If your Instagram feed is full of images of delicious food, you may be in a little bit of trouble – especially if you are trying to keep slim.

In the last month, Americans have celebrated seven national days relating to food, such as National Baby Back Ribs Day, National Cheese Pizza Day and National “I Love Food” Day to name a few.

While South Africans may not take part in these ad hoc celebrations, the images posted to social media promoting them leave our mouths watering for more.

Debra Nessel, a registered dietitian with Torrance Memorial Medical Center in California, explained:

With these holidays, many people eat up simply because some part of their brain believes they will never have this opportunity again, and that to miss out would be something to regret in the future.

It doesn’t matter how healthy they try to eat, they become a clean-ice-cream-tub club member, no matter how full they are.

And it’s true, the celebration of unhealthy food is much more attractive than that of healthy options. URWhatYouPost.com tracked 185.8 million food-related hashtags on Twitter and Instagram in the past three months, and here’s what they found:

65.9 percent refer to unhealthy foods. The #butter hashtag alone was used more than 7 million times in the past 90 days.

(FYI, #brusselssprout barely brought in 50,000.)

This has led to a phenomenon called “visual hunger”, where we are left wanting to eat something, anything in fact, because we have seen something delicious on our feed. The Daily Beast explains:

Food porn does that by tapping into various regions of the brain, including the limbic system, which controls basic emotions as well as our drive for hunger, explains Manhattan-based addictions psychologist Paul Hokemeyer, PhD. “Social media food holidays manipulate people into believing that food is something to be indulged in rather than something used for nourishment. They fetishize food and make it an object, rather than a tool to be used for the betterment and health of oneself.”

So what do you do?

You unfollow and unfriend all those people who promote unhealthy lifestyles – or you can train yourself to respond to images by saying “Oooooh, that looks good, but I don’t need it right now” instead of “OMG I GET IN MY BELLY!”

The last option is probably the way you should go because it’s always good to know whats on offer, especially from local restaurants such as these:

Too much for a Monday? Don’t worry, you’re just visually hungry.

[source:thedailybeast]