TheBrainChangingDiet

In light of our previous article on mirrors neurons, let us take a glimpse of how these brain cells affect you in your life. First, we discovered that simply watching somebody doing an activity stimulates your brain as if you were actually doing that activity. Next, we found that we can often feel the same emotions that another person is feeling, simply by watching their facial expressions. Finally we learned that through this interpretation, your brain anticipates what it would be like if you performed the activity that you are observing. Now lets relate it to diet and weight loss…

Simply watching another person perform any activity stimulates specific brain cells – ones that we previously believed were activated only by DOING the activity. Lets say you are minding your own business, going about your daily activities, and you decide to drop in to see one of your friends. You go into your friends house and she just happens to be having some chocolate chip cookies. You both sit down and begin to chat, but your attention keeps being drawn to the chocolate cookies. Why? Because as your friend goes through the process of eating the cookies your brain activates as you were eating them yourself. These are you mirror neurons. There is a problem however…you’re not actually eating any cookies. So as one area of your brain says, “Hey I’m eating cookies”, another area says “Nope, not getting any cookies here”. The common theme here is “cookies”, so all of a sudden you want cookies!

As your friend enjoys the cookies your brain tries to interpret how your friend feels about the cookies. “Are the cookies nice?”, “Does she like the cookies”, “How are the cookies making her feel?”. These processes all occur below your conscious awareness. Your friend doesn’t even need to tell you the cookies are great.  Your brain automatically monitors and interprets her body language. If she talks about how yummy the cookies taste your conscious awareness kicks in.  So you have your unconscious mind receiving information that the cookies must be really good and you have your conscious mind reinforcing this information.

Finally your brain begins to create an experience where it anticipates how wonderful the cookie would taste. Your brain knows that you have had cookies before and it uses your past experiences to gauge how enjoyable this cookie will be if you eat it. Finally, your friend asks “Would you like a cookie”. Somehow despite this intense activation in your brain you muster up the willpower to refuse your friends invitation of a delightful treat. After all you are “on a diet”.

The above example is called and ENVIRONMENTAL CUE. We experience these at multiple intervals during the day, like when you pass your favorite bakery on the way to work, or when you see an ad for burger king in-between watching a T.V show. In fact, studies show that we make over 200 conscious decisions and countless unconscious decisions about food every single day.  Environmental cues are everywhere, but the most powerful ones can come in the form of your social interactions.

Human beings have especially active mirror neurons. Many researchers believe that one of their primary functions is to facilitate social behavior.  These brain cells allow us to learn from each other subconsciously and they are responsible for many of the amazing feats we can accomplish. Unfortunately mirror neurons take in all the information around you and don’t make judgements.  They can help you learn useful social behaviors but they also indiscriminately respond to those less desirable actions that we encounter every day.

Lets take the above example of our friend and her cookies. Although you may have just eaten lunch and have absolutely no desire for a cookie, simply watching your friend eating one will ramp up your desire to do to same. In step 1, the motor areas of your brain that are required to eat a cookie are basically saying – “eat that cookie”. In step 2, the emotional areas of your brain that interpret your friends feelings are saying – “eat that cookie”. In step 3 the pleasure centers in your brain are determining how delicious it will be and are saying – “eat that cookie”. But guess what, not one of these structures work independently, so in one fell swoop you have the movement areas of your brian, the emotional areas of your brain and the pleasure areas of your brain all simultaneously telling you to “EAT THAT COOKIE”. All because you are watching your friend eat one. 

So can your friends make you fat? The answer is of course, yes. So many people are totally unaware of how their friends and social environment affect their behaviors. But here is the good news. If your friends can make you fat, then they can also make you thin. You just have to tell them how they can help you to do that. Here are some quick tips to get you started:

MAKE IT PUBLIC – Most people when trying to lose weight and change their eating behavior never tell anybody what they are trying to do. This can be a huge mistake. They are often embarrassed what people may think of them, especially if they fail to lose weight. By going public you can advise your family, friends, and others, how they can be the most helpful to you. Remember, it is very hard for people to help you if they do not know that you are trying to change.

CONTROL YOUR ENVIRONMENT – It is a lot easier to control your environment than it is to control your behavior. Read that again, it is critical to your success. When you are constantly exposed to food, you have to constantly resist temptation. One can only resist for so long. Start with your family. Ask them to get rid of foods that are problematic for you or at least make sure they are not storing them in plain view and eating them in front of you. Eliminating this environmental cue alone can make a big difference.

ELICIT HELPING RELATIONSHIPS – Seek the support of somebody that can help you with your behavior change. This can be anybody, a friend, a family member, a colleague, somebody who has already achieved the change that you want. It should be somebody who you think can understand and support you as you go through your behavior change.

FIND SOCIAL GROUPS – It can be very difficult to change your eating behavior if you feel like you are doing it all on your own. Seek out groups of people who are going through the same process that you are. You can learn from them, ask questions, find support and learn new strategies to help you along.

Changing your eating behavior to lose weight can be a long road for some people, and keeping it off is often more difficult. In order to create real change, you must understand to use your family, close friends and others to help you along. They do not have to change they just have to HELP YOU CHANGE. Make mirror neurons work for you and you will find that losing weight becomes a whole lot easier.

In order to understand the Lose Weight-Gain Weight Cycle, you must understand it in terms of your brain. Your brain is a survival based organism, and we have learned through neuroplasticity that it can change at any time depending on the demand placed on it. In this presentation we look at how and why your brain changes in response to this cycle.

For anybody trying to lose weight, the lose weight-gain weight cycle is often the trap that they fall into. It is the most common weight loss strategy used by many people, yet is the most ineffective because it actually PROMOTES weight gain. It is unfortunate then that most people revert to this strategy when trying to lose weight. In this 2 part presentation, the mechanisms of the lose-weight-gain weight cycle will be discussed.  In part 2, you will learn how your brain will alter your physiology during this cycle, thus promoting weight gain and inhibiting weight loss in the future.

When people think about losing weight they automatically feel that diet and exercise are the keys to success. But if this were the case, wouldn’t everybody have the body that they wanted? The truth is that the mantra “eat less, exercise more” simply doesn’t work for most people. The reason behind this is that if you do not change your brain you will never achieve your weight loss goals. The process of changing your brain is called neuroplasticity.

The BrainChanging Diet is all about neuroplasticity. Neuroscientists will tell you that in your brain you have hard-wiring and soft-wiring. The hard-wiring in your brain ensures that structures are connected to one another. The soft-wiring refers to your brains ability to enact change determined by our experience in the world. Through neuroplasticity, our brain reorganizes and restructures itself in response to the demands that we place on it.

This capability is not very surprising. Without neuroplasticity we would not be able to learn anything. The area of your brain called the hippocampus has been dubbed the memory centre of your brain and neuroplasticity allows this area to reorganize itself by creating connections with other areas of your brain, and to restructure by growing more neurons (brain cells). It was only until scientists gave this process a name – neuroplasticity – that people began talk and think about it. Now it has become clear that in order to make any significant long term change in your life and your behavior, you must understand neuroplasticity and how to use it.

So how do we do this?  After all until very recently we really didn’t know the adult brain was even capable of real structural change. We used to think that learning was all about thinking and the “mental mind”,  when in reality our brains actually change physically as we live and learn.  Simon LeVay summarized this brilliantly with the statement “the mind is just the brain doing it’s job”.  With this new knowledge we can use strategies that can effect real changes in our minds and our behaviors instead of just subtle “tweeks” that typically take place on a day to day basis.  

Most people consider learning to be the conscious acquisition of new knowledge or skills.  For example studying math problems, balancing on a bike or mastering a piece of music.  In reality the vast majority of learning takes place in our brain while we are unaware or even asleep.  Our brain is always monitoring our experiences and emotions and making associations so we can make predictions and plans about the future. This is neuroplasticity. You can’t turn it off, and you have limited awareness of it most of the time.  But there have been many new and exciting studies that show us that we do have a lot of control over this neuroplastic process.  This means that your brain can change for the good, but it can also change for the bad.  Changing for good literally means both change in a positive direction AND change for a lifetime.  

What does neuroplasticity or brainchanging have to do with eating?  Eating is one our very first actions and it is repeated over and over again throughout our lifetime.  So we make some very strong eating habits which translate to very strong brain associations.   Habits are formed by repeating things over and over and they are reinforced by other experiences that support a particular behavior.   We know that eating is a highly rewarding action – it needs to be because it is crucial to our survival.  So we are always driven to seek food when we are hungry but our brain also rewards us whenever we eat.  Well some of life’s rewards are small and some are much much more.  Of course usually our brain thinks more is better and much more of a good thing is better still.  Who wouldn’t rather be rewarded with dollar than a nickel?  The same hold’s true with eating rewards. The basic reward of eating is easily supplemented or amplified by other life experiences.  

Lets take an example from your childhood. Excited, and raring to go you take your new bike out for a spin but during the adventure you fall off and hurt your knee. You feel the pain and start to cry. Your mother soothes you, brings you in and gives you an ice cream. All of a sudden you feel better and want to go out and play again. In your brain this translates to, “when I feel bad or something bad happens I can eat some ice-cream and I will feel better!”. Now this one incident will not create an addiction. But every time you eat an ice-cream to feel better, that connection in your brain strengthens and makes it more and more likely that the next time you feel bad you AUTOMATICALLY think – “I want ice-cream!”

This process is called myelination or “Neurons that fire together wire together”. Every time that you feel bad and use food to feel better you strengthen that connection in your brain. Your brain is all about efficiency. So every time you do something your brain tries to make it a little bit easier for you to do it the next time – you might know this as “Practice makes Perfect”. Over time these connections become so habitual and unconscious that we are not even aware of them. This is the power of neuroplasticity. So it is probably more accurate to say “Practice makes Permanent.” 

There is a flip side.  In an attempt to be efficient, strong associations can convert a tangled underbrush of connections into your brain into a well worn easy to follow path.  This well worn path can get you “into a rut”. Neuroplasticity is not only the process we use to learn by strengthening brain associations it is also the process we use to “unlearn” by weakening associations. Neuroplastic change will only happen if you weaken associations over time and at the same time replace old automatic behaviors with new and better habits.  As far as your brain is concerned one of the governing principles is “use it or lose it”.  But because we are unaware of many of our habits we must make an effort to bring the behaviors we want to change to our conscious awareness.  We must practice mindfulness when we want to make intentional neuroplastic changes.  Just as “neurons that fire together wire together creating strong habits” the converse “neurons that fire apart wire apart” is an important rule of neuroplasticity. This is great news. If you have learned to love certain foods that you just can’t stop eating, you can also unlearn them through the process of brainchanging.  

Remember, simply telling yourself “I am not going to eat my favorite food” is not going to work because you are fighting a learned behavior. The neurobiological pathway is carved into the very structures of your brain tissue. Simply dieting and willpower alone will really have no chance of bringing about long term weight loss.

If you can identify these pathways in your brain which create the behaviors that hinder your weight loss goals you can alter them by restructuring your brain. You can put neuroplasticity to work for you, because remember, you are always BrainChanging.

Normal human behavior dictates that we seek out activities which bring us pleasure or are rewarding, and thus contribute to our sense of well-being. The underlying system in your brain which is responsible for that subjective experience of pleasure is known as your Endogenous Reward System.

A key word here is endogenous, which means having an internal cause or origin.  That’s a critical concept and we will return to it in a moment. Your subjective experience of pleasure refers to the fact that we all get varying amounts of pleasure depending on the activities that we enjoy. This  experience is totally individual; for some people it might be reading a book, other people might prefer interacting with their friends, and of course almost everybody relishes eating the foods that they like. 

These gratifying experiences are produced in one the older parts of the brain, sometimes called “the mammalian brain”.  The scientific name for this region is the “limbic system”.  Located deep inside the brain, the limbic system is responsible for the feelings and emotions we experience from our body.  It is intimately involved with learning and memory.  Our limbic system basically works to tell us how we “feel about something” so that the cortical area of the brain knows how to think about it or do so something about it.

The Limbic System contains two structures, commonly called the “pleasure centers” of the brain. These structures are called the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens septi. Don’t worry about the names, basically what this means is that if you were to look at images of your brain then these areas would show a lot of activity when you are having a pleasurable experience. The crucial point here is that these pleasure centers are in close and constant communication with the more evolutionarily advanced area of your brain (the primate brain). Within this area there are two regions, the prefrontal cortex and the orbitofrontal cortex, that are very involved with our planning and actions. It is pretty obvious that if your limbic system tells your cortex that an activity is pleasurable that your cortex would want you to act by doing it again or planning to do it again!  

Here is the really important piece. Biochemically, the neurotransmitter dopamine is used to communicate between these various parts of your brain (there are others, but dopamine is the major player). Dopamine is an endogenous neurotransmitter which can be translated to mean “self-made drug”. Drug you say? Yes your brain makes drugs, and lots of them!

Typically, when we think of drugs we mean substances that we ingest or inject. In medical terms these would be referred to as exogenous drugs. But we now know that we also have endogenous drugs. For the sake of simplicity let’s call the exogenous drugs man-made drugs. So we have self-made drugs and man-made drugs. An example of a man-made drug is cocaine, a drug that induces your brain to release dopamine. Typically dopamine is a chemical released in certain areas of the brain when we experience something as pleasurable.  So cocaine produces the same feeling in your brain but doesn’t require you to do anything (except take the drug in one form or another) in order to get pleasure.  So dopamine is a “self-made” drug that makes us feel very happy or euphoric and cocaine is a man-made drug that does the same thing but it does so by cheating.

The problem that we now face is that we are often relying on man-made drugs rather than self-made drugs to allow us to feel pleasure. Nowhere is this more evident than in our relationship with food. Can food act like a drug? Absolutely. When we eat food our limbic system releases some dopamine into those pleasure centers. It’s a good strategy, your brain needs to reward you for eating food because it is essential to your survival. For most of humankind’s history food wasn’t necessarily very easy to come by and we needed the extra incentive of a reward to motivate us to pursue it.  So it has been very important for our survival to have these self made drugs.  They give us incentive to work hard for things that may not be immediately available because we anticipate a reward at the end.  But in today’s world, acquisition of food has really changed.  Not only is it readily available it is prepared, packaged, plentiful and palatable… it requires so little work we barely have to chew it! But our brains still compel us to seek reward, especially if we are stressed. So we engage in behaviors that stimulate production of those self-made drugs. 

This however, is not the whole story. Our physiologic well being is geared towards alway trying to maintain balance or equilibrium.  The medical term for this is homeostasis and it is essential to our health and survival.  Our endogenous drugs are designed to help us maintain homeostasis.  Exogenous drugs can easily upset this balance. Exogenous drugs stimulate your pleasure centers with unnatural intensity.  This can result in addiction which means balance is lost and pleasure seeking or reward seeking turns to pathological craving.  Modern day food offers a lots of convenience but are also highly stimulatory to our pleasure centers.  The food industry knows how your brain works and one of their major goals is to chemically enhance foods so they are more attractive to your pleasure centers. Think about it, when you eat a food that makes you produce self-made drugs and also contains man-made drugs, it acts as a super charged blast to the pleasure centers of our brain. We are in a sense programmed to pursue and consume. These altered foods taste delicious and make us feel better, so we are much more likely to eat them again.

Over the coming week, we are going to take a closer look at the food industry and how you can become addicted to food, just like you would to any other drug.