User:BenFosters

APPETITE AND ENVIRONMENT
Of all the forces that influence your eating habits, those arising from your physical and social environment are among the least obvious but most powerful. Your family, friends, job, finances and personal circumstances can all influence your food choices and appetite, as can advertising, retailing, the price of food and current trends and culture. These forces shape your eating behaviour, appetite and dietary choices throughout your lifetime, from the moment you are born, and recognizing and challenging them may help you to break free from negative and counterproductive patterns of eating that have prevented you from losing weight. SOCIAL CONDITIONING

We are all born with an intrinsic ability to control our food intake but throughout our childhoods we are told what to eat, when to eat and how much to eat, so we lose touch with our natural hunger and satiety cues. Instead, we rely more and more on external cues, so that as adults we often eat not out of hunger but when it is socially acceptable to do so. In fact, much of our eating behaviour as adults has its roots in childhood.

Children learn to share the same lifestyles and dietary tastes as their immediate carers, both good and bad. If you are a child growing up in a Japanese household, you will develop different choices and eating styles than you would in an Indian, American or French household. Throughout childhood, we also come to attach symbolism such as sinfulness or purity to certain foods, and give them emotional value if they are used as reward or punishment or as a way of dealing with physical or emotional pain or distress.

We may even associate certain foods with important events, because many social occasions, including birthdays, weddings, religious festivals and parties involve food. So eating gains a social significance as an expression of hospitality and a way of bonding, nurturing and cementing relationships. Families that eat together, stay together! GreenCoffeeLover Weight Loss blog you can see now.