So what drives eating?

In the past I have looked at what drives eating: addiction, chemical food issues, emotional issues, habit, cultural and environmental, genetic, epigenetic, instinct or over driven instinct, etc. Now I am headed internally to choice vs free will, choice is free will, but with a triune brain what gives? It is also possible that we do not think the same; there is variation in process, and what we can control, and on what we put priority on. We can modify what is within our control by changing our beliefs and values, desires, aversion, delusions, expectations, our direction from history based to forward looking. It is a process.

Free will is a concept that originally came from religion, that force responsibility onto we, the people. It is not necessarily true, give it cannot be measured nor displayed. Given the obesity epidemic we currently live in; the epidemic that the rich have lived in at least since Roman time, with some evidence of the problem going back much further; we get fat when surplus food is available, unless we resisted the contemplation to overeat. Free will, what little we have is not much deference against the problem. Do we really have any free will with respect to food? My short answer is no, for most of us, but we do not need to hang around where food is available or where eating is promoted.

Free will is more of a concept than an actual reality. We have free will to make decisions, but not to carry out the actions as planned, as we become dependent on our bodies and/or others. Our beliefs and values get in the way, of which we adopted under the guise of free will, or we adopted them at our parents insistence. Clean that plate up. We do not want you to be hungry. One should never be hungry. If we accept that hungry is the natural state we should live in, we would not have a obesity issue. So now we can stay that our overeating is the direct result of our beliefs, and that we accepted our beliefs of our own free will, well we can as adults, unload those problem-matic beliefs, and take on new problem free beliefs as our own. Our beliefs are under indirect control of our free will, that condition where we can accept of reject a proposition. We can reevaluate and reject any entrenched proposition; we can retrain ourselves to almost anything that is not limited by our skill set. A simple bowl of soup can be lunch and or supper; nothing more is required for most of us.

The amount that is under the indirect control of our free will is vast compared to that under our direct free will to choose. It is this automatic testing against our beliefs that makes us rational... sort of. Yet we must also reexamine our beliefs that we test against, and drag those beliefs, which we have difficulty actually expressing, and recalling, out into the light of today, where we can continue to maintain, reject, or modify, to suit out current needs.

Many of our beliefs are cultural, religious, environmental, and from our parents and/or similar old people. But their beliefs, we must either own or discard. It is holding onto wrong ideas that is so damaging, and must be overcome through education and examination of those ideas. Maintaining wrong ideas as true is bad, not examining those ideas is foolish, or religious.

So what is the test of a idea? Define the idea, and list down all the factor pointing to the truth and or falsity of the idea. But there is an order that questions must be tested in, in order that the test is based on truth. This is the problem of religion, the first belief must be what is the primary virtue, the primary good, and that must occur somewhere above I think, therefore I am, and what is real, and what is conceptual, and the like. The stoic had the right idea, start with philosophy, reason, logic, physics and build from there. Learn hypothesis and evaluation, what is truth, and what is not, what is hypothesis to be held with a bit of doubt, the best explanation we have yet found, and go from there.

Yes, I am getting a bit slippery, perhaps off course, but then no one is providing sound advice that is follow-ible so what can one do? Find our own path. So how does this help overeating? We will see in the future.