They don’t call love a drug for nothing!
There are three stages to any long-term relationship that are intuitive to those of us that have been committed to someone for ages.
Those three stages are aptly named LUST, ATTRACTION, and ATTACHMENT. The names alone explain a lot, right?!?
Each phase is driven by a different cascade of hormones. Stage one LUST is driven by the obvious SEX hormones estrogen and testosterone.
In stage two ATTRACTION, Adrenaline, Dopamine, and Serotonin (pleasure or feel-good hormones) take the stage.
And stage three ATTACHMENT is driven by oxytocin and vasopressin which strengthen closeness and commitment.
Okay…but what’s love got to do with diet?
Turns out a lot since the hormones during the ATTRACTION stage are the exact same hormones that play a huge role in food addiction (or any addiction, for that matter).
The reason people lose their appetite when love is new isn’t so much that they’re distracted, preoccupied, or… busy (that’s what’s happening during the LUST phase)…
The real reason that new love distracts us from eating (or overeating) is that we’re receiving our serotonin/dopamine (PLEASURE HORMONE) fix in the form of attraction so we don’t need to seek it elsewhere (i.e.from food)…
That is until those hormones wane in the natural course of the relationship. Which explains the “fat and happy” paradox that many of us are way too familiar with.
Explains a ton, doesn’t it?
I am NOT telling you to go out and fall in love with someone new to lose weight. Please do not get that impression!
I’m just saying that dopamine is a hormone to be taken very seriously when it comes to rewiring your brain to become a normal eater.
When you have an overeater’s love affair with food, you experience more “brain hunger” than you do physical hunger because if you’re an overeater, you likely hardly know what true hunger feels like.
Here’s why: from a hormonal standpoint, brain hunger and true hunger are really hard to tell apart.
When I describe leptin, I talk about the same part of our brains lighting up when we think about food as happens with a drug addict thinking about their drug?
When we experience “brain hunger,” our mouths physically start to water and we experience a surge of dopamine just thinking about food – and then get this:
Brain hunger actually triggers the release of neurochemicals that LOWER blood-sugar in anticipation of eating.
If you know anything about what happens when you ride the blood sugar rollercoaster – once your blood sugar drops, a whole host of cravings set in to force you to eat right now to bring your blood sugar level back up.
Then we overeat because we’re looking for that dopamine fix we never receive (remember from yesterday’s email that we have to eat more than a normal eater to get the exact same dopamine release that a normal eater would get).
This leads to the oversecretion of insulin…which (when you’re insulin resistant from being overweight) drops the blood sugar below baseline again…
And that sets off more brain hunger to eat right this moment again.
So when there is no way in hell you could possibly be “truly hungry,” your hunger hormones are driving a cycle of eating insanity that makes no sense to anyone at all, including you while you’re shoveling it all in.
Enter guilt and shame and the stress hormones that drive brain hunger that they bring to the party, and you’ve got the recipe for food-obsessed disaster.
Which is why, when you’re food-obsessed, the mere thought of food (billboards, commercials, smells, memories, and many more triggers) set off a physical response that is harder than hell to head-off unless you understand what’s happening and you have the right tools.
But here comes the GOOD NEWS. This entire cascade can be reprogrammed.
And it’s not with willpower. That actually makes matters worse – I’ll fill you in on that tomorrow.
What it takes is a comprehensive program to deal with:
WHAT to eat to calm your craving hormones and neurotransmitters.
HOW to eat to entirely reprogram the brain’s response to food.
And WHY we eat so that we don’t always have a pilot light lit and ready to ignite the whole thing again at the drop of a pin.
Without addressing all three at the same time, you’ve got a three-legged table missing a leg.
The best news is that you’ll be losing up to a pound a day while you’re doing the inner work required to make the change permanent!
Here’s where we dig deep and take care of this for good >>> www.wildwomanweightloss.com
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