I think it's pretty common. I personally call it "Goldfish syndrome", although apparently that's caught on with another informal meaning according to the internet.
Eating and drinking delicious high calorie things rewards your brain. On an evolutionary time scale, delicious things were relatively rare and often required expending a lot of energy to acquire. In the last 100 years or so, modern technology has shifted the typical diet to be primarily cheap, processed high calorie foods.
If you want to change your behavior, I would suggest calorie counting with a phone app. Do it every meal or snack, before you eat it. Even if you don't restrict yourself, it will make you consciously aware of your intake. You'll naturally start thinking in terms of energy intake rather than sensory intake. You'll also start to be able to correlate your emotional state to your current level of hunger rather than the other way around. "I am so hungry I could eat 300 calories of potato chips!" I did that for a few months recently and lost 8 pounds. I stopped doing it more recently, and have gained 3 back.
If you're a hipster at heart and have free time, you could also start doing more of your own food processing at home. Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch. If you really like good coffee, buy a hand grinder and whole beans, or figure out how to roast your own beans.
If you think you're eating unhealthy and having external pressure would help with your self control, maybe just go see a primary care physician and request a cholesterol check and to be screened for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. If you have indeed been too indulgent and lethargic over an extended period of time, your cholesterol will probably read high, and you probably have fat in your liver that may be causing slightly elevated enzyme levels. A Dr. telling you to try to eat healthy may not be motivating, but quantitative data may be.
If you want an altogether nerdier name maybe call it Wittgenstein syndrome?
Drury reports a conversation with the famed philosopher:
> So the next day when we were alone I asked Wittgenstein to tell me more about Kierkegaard. Wittgenstein: “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” He then went on to speak of the three categories of life-style that play such a large part in Kierkegaard’s writing: the asethetic, where the objective is to get the maximum enjoyment out of this life; the ethical, where the concept of duty demands renunciation; and the religious, where this very renunciation itself becomes a source of joy. Wittgenstein: “Concerning this last category I don’t pretend to understand how it is possible. I have never been able to deny myself anything, not even a cup of coffee if I wanted it. Mind you I don’t believe what Kierkegaard believed, but of this I am certain, that we are not here in order to have a good time.”
> Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch
This is good for different reasons, such as less additives in your food which might be healthier in the long term, taste, and the pleasure in the activity itself, but is unlikely to help with weight loss. There is little difference in calorie content between two similar pizzas, home made and from a restaurant (assuming you’re not eating Domino’s cheese-stuffed crust style pizzas).
My point is it's good to make lifestyle changes that lead to healthier choices on average. Pizza is inherently calorie dense, and easy to eat too much of. You might as well make it a relaxing hobby that requires some effort and forethought, rather than something you order out for several times a week because you're stressed out and exhausted. Good dough takes 24 hours to optimally ferment, and requires at least a few minutes of kneading by hand. Stretching the dough, topping it, and then baking it require some focused attention. It's not a big time commitment, though. The activity, mindfulness and the delayed gratification are the healthy part.
Neapolitan style pizza in particular is very thin crust, and the emphasis is on carefully chosen high quality ingredients rather than quantity. It is significantly less calorie dense than typical American pizza. Eating a whole pizza with toppings might be 1000 calories, while a single slice of cheese pizza from Costco is around 800 calories.
It's also very informative to see for yourself the ingredients going into what you're eating. Buying a can of cake frosting at the store gets you roughly the same outcome as making it from scratch using a whole stick of butter and several cups of sugar, but the latter seems more likely to influence the size of the piece you take, or at least make it obvious why you feel bleh after eating it.
If you compare the same pizzas restaurant vs. homemade then sure, but learning to do it well allows you to modify everything to suit your needs. A really nice thin crust can be made with quite a bit less dough, which may then need a lot less cheese to saturate the dish. Just like that you've knocked down two of the most calorically heavy parts of a pizza!
Neapolitan style pizza baked at high temperature is actually extremely sensitive to excessive topping. Too much sauce or fresh mozzarella, and there will be too much liquid for the center of the crust to cook properly. I'll typically only use maybe 3 tbsp of tomato sauce, and aim for 50% of cheese coverage by area if using hand cut mozzarella cubes, or 80% coverage if shredded.
My typical dough recipe has 150g of flour and 5g sugar per pizza, which is about 550 calories. Let's say 250 calories of cheese. Raw tomato sauce isn't even worth counting. So 800 as a baseline for one pizza. Fully loading it with pepperoni might bump it up to 1000.
A few months ago I was trying to restrict myself to 1800 calories per day. We had friends over for pizza one night, and I decided to just not worry about it and gorge myself. I counted it all up before going to bed, though, and my daily intake worked out to be about 1900.
Eating and drinking delicious high calorie things rewards your brain. On an evolutionary time scale, delicious things were relatively rare and often required expending a lot of energy to acquire. In the last 100 years or so, modern technology has shifted the typical diet to be primarily cheap, processed high calorie foods.
If you want to change your behavior, I would suggest calorie counting with a phone app. Do it every meal or snack, before you eat it. Even if you don't restrict yourself, it will make you consciously aware of your intake. You'll naturally start thinking in terms of energy intake rather than sensory intake. You'll also start to be able to correlate your emotional state to your current level of hunger rather than the other way around. "I am so hungry I could eat 300 calories of potato chips!" I did that for a few months recently and lost 8 pounds. I stopped doing it more recently, and have gained 3 back.
If you're a hipster at heart and have free time, you could also start doing more of your own food processing at home. Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch. If you really like good coffee, buy a hand grinder and whole beans, or figure out how to roast your own beans.
If you think you're eating unhealthy and having external pressure would help with your self control, maybe just go see a primary care physician and request a cholesterol check and to be screened for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. If you have indeed been too indulgent and lethargic over an extended period of time, your cholesterol will probably read high, and you probably have fat in your liver that may be causing slightly elevated enzyme levels. A Dr. telling you to try to eat healthy may not be motivating, but quantitative data may be.