the brain to want to eat it.

My trigger foods

I have a number of trigger foods that cause me to get out of control if left unchecked. Here’s my top 3:

  1. Bread
  2. Savoury snacks combining pastry and meat (sausage rolls / pies)
  3. Ice cream

The only way I can avoid binging on all of these things is to avoid them altogether, even to the extent of not having them in the house. Because I don’t want just one or two slices of bread – I want half a loaf! I don’t want one pork pie – I want the entire packet. And don’t get me started on a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, because I won’t stop!

So the way for me to keep on-track with Slimming World is to cut out these trigger foods entirely. I know that a lot of people enjoy bread for their Healthy Extra B, but I prefer to have something like Scanbran or an Aldi Harvest Morn Cereal Bar – something that I won’t binge on.

Aldi Harvest Morn Cereal Bars – one bar is 5 Syns or a Health Extra B

What are your trigger foods? How do you manage them? Let me know in the comments…

One Comment

  1. Penelope said:

    Hoping to see some other members suggestions for this. I occasionally try again to buy something that has been a trigger in the past to see if I can manage it now. The answer is usually no but I’m still do it.

    Mon, 5th Jul 2021
    Reply

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