Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat (16 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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Paying the Price for Your Caffeine Buzz
 
A key dopamine stimulator is caffeine, which some 90 percent of all U.S. adults consume daily, primarily in the form of coffee, energy drinks, and soda. Like sugar, starches, and fats, caffeine gives us a quick high followed by an uncomfortable crash. In many cases, our response to that crash is to seek either high-carb or high-fat foods to pick us up again. While caffeine does suppress your appetite during the buzz, you might feel hungrier than ever when you crash.
Lack of sleep lowers both your dopamine and your serotonin levels. Caffeine can also interfere with your ability to get restful sleep—and that lack of rest lowers both your dopamine and your serotonin levels. If you’re already getting less sleep than you need—and most Americans are—you may be turning to a combination of sweet, starchy, and high-fat foods plus various forms of caffeine just to make it through the day.
What’s the solution? First, get more sleep—easier said than done, I know, but crucial to your health, well-being, and weight loss. Besides decreasing your levels of vital brain chemicals and setting you up for food cravings, lack of sleep increases the production of cortisol, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, cues your body to hold on to fat.
Second, take a long, hard look at how caffeine might be affecting your rest. The half-life of caffeine is six hours, which means that the coffee or energy drink you consume at four p.m. is leaving you with a half-dose of caffeine by ten p.m. Even when you have no problems falling asleep, caffeine interferes with the depth of your rest. If you wake up the next day feeling tired, you’re setting yourself up to crave more caffeine—and then all the sugar, starch, and fat that helps you through your caffeine cycle.
Of course, if you’re drinking any of the delicious flavored coffee drinks that are so popular these days, you are most likely adding sweets and fats to your caffeine anyway. This combination makes these treats especially hard to resist—and also especially likely to set you up for addiction, exhaustion, mood swings, and weight gain.
In your 28-day Diet Rehab plan, I’ll include suggestions for reducing pitfall levels of caffeine, whether in the form of coffee, soda, or energy drinks. Remember, I won’t ask you to cut back on anything—not even a little bit!—until you’ve spent two entire weeks boosting your dopamine and serotonin levels with foods and activities that will give you some of the same lift that caffeine does now. If just the thought of cutting back the caffeine makes you anxious, please put it out of your mind. You won’t be trying to do without your caffeine buzz until you’re getting that same kick elsewhere—I promise!
Why Diet Soda Is Bad for Your Waistline
 
Okay, I used to be a soda junkie, so I know how awful this next sentence is going to sound, but I have to be straight with you, so here it is: Diet soda interferes with your weight loss.
Why? Because it’s so sweet that once you develop a taste for it, nothing tastes sweet enough anymore. Your palate will have a very hard time preferring a sweet, delicious apple over a diet soda as long as the soda option is available. So diet soda can actually keep you from choosing foods that are going to prevent disease and weight loss. It’s no wonder so many studies show that people who drink diet soda are more likely to be overweight.
The good news is that you can fix this through taste recalibration. Think of it as your car needing an alignment after hitting a big pothole. After this recalibration occurs, you will actually
stop liking
the taste of that hundreds-of-times-sweeter-than-sugar taste. Just as people on a low-sodium diet eventually report previously preferred foods as too salty, the same thing can happen to your taste buds that perceive sweetness. (For more on taste recalibration, see Chapter 10.)
Again, I won’t ask you to even
think
about cutting back on diet soda until your life and diet are full of serotonin and dopamine boosters. So please don’t worry about it now. Just be aware that diet soda is a pitfall food, and when you’re looking at your 28-day Diet Rehab plan, you’ll be counting diet soda as one of your treats.
 
Are You Addicted to Soda?
If the very idea of cutting back on soda makes you want to run screaming for the hills, consider the possibility that you may be using its high doses of caffeine or sugar to self-medicate other concerns. In my experience, hard-core soda drinkers—diet or full-sugar—are sometimes trying to treat underlying depression or ADD/ADHD-like symptoms with dopamine-boosting caffeine, or to address underlying anxiety or low self-worth by loading up on the serotonin-boosting sugar in regular soda. Other times excessive soda/caffeine consumption means their body just needs a little more rest.
Either way, pairing these biochemical needs with a habit you’ve been engaging in for years can give way to an unhealthy compulsion. Luckily, Diet Rehab’s dopamine booster foods and activities can help you achieve the same effect in a healthier way. Boosters such as meditation have also been shown to be clinically effective in treating ADD/ ADHD, so you’ll need less caffeine to feel focused.
If you’re turning to caffeine because you’re exhausted, serotonin boosters will help you achieve the peace you’re craving. Thirty minutes of extra sleep or a ten-minute walk outside your office is another great remedy for exhaustion and stress. A Sudoku puzzle or cup of green tea may be a great replacement for soda when you need a little pick-me-up. You don’t have to decrease
anything
before we start
adding
to your life. And, remember, at no point in Diet Rehab are you ever asked to cut anything out of your diet entirely. You can always have at least a little of anything you’d really like.
So if you really want that diet soda, go for it! But I bet you’ll be craving it less after you’ve completed the program. If you’re still noticing significant symptoms, such as inability to focus, hyperactivity, depression, or anxiety, consider seeing a psychiatrist or psychotherapist.
Revving Up Your Brain—Naturally
 
Dopamine usually works with two other activating brain chemicals that, luckily, are also supported by our dopamine boosters: adrenaline (also known as epinephrine) and noradrenaline (also known as norepinephrine). These stress hormones are designed to rev us up for “fight or flight,” and they are key elements in feeling motivated, excited, challenged, and thrilled.
People with ADD/ADHD are often treated with dopamine-boosting stimulants or Wellbutrin, an antidepressant that boosts dopamine. Sometimes, though, they are prescribed the nonstimulant Strattera, a “norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor,” which basically increases the available norepinephrine in the brain. People with depression are often given a class of drugs known as SNRI—serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors—which increase both the serotonin and the norepinephrine available to the brain.
Diet Rehab is also geared to address these vital brain chemicals. If you get plenty of dopamine boosters, you will also be supporting your adrenaline (epinephrine) and noradrenaline (norepinephrine) levels as well.
 
Low Dopamine: Frustration, Boredom, and Feelings of Inadequacy
 
By now you understand that low dopamine levels create listlessness, frustration, boredom, feelings of inadequacy, and, in some cases, full-blown clinical depression. But it works the other way, too: being trapped in a frustrating, boring, or discouraging situation depletes your dopamine.
 
Which came first, the thoughts or the brain chemistry? Like the chicken and the egg, we can’t pinpoint it exactly—but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is interrupting your pitfall thoughts while revitalizing your brain chemistry.
Dopamine booster foods are crucial for giving you the lift that you may now be getting from caffeine, nicotine, or high-fat foods. If you want to start adding these boosters to your diet immediately, turn to page 219. When you get to Part IV, you’ll learn how to craft your 28-day Diet Rehab plan and how to add dopamine boosters to your diet every day, giving you the emotional and biochemical support you need to get off the caffeine “buzz-crash” roller-coaster.
You can also harness the power of your mind to replace
pitfall
thoughts, which generate discouragement, fatigue, and lack of motivation, with
booster
thoughts, which generate excitement, energy, and determination. As we saw in Chapter 4, transforming your mantra by adding booster activities is one of the most powerful thought- and mood-transforming tools you can have.
Novelty and Obesity
 
Novelty-seeking personality types are more likely to crave a dopamine hit—and are also more likely to be obese, according to recent research. A 2006 study found that obese people were more likely to be novelty seekers than the control group. Since novelty seeking is also associated with impulsivity and gratification seeking, a possible explanation for the higher weight is that this personality type was more likely to give into their cravings while failing to consider long-term consequences.
 
Identifying Your Mantra
 
If you skipped Chapter 4, go back and read “Meet Your Mantra” (pages 84–91) to find out what a mantra is and how it can help you replace pitfall thoughts with booster thoughts. If you’re coping with low dopamine, your mantra is likely to express discouragement, defeat, and a sense of inadequacy. Here are some common “ravenous for dopamine” mantras:
• Something has to change.
• I’m just not good enough.
• I never really succeed.
• I let people down a lot.
• My life is not going the way I thought it would.
• I can’t finish anything.
• No one really understands me.
• Is this all there is?
• I just can’t get started.
• I can’t do anything right.
• Something’s wrong with me.
• I just can’t get it together.
• I feel helpless.
• I wish I was somewhere else.
I know it’s not pleasant looking at such negative statements, but like a surgeon getting ready to cut out an unhealthy growth, we’ve got to identify the problem with precision before we can do anything about it. Every one of us tells ourselves a story about the world and who we are—a story that is embodied in our mantra. Our mantra tells us what we can expect, from the world and from ourselves. If we’re going to change our behavior and get new results, we will get a lot further if we start by changing our mantra. But we can’t
change
our mantra until we
identify
our mantra.
So what’s
your
mantra? Do any of the ones above sum up your sense of yourself and the world? If so, this is your pitfall mantra. Write it down and then go right to the next section to find out how this mantra affects your weight.
If none of the statements I’ve supplied accurately describes you, now is the time to write down your own personal pitfall mantra. Take a few minutes and really get down the sentence or phrase that captures your core beliefs about who you are and how the world responds to you. What words do you keep hearing that make you feel discouraged, unmotivated, and inadequate? Please write them down somewhere you can easily access them and then proceed to the next section.
How Your Mantra Affects Your Weight
 
As we saw in Chapter 4, your pitfall mantra has a powerful effect on your brain chemistry. Each time you repeat it to yourself—even unconsciously—your dopamine levels fall a little bit. If you feel trapped inside these thoughts, you will feel trapped inside your life—and your brain chemistry will reflect that:
 

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