Eating healthy fake versions of your favourite food could be making you eat more

Throw out your carefully spiralised courgetti. Stop replacing your bread with thinly sliced bits of sweet potato. Get rid of the avocado and give your burger a proper bun.

All your healthy versions of your favourite foods might not be doing you any good.
It turns out that taking healthy foods like vegetables and dressing them up so they can masquerade as junk food could be a massive mistake when it comes to getting fit.
Why? Because the mental gymnastics required to eat courgette ‘pasta, avocado ‘ice cream', and the avocado ‘bun' could end up backfiring on us.

You see, every time we eat courgetti or similar healthy fake foods, we have to trick ourselves into pretending that a big bowl of vegetables is actually a big bowl of pasta.
But when we do this, we're always aware that what we're eating – as good as it may taste – is still the ‘healthy' option. And this can cause problems.
Kathleen Keller, a professor of nutritional sciences and food science at Penn State University, explained to The Atlantic that eating these healthy substitutes could lead to the Snackwell effect – when we know we're eating something healthy, so let ourselves eat a larger portion than we usually would.

And because vegetable pasta isn't actually the same as regular pasta in terms of taste and texture, our pasta cravings and expectations when we eat them aren't fulfilled, leading us to compensate by eating more or adding unhealthy topping to satisfy our foodie needs.
It's simple. When we tell ourselves we're eating pasta when really we're eating courgette, we're going to feel like we're missing out. And so we'll eat more to make up for it.

The solution? Stop pretending that courgettes taste like pasta. They don't.
Just enjoy a nice bowl of courgettes for the sake of courgettes. If you're having serious spaghetti cravings, eat the damn spaghetti. ‘Kay?