Our ancestors ate to survive; they ate because they were hungry or maybe to celebrate a victory over a warring tribe. Us? We eat because we're angry, bored, stressed, depressed, frustrated, watching a movie, busy, not busy enough, getting together with friends, or PO'd that the Lions lost. What we think of as an emotional reaction - where we substitute chocolate for a conversation, or ice cream for a bath, or chips for a punching bag - isn't always as much about character as it is about chemistry.
Chemical reactions take place in your body and stimulate hunger. Leptin and ghrelin are the joysticks that control our eating actions. But oftentimes, the physical action of eating can be triggered by emotions that coax us to wolf down the mustard-smothered dog. While emotions are the least understood part of the obesity issue, they're also a very real part of overeating for many people. Your hypothalamus is also part of your brain where your mind and body literally connect. As the bosom buddy of the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland sends chemicals to talk to the rest of the body. It's really where the whole weight-loss game is won and lost - this connection between physiological and psychological needs for eating.
As you well know, emotional eating isn't about reaching for celery. Rather, it's out of control, hedonistic eating (that often comes from your food memory), where we eat every cookie in the bag because they look good and taste even better. It's a craving, and usually for something that's starchy, sugary, salty, or loaded with fat. The following five brain chemicals are the ones that primarily influence our emotions, and not only do they provide the foundation for why we eat at certain times, but they're also the key chemicals to many of our current and future weight-loss drugs.
Intentionally, the intricate web of interactions that take place among these chemicals, and the non emotional effects are being left out. The intricacies of these interactions - fully understood by only a few people in the world - are real but not integral to your understanding of the science of emotions for eating. To deal with some of the emotions and stresses that lead to eating, you have to remember that the brain chemicals that influence our hunger and our moods are out "why" regulators of eating:
Norepinephrine: the caveman fight-or-flight chemical. It's what tells you to tangle with a saber-tooth or hightail it to the safety of your hut.
Serotonin: the James Brown of neurotransmitters. It makes you feel good and is a major target of anti depression drugs.
Dopamine: the brain's fun house. It's a pleasure-and-reward-system and is particularly sensitive to addictions. It's also the one that helps you feel no pain.
GABA(gamma-aminobutyric acid): the English Patient of amino acids. It makes you feel like a zombie and is one of the ways that anesthesia may work to reduce your responsiveness to the outside world.
Nitric Oxide: the meditation like chemical. It helps calm you. This powerful neuropeptide is usually a very short-lived gas that also relaxes the blood vessels of the body.
Note: When the level of serotonin in your brain fails, your body senses starvation, and to protect itself, starts craving carbs the way twelve-year olds crave Hillary Duff sightings. Serotonin levels plummet after you go too long without eating, and that prompts your bodily machine to fill itself with foods. Some have tried to keep their serotonin level up by supplementation with 5-HTP, the breakdown product of tryptophan that converts to and stimulates serotonin. In a six week study,a group of dieters using 5-HTP lost an average of twelve pounds, while a control group lost an average of four. Although one side effect of the supplement is nausea, about 90 percent of women taking 300 milligrams of 5-HTP reported satiety while on the diet.
Now, the real question is: What do all these chemicals have to do with whether or not you snack on a Hershey bar or a plum? Probably the best way to think about it is to use serotonin as an example. Picture your brain as a small pinball machine. You have millions of neurotransmitters that are sending messages to and from one another. When your serotonin transmitters fire the signals, they send the message throughout your brain that you feel good; this message is strongest when that feel-good pinball is frenetically bouncing around in your brain, racking up tons of yeah-baby points along the way. But when you lose the ball down the chute (that is, when cells in the brain take the serotonin and break it down), that love-the-world feeling you've just been experiencing is lost. So what does your brain do? Put another quarter in the machine and get another ball. For many of us, the next ball comes in the form of foods that naturally and quickly make us feel good, to counteract the drop in serotonin that we're feeling.
Unfortunately, the way we typically satisfy our urge to play another ball is to use the foods that provide an immediate rush of serotonin. That rush can come with a jolt of sugar: sugar stimulates the release of serotonin. Insulin facilitates serotonin production in the brain, which in turn boosts our mood, makes us feel better, or masks the stress, pain, boredom, anger, or frustration that we may be feeling. But serotonin is only one ball in play. You have all of these other chemicals fighting to send your appetite and cravings from bumper to bumper.
To see how the total picture works, think of these chemicals as parts of a scale. When the chemicals associated with positive feeling (like serotonin or dopamine) are in the up (or activated) position, you're chemically high. But when they've down, you experience a big chemical downfall. And this puts you in a state of anxiety that sends you searching for the chemical high. That's how illegal drugs work too; users keep seeking the high not always for its own sake but to avoid the lows. You're constantly fighting to get back to that place of neurochemical comfort. When these chemicals are high, your weight gets lower, and when they're lower, you reach for the foods that eventually make your weight higher.
That's the reason why what happens under your skull plays such a vital role in what happens under your belt. Knowing how your emotions can steer your desire to eat will help you to resist your cravings and, ideally, avoid them altogether. Your goal: Keep your feel good hormones level so that you're in a steady state of satisfaction and never experience huge hormonal highs and lows that make you search for good-for-your-brain-but-bad-for-your-waist foods.
Mood Foods
Recent research shows what many of us knew all along: Our moods dictate what we eat. Researchers studied the diets of people to show how personality and foods collide - how our moods may steer us to certain foods, on the basis of their physical characteristics. The study theorized that many moods send specific signals; for example, stressed adrenal glands could be sending salt-craving signals. So what does you favorite turn to food say about you?
If you reach for tough foods, like meat or hard, crunchy food - you might be feeling angry.
Sugars: Depression
Soft and sweet foods, like ice cream: Anxiety
Salty foods: Stress
Bulky fill you up foods like crackers and pasta: Lonesome, sexually frustrated
Anything and Everything: Jealous
Dieting Tips:
Work Food in Your Favor.
Foods all have different effects on your stomach, your blood, and your brain. These are some of the nutrients that may influence your hunger and the brain chemicals that affect it:
Turkey contains tryptophan, which increases serotonin to improve your mood and combat depression, and help you resist cravings for simple carbs.
Omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in fish, have long been known as brain boosters and cholesterol clearers, but they've also been shown convincingly to help with depression in pregnant women. Depression contributes to hedonistic and emotional eating. Since many of us have low omega-3 intake, it might explain some other instances of depression as well.
Savor the Flavor.
If you're going to eat something that's bad for you, enjoy it, savor it, roll it around your mouth. We suggest taking a piece of dark 70 percent cocoa chocolate and meditating-as a healthy stress reliever and as a way to reward yourself with something sweet. We're trying to find small ways to make you feel good and increase serotonin so you don't plummet and scavenge for anything you can find. It's Ok to eat bad foods - every once in a while. It's not the first piece that's going to make you fat; it's scarfing down the whole bag that will.
Go To Sleep.
Getting enough sleep keeps you thin. That's because when your body doesn't get the seven to eight hours of sleep it needs every night to get rejuvenated, it needs to find ways to compensate for neurons not secreting the normal amounts of serotonin or dopamine. The way it typically does that is by craving sugary foods that will give you an immediate release of serotonin and dopamine. The lack of sleep throws off your entire system - even increasing your levels of NPY, which increase your appetite. Lack of sleep can become an even bigger factor as you age. When you get older, the pineal gland in your brain produces less of the sleep hormone melatonin, resulting in a craving for carbohydrates. ~Aunt Millie
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