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”.

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.

The triune brain theory is a simplistic view on the brain but it will give you a solid framework to understand how your brain actually works.
The triune brain was first proposed by a neuroscientist called Dr. Paul McLean, who explained that our brain is actually broken into three distinct parts. He referred to them as:

The Reptilian Brain
The Mammalian Brain
The Primate Brain

The Reptilian Brain

The Reptilian Brain consists mainly of brain structures such as the brain stem, the medulla, the pons, cerebellum an other what are considered “primitive” structures. Its major function involves mainly reflexive and internal body functions such as breathing, circulation, digestion etc. It also handles primary instinctive and reflexive actions which serve to protect us. In terms of our understanding its motives lie in such characteristics as aggression, power, sexuality and protection. It’s number one primary goal is survival, i.e To make sure that you stay alive.

The Mammalian Brain

The Mammalian Brain, often referred to as “the limbic system”, contains lots of brain structures or “nuclei”, however most neuroscientists disagree as to which brain structures should be included into the limbic system. For the purpose of our learning we will describe the limbic system as our emotional, memory and pleasure centers of the brain. The limbic system houses brain structures such as the amygdala, the hippocampus and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). The limbic system gives rise to a lot of our feelings. These areas and others will be discussed. An understanding of the mammalian brain will be critical in our understanding of our behavior, particularly towards eating.

The Primate Brain

The Primate Brain is generally composed of the neo-cortex (also called cerebral cortex). It is because of our very large neo-cortex in comparison to other animals that makes us human. The neo-cortex allows us to do things like engage in complex social interactions and to plan for the future.
The neo-cortex also gives rise to rational thinking. For example you can probably remember a time when you really wanted to do something, but you “knew” that you shouldn’t. It was your neo-cortex telling you not to do it.

Although it is true that we have one brain, there are certain parts of our brain that have their own “motives” and this can cause extreme conflict. We all like to think that our neo-cortex is in control all the time, however it can often get “hijacked” by the other brian structures. So while your neo-cortex might be telling you not to eat that cookie, your reptilian brain is shouting at you to eat it because it is afraid that the cookie won’t be available to eat tomorrow or anytime soon in the future. Plus it also knows that the cookie is high in fat and sugar, which is in essence, brain food. Then your emotional brain whispers to you and expresses how delicious it will taste. All in all its a losing combination for your neo-cortex.

Fortunately our neo-cortex comes equipped with a powerful process that we call willpower. So we use our willpower to suppress the desire to gorge and overeat. Unfortunately however we have limited willpower, and eventually we break down and give in to our cravings. In order to change your brain we need to learn how to tame our reptilian brain and work with our emotional brain to put your cortex back in control. This is one of the fundamental steps in controlling the way you eat.

Now that we have a brief understanding of the three brains – join us back when we will discuss how to use our knowledge of the “three” brains to dramatically increase our likelihood of diet success.