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.

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.

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.