TheBrainChangingDiet

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.

For some people food is just fuel, for most of us it is more, sometimes a lot more.  Throughout most of our history our primary drive has been to seek out and acquire food. We have a built in mechanism to sustain this drive - our reward system. Whenever we eat food and sometimes when we just think about it, chemicals in our brain stimulate certain brain ares that give us a sensation of pleasure. 

Certain foods are more rewarding than others.  Scientists call this quality “palatability”.  When we say that a food is palatable, oftentimes we are referring to its taste. Here though, palatability refers to a food’s ability to stimulate our appetite and prompt us to eat more. Palatability of course involves taste, but it primarily involves our motivation to pursue certain foods. It’s the reason that when it comes to certain foods, we just can’t stop eating. 

What makes a food palatable?  A food’s palatability is largely dependent on the food’s ability to engage all of your senses. This experience is called your perception and is a subjective experience for all of us. It explains why you may like certain foods but your friend may not. We all have different perceptions on how something tastes, smells, looks or feels which in turn creates an experience that is unique to you.  Food that stimulates all of senses has the potential to create intense memories.  This was the basis for one of the most famous books of all time, Swann’s Way, usually called “A Remembrance of Things Past” by Marcel Proust.

When we describe food, people usually talk about taste.  When it tastes really good we say it is “delicious”.  But when we eat, taste is only one of the senses that use. We also describe the SMOOTH, CREAMY pleasure of our favorite chocolate cake, the RICH AROMA of our favorite coffee, or the CRISPY texture of our favorite fried shrimp. Any food writer knows the importance of highlighting these characteristics to make the food seem more desirable and appetizing.

The food industry knows exactly how to create this experience for you, and they do everything in their power to provide a bite that will MELT in your mouth. Here is a short description of an entree that I picked up at a restaurant recently:

“Juicy fire–grilled chicken breast drizzled with our Jack Daniel’s^® glaze and some crispy Cajun–spiced fried shrimp with dipping sauce. Our creamy mashed potatoes and veggies seal the satisfaction. “

Now you may not be hungry, but just reading that will definitely tickle your taste buds. Just the words on the page will create a picture in your mind of what this dish would look, taste, smell and feel like in your mouth. All of this is packaged together to create a perception of the experience we would have if we could eat this meal right now. This perception sends massive anticipatory reactions to the pleasure centers of your brain and you say “ That SOUNDS scrumptious, I think I’ll have that!”

It is this anticipation of stimulation which motivates you to eat long after your physical drives for food have been satisfied. It is why you can’t stop thinking about desert even though you have just started to eat your main course, because you know how delicious desert will be. Humans like to be entertained and have pleasure. The way food is presented to us in today’s society, entertainment and pleasure can easily be satisfied by simply going to your local restaurant.

So the next time you call something “creamy and moist”,  realize that you are probably not eating to satisfy your physical hunger, but instead to delight your senses.