Dr. Jason Fung

We've paired food with almost everything in our environment, right?

So you'd get up in the morning.

Hey, you need to eat breakfast.

Hey, get a coffee in the morning.

Hey, you need to get something with the coffee.

Lunchtime, you have to eat.

You need to get afterschool snacks.

You need to get before bedtime snacks.

You go into the car, you're thinking about eating.

You go to the mall, you're thinking about eating.

You're eating in front of the TV, you're eating in front of the computer, you're eating from everywhere you go is food.

There's billboards, there's everything.

So everything, because we've paired it all together, we've become Pavlov's dogs, right?

It's like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

And this is what people call the food noise.

Everywhere around you, you're triggering off this hunger because you've paired it so often, just like the bell with the dogs, right?

And so if that's the problem, then you need to remove these cues or break these connections.

That's completely different than just saying eat fewer calories.

It's a completely different toolkit.

Same thing with emotional hunger or hedonic hunger.