Why We Overeat. 

Every time you activate the reward centre, the brain takes a snapshot of both internal and external cues. These cues might include stress, nighttime television, sitting in your car, or at your work desk, etc. With repeated pairing of a hyperpalatable food and these cues, your brain eventually learns that these are associated with pleasure; so all it takes is the presence of a cue that sprinkles a bit of dopamine on the nucleus accumbens, an area that is responsible for WANTING. These cues are what we call the High Risk Time – the time that you are at highest vulnerability of consuming unplanned calories due to wanting rather than hunger.