It’s not your imagination. There are foods that give you such a rush of pleasure from the very first bite that your brain screams for more—making it very hard to stop eating them once you start. That’s because they’ve been engineered with the right combination of refined carbohydrates like white flour and sugar and added fat to deliver a big glycemic load—a rush of blood sugar into your system, which triggers your brain’s reward center and makes you want more. In a recent study, food addiction researcher Nicole Avena, PhD, identified the most addictive foods. Unsurprisingly, the ones that top the list are highly processed and have more sugar and fat per bite, with far less fiber to slow down digestion, than unprocessed foods found in nature.

Do you need to avoid addictive foods altogether? Maybe, if they truly cause you trouble, says Avena. But for others, awareness that they can cause problems and strategies to make them less problematic may do the trick. Here’s what she has to say about the biggest troublemakers.

Pizza

“The more processed the pizza, the worse it is,” says Avena. “Try to eat pizza with whole, fresh ingredients and go easy on the cheese, because it is so highly processed. Try to use a less-processed crust if possible. If making it at home, you can play around with more healthful recipes like using cauliflower crusts.” This cauliflower crust pizza recipe packs so much flavor, you won’t miss delivery.

Chocolate

To lower the binge bar, darker chocolate is better. “Milk chocolate contains a lot of fat, so try to eat darker chocolate,” she says. “It may taste bitter at first, but after a while, as you adjust your tastes, that won’t be the case, and the milk chocolate will actually taste too sweet!”

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