Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat (11 page)

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Authors: Mike Dow,Antonia Blyth

BOOK: Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat
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Note:
If you scored anything but a 0 in box A, I recommend that you work with a psychiatrist or psychotherapist to implement Diet Rehab. Your treatment may need to be augmented by medication and/or professional support.
If you scored 40 or above, please consult a psychiatrist or psychotherapist immediately to be screened and/or treated for depression, anxiety, addiction, eating disorders, or ADHD before starting this program.
Do You Have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?
 
One extreme presentation of serotonin starvation is obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD symptoms include repetitive counting, obsessive checking or cleaning rituals, extremely specific rules about food, or other problematic compulsions. If you see yourself in this portrait, consult a psychiatrist before starting Diet Rehab. You may need a serotonin-boosting drug such as Luvox or Prozac; they have often been found helpful to OCD sufferers.
 
Serotonin and Your Body
 
If you’ve just found out that you’re serotonin deficient, you might begin to see what has perhaps been behind a host of issues you’ve struggled with. Low serotonin causes emotional ailments such as anxiety, depression, and lack of self-confidence. It can also cause such physical disturbances as trouble with sleep, digestion, and pain. Serotonin is crucial not just for our brains but for our entire bodies.
For example, together with melatonin, serotonin is central to our ability to fall asleep, to stay asleep, and to sleep deeply. We often crave sweets or carbs late at night, which may be our body’s way of seeking the natural sleep assistance of this crucial brain chemical. The problem is that the same sweets and carbs that help us fall asleep work the same way that drinking alcohol before bed does. Both may cause drowsiness, but in the long run, they actually prevent you from getting the deep sleep you need to feel rested and alert the next day. They can help you
fall
asleep, but using these foods as your sleeping aid may also lead you to wake up in the middle of the night when the “high” wears off. Healthy, stable supplies of serotonin are crucial for good sleep.
Serotonin is also active in our cardiovascular system and regulates expansion and contraction of blood vessels while also managing the function of platelets, which help blood to coagulate and close a wound. Low serotonin is implicated in Raynaud’s disease and hypertension.
Digestion relies on serotonin, much of which is manufactured in the gut. Serotonin helps our abdominal muscles contract so they can push food through the gastrointestinal tract. Low serotonin may be associated with a variety of digestive problems, including irritable bowel syndrome.
Finally, serotonin is a known pain reliever. That’s why when our levels are low we often feel achy and more easily laid low by any type of physical challenge. This is also why serotonin-boosting antidepressants are sometimes prescribed for chronic pain, even if the patient doesn’t report depression.
I don’t want you to worry about these potential maladies, but I do want you to understand: If your stores of serotonin are low, it is very difficult for you to function in a healthy, relaxed way. Eating sweet, starchy foods is an understandable response to this uncomfortable state. Unfortunately, if you try to feed your serotonin-starved brain with processed sugar and white flour, you’ll only make the problem worse. First, because of the tolerance element in addiction, you’ll need more and more sweet foods just to get the same comfort.
Second, because of withdrawal, you’ll feel terrible any time you try to give up sugar. You reached for addictive foods in the first place because you thought they would make you feel better—and they do, temporarily. But they also conspire to make you feel worse, particularly when you are holding on to or gaining weight.
What’s the solution? First, add healthy serotonin boosters to your diet and your life. Then, gradually, when you’re getting all the serotonin you need, you can slowly reduce the number of pitfall foods that you were once relying on as a serotonin crutch. At the same time, as we’ll see in this chapter, you can begin to replace pitfall thoughts with boosters—positive, supportive ways of thinking that will also help your serotonin levels rise.
Sugar’s Sweetness Goes Beyond Taste
 
The brain-stimulating effects of sugar are so addictive that mice whose ability to taste sugar had been removed still chose sugar water over regular water every time they were presented with both. Clearly, neither taste nor “psychology” were involved. The mice were responding purely to the chemical effects of sugar.
 
Sleep, Serotonin, and Insulin Resistance: How Sugar and Carbs Make You Tired and Hungry
 
As we have seen, sweet, starchy foods toy with you like a seductive, unreliable lover. One minute, they’re promising to satisfy all your cravings. The next minute, they’ve left you hungrier than ever.
The reason for this roller-coaster appetite is insulin resistance. Insulin is a hormone made in your pancreas that transfers glucose—blood sugar—from your bloodstream to your cells. We call it blood
sugar,
but that’s a misleading term. Blood sugar rises or falls in response to everything you eat: proteins, vegetables, and legumes, as well as sweet or starchy foods.
However, sweets and starches cause your insulin levels to spike because processed flour and sugar metabolize quickly, dumping a lot of sugar into your blood at once. Insulin will then flood your system because it’s trying to bring down those high blood-sugar levels by transferring that sugar right into your cells.
If your insulin spikes too often, your cells will eventually begin to adapt by reducing their response to insulin, which then leaves the glucose floating aimlessly in your bloodstream instead of transferring its energy to your cells. Your blood sugar is too high, and your cells aren’t getting enough of it. Your pancreas will initially respond by making more insulin to saturate your insulin receptors, but over time the pancreas will start to reduce the amount of insulin it releases.
This is a recipe for diabetes and exhaustion. And most paradoxically, it also leads to a constant appetite, since your sugar-starved cells are sending hunger messages to the brain, unaware that all the sugar they need is right there in your bloodstream.
Significantly, serotonin levels rise as you eat, helping your brain to register when you feel satisfied. So if your brain is low on serotonin, it won’t understand that you’re “full,” and you’re likely to keep eating, even when your body has had enough. Besides making you feel anxious, low serotonin levels make you more likely to overeat and less likely to feel satisfied. That’s why you often crave dessert, even when you feel “stuffed” and understand intellectually that you are no longer hungry. And of course, we all know that lethargic feeling we get when indulging in too many carbs and sweets, commonly known as a “food coma.”
Over the long term, the weight you gain from your serotonin shortage can lead to all sorts of problems; one example is sleep apnea, which in turn can lead to restless sleep and sleepiness during the daytime. Once again, you’re caught in the downward spiral of using food to make up for this general feeling of low energy, even as the food you choose depletes your energy further.
The solution? Gradually replace serotonin
pitfalls
—addictive sweets and starches—with serotonin
boosters
: foods and activities that help keep your serotonin at a nice, stable level. If you don’t reverse this downward spiral, you’re setting yourself up for serious health problems. It’s very difficult to simply feed your serotonin addiction “a little” and remain “a little” overweight. Due to the nature of tolerance, you’re going to crave ever-increasing amounts of sweets and starches, and your weight—as well as all the related health risks—will continue to increase.
The good news is that if you can turn this situation around, you’ll create the opposite effect. Every healthy change will give you the energy to make more changes, which will make you even healthier.
Feel-Good Brain Chemicals
 
Our brains are full of chemicals that keep us moving forward in our lives, energetically but calmly. To some extent, sweet and starchy foods cue the brain to make more of these vital chemicals just as they prompt serotonin production. Luckily, the healthy serotonin boosters I’ll be recommending throughout this book will also increase the levels of these other brain supports:
•
Oxytocin
promotes bonding and warm feelings of connectedness. It’s released during cuddling, which is part of why you often feel close to your partner after sex. It’s also released during nursing and promotes mother-child bonding. It’s also released when cuddling with a pet.
•
Endorphins
are natural pain relievers that also lift our spirits. Vigorous aerobic exercise releases endorphins. So do sweet foods, which is another reason you might crave them: They really do make you feel better. Fortunately, endorphins are also released by the healthy serotonin boosters we recommend in Diet Rehab.
 
Cigarettes and Serotonin
 
Smoking is addictive because of the way it boosts dopamine. But in 2004, scientists discovered that smoking also causes the brain to reduce serotonin production. So although it feels as though smoking relieves your anxiety, nicotine actually makes you
more
anxious. In fact, the reason people so frequently overeat after they quit smoking may well be because they are trying to replace the serotonin that cigarettes have depleted.
While you are smoking, the extra dopamine from the cigarettes masks the lack of serotonin. But after quitting, both dopamine and serotonin are in short supply—causing many smokers to seek sweet, starchy, or fatty pitfall foods to make up the difference.
 
Why Dieting Makes You Miserable—Especially If You’re a Woman
 
Americans quickly embraced no-carbohydrate diets, and now when people want to lose weight, cutting back the carbs is usually what they try first. But doing so can dramatically affect your brain chemistry—especially if you’re a woman.
MIT researchers found that carbohydrates cause the brain to release serotonin. Without enough carbohydrates to perform this crucial function, dieters become serotonin-deprived and may feel anxious, irritable, and depressed. In one study, animals deprived of tryptophan—a key amino acid used to make serotonin—became far more aggressive. Now we can see that when dieters have a similar reaction, it’s not a character weakness but a biological response.
Women and those under ongoing stress may be the most at risk. Why? They may have lower levels of serotonin in the brain and process it differently than men, so they can’t afford to lose even a little as the result of a change in diet. Depressed women have been shown to respond more favorably than men to antidepressants that target serotonin, suggesting that low serotonin levels are indeed a significant problem for women and one that makes ordinary diets very problematic for most.
We know that women are about twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression as men, and they’re also far more likely to suffer from migraines. Low serotonin is responsible for a great deal of that discrepancy. Whether women lack serotonin because of their inherent biology or because they face social stressors and negative conditioning that men are spared, the result is the same: Most women are at a serotonin deficit that can easily become a serious problem if either new stress or a restrictive diet further depletes their stores.
Researchers in another study found clear evidence of women’s special difficulties with diets. After three weeks on a low-calorie diet, men and women had lost a similar amount of weight. However, the women were left more anxious and unhappy and far more vulnerable to mood swings than their male counterparts. Since women’s ability to produce and store serotonin may be lower than men’s, the restrictive diets were harder on them. If the diets had offered women alternative sources of serotonin, the women might have lost weight
and
felt better.
Do You Worry About What Others Think?
 
If so, you’re not alone. Those of us who feel anxious—and who are hungry for serotonin—often worry about the reactions of others. At our best, this makes us sensitive, caring, agreeable, and willing to go along with other people’s plans and wishes. Be careful, though, because scientists have found that being
too
agreeable may bring a heavy price—literally. A 2007 Japanese study discovered that agreeable personalities are more likely to gain weight, perhaps because they more easily succumb to other people’s pressure about where, when, and how much to eat.
 
Meet Your Mantra: A Powerful Tool for Self-Transformation
 
As we’ve seen, low serotonin levels produce anxiety. But it works the other way, too: Anxiety and other forms of stress deplete your serotonin.

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