TheBrainChangingDiet

Emotional Eating is something that everybody has heard of, yet it is has no formal definition. Many people describe emotional eating as the process of eating particular foods that makes them feel better. Some people eat when they are sad or anxious. Others eat when they are overwhelmed. For many, the cue to eat may come when they are bored, lonely, angry or distressed. Although the reasons may vary, the results seems to be the same – “Food makes me feel better”.

The reason that food makes you feel better is because your brain is designed to give you that response. Your brain wants you to eat, and in order to do that, it must reward you for taking action and eating food. Although any food can stimulate the brain’s reward system, some foods give us “more reward”. These foods tend to be more reinforcing and thus we seek them out more. Highly rewarding foods are usually high in fat, sugar, and calories, and they provide the “feeling better” sensations that emotional eaters experience.

Everybody is an Emotional Eater

What people seem to misunderstand however, is that EVERYBODY is an emotional eater. We all eat food and everybody gets a release of reward chemicals in their brain for doing so. This is how humans have survived as a species. This is why we live today. Without this mechanism we would not seek out food. Everybody is an emotional eater because your brain is designed that way. It is designed to make you feel better when you eat, so you will do it again in the future.

Let me give you an example. Almost everybody has stuffed themselves so much that it almost made them sick. In fact for some people, this is quite a common occurrence! Do you know why you let yourself do this? You did it because you are an emotional eater, just like everybody else. Even in the absence of any hunger, your brain will give you a reward when you keep eating. That’s why sometimes it is hard to stop, because your brain wants you to keep eating!

The big problem however, is when people associate certain behaviors with an eating habit. They develop repetitive behaviors and always eat under certain circumstances. In essence they create a script that is imprinted in their brains and this behavior becomes so routine that they respond even before they are conscious of a stimulus. For example “every time I get stressed, I eat ice-cream”. This process is often unconscious. That is why sometimes you find yourself scraping the bottom of the ice-cream container without even realizing you have eaten anything at all!

This process is called “conditioned learning”. Basically, conditioned learning means that you have TRAINED your brain to react a specific way under specific circumstances. This is what people refer to when they say that they are “emotional eaters”. In fact eating when you are stressed or angry or lonely or sad is a learned behavior that you have created in your brain through association. It is a conditioned response.

Lets take another example. Ivan Pavlov, the great Russian scientist, found that salivation in response to the presentation of food could rapidly be transferred to another stimulus. In one of his fascinating experiments he found that a bell tone that is repeatedly associated with the presentation of food could elicit the identical physiological reactions to the presentation of food. So every time he rang the bell, it produced the physiological response of salivation, i.e the desire to eat food.

This process of association has the nice little tag line of “neurons that fire together wire together”. This is how your brain works. It makes associations by linking cognitive, motor and emotional aspects together into one chunk. This is a memory. Every time that you repeat the same sequence of events, such as always eating food under certain circumstances, you strengthen that connection in your brain. This repetition creates a formed habit, an unconscious response that you have developed over a period of time.

Emotional Eating is a Habit

The major difference here is that of goal-directed behavior verses habit-directed behavior. An example of goal directed behavior is thinking about cake, desiring cake, and then taking the deliberate steps to obtain cake. All of this requires a specific set of motivational neural circuits. If you walk into your house intent on getting some cake from the refrigerator, your activity is goal-directed and consciously reward-driven. You want that cake and you are going to act to obtain it.

But if you do that often enough, the mental process changes. It becomes a habit-driven behavior, less deliberate and more repetitive – and engages different neural circuitry. No longer motivated by a conscious desire for food, you consciously head for the refrigerator when you get home because it is a habit. Your motor behavior has become automatic.

This habit of stimulus-response is what causes overeating, not “emotional eating”. Remember, everybody is an emotional eater, but not everybody is an overeater. Every time you eat when you are angry, you strengthen the angry=eating habit. Every time you don’t eat when you get angry then you weaken the angry=eating habit. That’s neuroplasticity, and it is always in action.

Eliminate the Habit

The first step in eliminating these triggers that people call emotional eating is awareness. Try and identify your negative eating habits. For example “when X happens, then I want to eat Y and only Y.” If you can eliminate X then you are much less likely to eat Y. If you can’t eliminate X, then substitute Z for Y – a healthier option or some activity. At first you are not going to want to do this because breaking a habit can be very difficult.

But that’s what it is – a habit. You brain is a habit machine. It creates these habits for efficiency, because it likes to conserve energy. If you can change your negative eating habits by training new ones, you will escape the trap of of always desiring specific foods when you feel a certain way. Everybody is an emotional eater so your desire to overeat when you feel bad (or good) is a trained behavior. Eliminate the habit, and you will eliminate your “emotional eating”.

In part 4 of the best diet for weight loss, we are going to continue to the next step of creating your new diet blueprint. At this stage, you should have a good understanding of your current eating behaviors and habits. In Part 3 we discussed that we all have very distinct habits when it comes to eating, and that completely changing your diet is not a good idea because you will always revert to your old eating behaviors. In this series we will discuss what the best habits are to change and how to use neuroplasticity to make that change.

The first important point is that you should only change one habit at a time. The reason for this is simple. Changing your habits requires energy, attention and willpower. If you burden yourself with too much change, your brain is likely to go into a survival response which will lead you to revert to your old habits. In times of danger, your brain will always rely on what it knows best. Change means danger, so you must reduce the threat that change brings by only changing one habit at a time.

So what habit should you change? Of course this is entirely individual. In this stage of the process it is often very valuable to have a coach. A coach can see what you cannot, and can provide you with the best option for change. Alternatively you need to examine your diet and ask yourself, “What is the one habit that I can change that will provide me with the best outcome in terms of a healthy change for weight loss?”

Now read this carefully. If your weak point is that you drink 2 gallons of soda a day, don’t do what most people do and say “No more soda!”. It is imperative that you don’t deprive yourself of the things that you love, or else you are almost guaranteed to binge sooner or later. Instead ask yourself “How can I reduce the amount of soda that I drink and still feel satisfied?”, and then make the change. Maybe you eliminate drinking soda in the car, or replace the soda with water for one meal a day, or maybe you choose a day of the week where you don’t drink any soda. Eventually your new routine will become a habit, and you can continue to reduce your intake of soda until (a) you only drink a moderate amount or (b) you eliminate it altogether.

For most people this process seems too slow and often too hard. These are the people who are continually “on a diet”. It’s easy to lose weight in two weeks. Creating your new diet blueprint takes time, effort, and energy, and most importantly it requires taking small steps. Continue to gradually replace bad habits with good ones, and soon your diet blueprint will not be something you are “on” it will just be simply something that you do.

Week 4: 

Examine your current diet blueprint and ask yourself “What is the one habit that I can change that will provide me with the best outcome in terms of a healthy change for weight loss?”. The answer to this will be different for everybody, and is a major reason why simply adapting somebody else’s diet frequently results in failure.

Once that change becomes a habit (i.e you don’t have to think about it), then you can repeat the process. Remember, one habit at a time, and good luck!

In part 3 of the best diet for weight loss, we are going to start to evaluate your eating behaviors. By now you should be starting to get a basic understanding of your current eating blueprint. This is critical, so if you have not managed to write down everything that you eat during a week, then go back to part 2 of this series.

This first thing that we want to identify is your current eating patterns. Human beings are hardwired to create habits because it makes us efficient. One of the fundamental and ingrained habits we have is our eating behaviors, because we do them on such a consistent basis. As you go through your journal, try and identify some of these habits and behaviors. What time of the day do you always eat? What are the foods that you eat the most? When are the times when you eat too much of a certain food? When do you eat the majority of your food?

Why is this so important? Because 99% of the things that we do, think, and feel are the same as we did, thought and felt yesterday, and are the same as we will do, will think and will feel tomorrow! This is why every single diet that you take from somebody else will fail over the long run. If you drastically change your eating behavior and habits, your brain will repel and you will go back to your previous eating habits eventually. This is why almost everybody will regain weight (and more!) during their weight loss campaign.

So how do you change? By replacing your old habits with new ones. Although that may sound easy, changing your habits can be very difficult because your brain HATES CHANGE! This is because your brain is always looking for ways to conserve energy and it literally has to burn more glucose when we do something out of the ordinary. So when you decide to “go for broke” by changing  your whole eating behavior and introducing excessive exercise, any unplanned event in your life can easily derail the changes that you want to make. Your body literally runs out of energy to manage all of the changes, and falls back to what it knows best to get through the rest of the day.

With this in mind, over the next few weeks we are going to focus on making one small change. We do this by identifying something small that we want to change, establishing a strategy for change, and then implementing the strategy. If you do this everyday (for approximately 21 days) you will create new neural pathways in your brain and a new habit will be formed. While it may be frustrating to make changes gradually, it is a much more realistic approach for guaranteeing success because it requires less energy and won’t place unrealistic demands on your body. Remember, success breeds success, so it is much better to have many small successes that add up, than to take on TOO much at once, fail, and have to start all over at square one.

Week 3:

Evaluate your current eating blueprint. What is the one change you could make that you could feel like you could accomplish? Here are some examples to get you thinking:

Cut out or reduce your intake of ONE snack

Replace ONE starch with vegetables

Reduce your intake of calories from liquids.

Remove or reduce your intake of ONE desert.

Begin eating your meals NOT in front of the T.V.

There are hundreds of different eating behaviors that you can change, but what is important is that you change the ones that are relevant to you. Next week we will observe what eating behavior will be most beneficial for you to change in order to create your new eating blueprint.

Most researchers say that it takes about 20 minutes for our brains to realize that we are full. In accordance with this, most people who are trying to change their eating behavior are given advice to do the following – Put your utensils down in between bites, chew your food X amount of times, wait X seconds after you have swallowed to take the next bite, drink water in between each bite, stop half way through your meal and wait 10 minutes. These and other strategies like them are designed to increase the time it takes you to eat your food. The hypothesis is that taking more time will get you towards the “20 minutes mark” that it takes for your brain to register what you have eaten.

For many people such strategies can be quite helpful. They ensure that you are more mindful when you eat and that you pay attention to the signals of your body. One of the most common is – “Chew your food X number of times”. This is a good little habit to get yourself into, not so much because it will take you longer to eat your food, but because it will ensure that you eat foods that actually require chewing. Let me explain… 

Food manufacturers know that the quicker that you eat, the more you eat. The more food that you eat, the more you buy, so getting you to eat quickly is of high priority for food designers. This means that they produce foods that are specifically designed to break down immediately in your mouth.  Less chewing time means quicker consumption. Quicker consumption means more food consumed. You get the picture.

They do this in a variety of ways from putting water into chicken which makes it softer and easier to chew, to adding fat, simply to make the food break down easier in your mouth, and even injecting marinade into meat so the connective tissue is destroyed making it almost “pre-chewed”.

As you can imagine, processed foods also contain additives and chemicals that reduce the effort it takes to break them down and swallow. This means that you are often taking the next bite even before you have swallowed the first. So not only are the highly processed foods more calorie dense, but you are also eating more of them because they are designed to be eaten very fast. In most situations your brain will not register the fact that you have just eaten 1,000 calories in 5 minutes, so you continue to eat.

The most important point here is that when you are choosing foods to eat, make sure that you choose foods that you actually have to chew. Foods that don’t require chewing are designed that way, and almost guarantee that you will eat more. Foods that require chewing are usually healthier options and you will eat less because it takes you a little longer to consume them.

In the past we needed to chew a food around 25 times before we could swallow it. Now it may take you 2 or 3 quick munches for the food to be headed into your stomach. Stick to foods that you need to chew and you will magically see yourself eating a lot less.

All this chewing also gives you a fantastic side effect.  Chewing enhances flavor! It’s called savoring your food.  When the food stays in our mouth longer our sense of smell really has a chance to kick in and provide an extra flavor boost.  We all are aware of this on some level – every kid knows if they don’t like the taste of something they should try and AVOID chewing and gulp the food as quickly as possible.  

So slow down, chew and savor your food.  Eat mindfully.  Think about choosing foods that are less commercially processed and require a little more effort to chew.  Your stomach will be able communicate fullness appropriately and at the same time your taste buds can be really satisfied.

We are human.  We seek security and comfort, and above all we seek food.  The fundamental question of human beings… “when will I eat?” has been almost magically converted into “what will I eat?”. One of the problems that we face with overeating, is that we have engineered our environment to never go hungry. Food abundance has ensured that whenever we even think about being hungry, we eliminate that sensation with a snack that is within arms reach. Over time, and because of our exposure to constant food availability, we have learned to eat whenever we get the slightest feeling of hunger instead of eating when we need to eat.

Being hungry does not mean that you have to eat immediately. It does not mean that you are going to starve if you don’t eat within the next half hour. But that is how we act. We say that unless we get something to eat that we simply can’t function. We have almost become afraid of the sensation of hunger, with food being our saviour. But this was not always the case.

Most people cannot tolerate being hungry, because they have trained themselves to be that way. Hunger is a natural process. It was not designed to paralyze you. Hunger does not mean that you must stop everything immediately, and find food. But for many people it does. Hunger is a healthy reminder that you will probably have to eat something pretty soon or later on in the day. If you didn’t get hungry you wouldn’t eat that much. But you don’t have to eat every time you feel hungry.

If you eat every time you feel hungry then you give your brain a flawless strategy to get you to eat whenever it wants. Remember your brain loves sugar, fat and calories and it doesn’t care what you look like naked. It is you, or your “consciousness” that refrains from gorging on cookies all day. Deep down however, some of your other brain structures are signaling you to give in to those urges. And the way that these structures get you to eat those delicious treats is to make you slightly hungry, just enough to get you to indulge.

Think about it. When are the most common times when you snack on little treats? For most people it is in between meals – the midmorning snack, or the mid-afternoon sugar lift. Others enjoy snacking when they are preparing meals, or when they have to wait for their meal to be ready. For other people they just have to eat the minute they come home from work. At all of these times your not really hungry, you are JUST HUNGRY ENOUGH.

That’s all you brain needs, it just needs to give you the right stimulus to get you to eat that bag of chips. For most of us that means just a little bit hungry, or a little “pickish”. But have you ever felt that urge to eat, then you forgot about it and 10 minutes later you realized that you were not even hungry anymore? Congratulations, you have just practiced some hunger tolerance.

In order to stop your incessant snacking, you need to re-learn to become comfortable with being just a little bit hungry. At first it may be a bit uncomfortable, but that is only because you have trained yourself to be that way. You have trained yourself to always eat when you feel a certain cue from your stomach (brain!). When you practice slight hunger tolerance you will quickly learn that you do not have to always eat when you feel hungry, and the sensation will often go away. 

Think of it this way.  Hunger is like a conversation that your stomach is having with your brain.  Your stomach may be temporarily empty but that doesn’t mean you are starving or even that your body needs fuel at the moment.  Your stomach is like a small child that hasn’t learned the meaning of later or patience.  But your stomach can be trained to wait just a little while and food will be available. You can learn to notice signals of hunger and defer the desire to eat immediately. The critical point to understand is that this takes PRACTICE not just understanding.  So don’t let your tummy throw a tantrum!  Your mindful brain is wiser and capable of exerting executive control.  Before too long being a little bit hungry will be a cue from your body and not a command.  After all we don’t immediately put on pajamas and go to bed every time we feel sleepy!

Practice patience and your hunger pangs can be dealt with appropriately. Over time the screaming and crying will turn into a polite request and save you from diving head first into the nearest cookie jar.