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Can you be addicted to food?

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I’d venture to guess that you have always kept at least a little bit of sugar in your pantry.
I’d also venture to guess that you’ve never eaten scoops of it right out of the bag.
But the moment you’ve added it to the creamed butter in the mixing bowl to start making cookies, you’ve been tempted to take a taste.
Add the flour and to the mixer and if you’ve got a highly sensitive food brain like I do, you’re lucky if any of the cookie dough makes it to the oven.
Along these same lines, we don’t really crave starch plain, like a plain baked potato. We crave a potato loaded with salted butter.
We don’t crave flour mixed with water. We crave flour, water, oil, sugar, and salt and we call it bread.
So what is it that we’re really craving?
To answer this, we have to look at our biochemistry from an evolutionary standpoint.
Propagating our species is, was, and always will be our #1 evolutionary priority just like it is for all living things.
It may not be your personal priority for modern-day psycho/emotional reasons but it’s still hard wired into you which is why you continue to have sex in your reproductive years even if you don’t “want” kids so stay with me.
Keeping our offspring alive to propagate our species requires food, shelter, and water.
We are hardwired to expend as little energy as possible to find that food/water/shelter for obvious survival reasons.
Of these 3, food is the hardest to find on a consistent basis (just watch a season of Alone if you doubt this).
Our brains are wired to register (and reward us through a feeling of relief/bliss) for finding food. Especially food that is calorically dense enough to keep us alive for a while so we have the energy to… reproduce and to find more food.
The more calorically dense, the bigger the reward, not just in our bellies but in our brain so that we’re likely to repeat the behavior that led to finding that food.
This means that Salmon is more rewarding than wild lettuce and we’re willing to work harder to catch a salmon than we would be to find some lettuce.
This hard wiring is a feel-good reward system driven by dopamine in our brain. Dopamine plays a huge role in all habits via a reward/motivation/behavior loop.
Our brain naturally registers (and rewards us with a feeling of pleasure) for finding fat because fat is calorically more dense than either carbohydrates or protein alone.
Our brain also naturally registers (and rewards us big time) for finding carbohydrates, especially sugar because there is nothing in nature that is inherently sweet and poisonous.
Sugar plus fat equals a huge dopamine score because that signifies safe caloric density.
Random behavior (stumbling on huckleberries for the first time) triggers dopamine to reward us, pleasure is registered, our brain wires a connection between blueberries and pleasure, that guarantees we’re likely to repeat the steps that led to finding the blueberries.
Next time we get hungry we remember the berries, craving is triggered, the behavior is repeated.
This whole system exists to guarantee that behavior that is helpful to survival gets repeated. The more the behavior gets repeated, the stronger the neurology driving the behavior (ie, the stronger the desire) and the more automated the behavior becomes.
This is when cravings feel out of control. They are. Out of our rational control anyway.
This is all happening in our more primitive/emotional brain, not our rational (I want to fit into my swimsuit this summer) brain.
Our modern food supply hijacks this inherent biochemical reward system.
Our biochemistry drives our behavior around processed food and food manufacturers exploit the crap out of this. They call it the bliss point.
The bliss point is a perfect blend of fat/salt/sugar that is irresistible to us because it triggers this dopamine reward that feels wonderful for a few moments.
That pleasure feeling lays down neural pathways that guarantee that we’ll never walk past that food again without triggering desire.
It’s basic biology. And understanding it allows you to quit being exploited by it.
Want to learn more?

Join our Wild Woman Facebook Group where I give you tools to stop being hijacked by processed food

https://www.facebook.com/groups/wildwomanwellness

See you in the group!

Is Your Inner Rebel Blowing Your Diet AGAIN?

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I talked in my last post about our inner Critic and how she keeps us playing small in order to protect us from external Criticism.

Today, I want to introduce you to her (even) less mature although somewhat more entertaining younger sister, our inner Rebel.

Both of these show up as disempowering voices within each of us.

No one is immune from them although they manifest differently based on our inherent personality and our upbringing.

It’s crucial to be able to identify the voices of our Critic and Rebel in order to be able to separate them from the voice of our authentic, wise, grounded, capable, rational self.

When we fuse with the Rebel and the Critic and allow them to dominate our thoughts, it feels like we’re off-kilter (at the very least) or spinning, completely unbalanced, and out of control (at their extreme).

We eat, drink, check FB, shop (whatever your addiction) to distract us from the incessant drone of the Critic, and the tension she creates.

In order to get a handle on those behaviors, we have to recognize when these disempowering voices start calling the shots.

When it comes to weight, no amount of rational “vowing to stop eating” or “starting a new diet plan” is going to override the wiring driving our conflicting behavior.

None.

Unconscious programming always wins.

That’s the way we’re designed.

That’s why every “new plan” ends just like every other “new plan” that came before. Wherever we go, there we are, as long as our Rebel and Critic are driving the bus.

Our Critic’s role is to keep us playing small, to keep us safely living just under our growth edge. She works in an underhanded, subconscious, passive-aggressive way.

She’s both a nagging, hopeless, “why bother” feeling and a tape running through our mind reminding us of all the “reasons” why we can’t do something.

She’s the reason Prozac exists. Depression, fear, and anxiety are her fortes. Imposter Syndrome is her specialty.

She keeps us spinning and “getting ready to get ready to get ready”. She reminds you that no matter what, we’re not quite good enough yet to leap.

Better take another course, check Facebook, update our Linkedin profile, stall a while longer…
As long as you’re paralyzed, you’re safe in her eyes.
She fully subscribes to the promise that the devil you know is way safer than the devil you don’t.
Our Rebel, on the other hand, is way more obvious in her undermining insanity.
Most women can identify her when she chimes in. She’s like the quirky friend that we avoid when we are “being good” because she’s oh so fun to be “bad” with.
She provides a welcome relief from the internal tension caused by the underhanded voice of the Critic.
Our Rebel feels like the sly grinning devil on one shoulder urging us to throw caution to the wind and just “Fck it”.
We can only (dysfunctionally) operate under the tension of the Critic for so long.
Then we cave to the Rebel’s urging us to break the rules (especially the ones we’ve set for ourselves because it’s usually our Critic that made the rules to begin with).
We all have our own unique Rebel but when it comes to women who struggle with weight, some of their Rebel’s favorite lines are, “You can start again Monday”, “Just this once”, and “It’s not fair”.
When we heed our Rebel’s urging to throw caution to the wind and deal with it all “tomorrow”, we experience momentary relief from the Critic’s incessant tormenting and her constant reminder that we’re “not yet good enough”.
But…
Heeding the Rebel’s urging to break the rules always turns up the Critic’s volume.
The problem isn’t so much in the Rebel urging us to “misbehave”, it’s in her ability to provoke our inner Critic.
And their dance continues…
Keeping us from ever quite achieving what it is that we truly desire.
This really unhealthy codependent relationship between the two inside our mind is what turns the Rebel’s “one bite” into the Critic’s “all or nothing thinking”.
This dance makes that one bite turn into a whole bunch of dieter’s drama that leads to one week, then one month, then longer “getting ready to get ready to find the willpower to get back on plan”.
It’s so easy to buy into their drama and lose our objective ability to step back and watch their BS for what it is.
We lose our ability to separate into our wise authentic mind because they hijack our rational frontal cortex.
When that happens, we follow them into their predictable disempowering spin over and over again.
So what’s the solution?
The first step is to recognize your personal drama triggers.
For most women, their triggers are collective stress like natural disasters, Covid, etc, the internal stress of hitting an upper limit, leaning out over your growth edge, getting triggered in that predictable yet disempowering way by your spouse, peer, boss, or a complete stranger, and coming up against a competing commitment.
Particularly persistent Critics are protecting us (although it’s a very misguided attempt at protection) from something that they believe will happen based on something that’s happened in the past.
The reason it doesn’t work to override their insanity with our rational brain is because the Critic and her misguided fear are not housed in the same part of the brain as our ability to recognize her craziness.

The Empowered Craving Freedom Method I use with my clients targets the unconscious programming of our Critic at its source freeing my women from their incessant cravings and frustrating behavior around food!

Want to learn more? i invite you to join my free Facebook group where I cover this and a whole lot more. 🦋

>>> https://www.facebook.com/groups/wildwomanwellness

The Inner Critic and Guilt/Shame About Food

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It’s a fascinating human phenomenon, the way we get in our own way and keep ourselves from achieving the exact thing we most desire.
I just had this happen to me yesterday. It showed up as an Upper Limit Wine Craving.

It goes like this…

We feel a tug and start to expand and grow in a direction that we know is an exciting and important next step.
We’re excited and on fire – the path opens up and seems completely clear, like how in the world did we not notice this before?
We start moving in that exciting new direction, typing a mile a minute, ideas flowing like crazy, we can barely write fast enough to keep up with the ideas coming through to us.

And while we receive this exciting new download, without us noticing consciously, the critic within starts to quietly begin her assault.
It’s predictable yet it never fails to knock us off guard because our critic knows every single weak point to stab and exactly how to dig the knife in and twist it around… because she is part of us.

She carries the imprint of every painful experience we’ve had to date. Her job is to keep us playing small, to protect us from outside criticism and harm.

In a twisted way, she protects us by attacking first.
In doing so, she keeps us hostage to our unconscious commitments and conflicting beliefs. These are our big assumptions that underlie and drive our entire approach to life.

My personal top two are, “Something could go wrong” and “I could be judged/attacked” (verbally, not physically).

My critic has collected a whole lot of evidence that both of these are very real possibilities. They’ve both happened many times.

Big deal, right? My rational, conscious mind thinks these fears are childish, that I should be way beyond them. My rational mind desperately wants me to bust through these damn fears that no longer serve me and freakin quit letting them hold me back already!

Unfortunately, my rational mind doesn’t call the shots that really matter here – the ones driving my behavior. Our willpower driven rational mind is responsible for less than 20% of our behavior actually and it’s not the irrational behavior that gets us into trouble because… well… it’s rational.

That other 80% though – the irrational crap – the behavior that directly conflicts with our rational mind’s goals…

As an otherwise empowered and high achieving woman, it’s this automated behavior bullshit that drives me nuts because I can see that this conflicting behavior is responsible for derailing my most well-laid plans time and time again!
I just flat get in my own way. We all do. And with the right tools, we can nip it in the bud.
Here’s a typical type-A, high achieving woman’s example: She wants to lose 20 lbs by summer (rational brain) but she keeps working late and not planning dinner (unconscious programming driven by a conflicting belief).
No amount of diet planning and vowing to get the weight off is ever going to override that conflicting belief (her equal or greater commitment to something else). That conflicting belief is actually driving her behavior.
Attempting to strengthen her resolve/willpower/drive – her rational conscious desire for the outcome is the way most of us go about tackling this.
Women say to me, “I just need to find the willpower”… like it’s a magical ring we’ve misplaced somewhere.
But…then that same 20lbs turns into 30lbs and last summer turns into this summer.
We’re still blaming our willpower and resolve but honestly, more resolve isn’t going to work or it would have by now.
It’s not a lack of desire to get the weight off that is causing the problem, it’s that she’s equally committed to a conflicting belief.
Next, she tries layering on some guilt and shame for being so damn weak. (We think, if we could just get mad enough at ourself, we’d change)
That only backfires 100% of the time too because now she’s stress eating to avoid her own self-induced own guilt/shame spiral.
So what’s the solution?
I’ve been doing this work for decades and the only thing that works consistently for high achieving women to move past this is dislodging that competing belief at its core. This is step three in The Empower Method – the path to permanent weight loss.
We use the familiar uncomfortable feeling we get to illuminate where we’ve hit an Upper Limit and instead of turning away from it (through food, drink, distraction), we welcome the information and we use it to diagnose a competing belief. Then we use 4 very specific tools to remove it at its core.
Anything else is just a bandaid and the next time you hit an Upper Limit or lean out over your growth edge, that familiar feeling, that quiet yet persistent attack from your critic knocks you right back down again and leaves you wondering… How the hell did I manage to get in my own way again?
If you’d like to learn the tools to recognize when this process begins and to finally get out of your own way starting with weight and food for good, reach out and we’ll have a quick chat to see if Empower Coaching is a fit for you.

If it’s a good fit, we’ll get started immediately. Your health and your life are waiting and there’s no time like the present to fix this for good! 🦋

The Insomnia Estrogen Connection

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Ladies, for those of you that have weight issues, insomnia, estrogen dominance, anxiety or depression, and you’ve tried every diet, every supplement, read all the books, googled for hours… My story might change everything for you.
I hadn’t slept through the night without the help of a sleeping aid in 30 years.
For reals. Not one night.
My mom says I didn’t sleep on the way home from the hospital. She says that as a toddler, I couldn’t get to sleep because I couldn’t turn my brain off. As a teenager, I couldn’t stay asleep. As an adult, I know 3am better than I know my husband.
Of course I do – I walk around like a half-crazed zombie every day – putting off (until I get some sleep), all the things I should get done – including having a normal relationship with my family, showing up for anything after 4pm, dishes, laundry, errands, friends – unfortunately when you’re running on empty, there really isn’t any of you available to anyone else. 😴😴😴
I’m barely surviving most days, counting the moments until bedtime. Then praying… praying I’ll be able to sleep. 🛏️
I’ll think to myself… I haven’t slept in 4 nights, maybe tonight I’m tired enough to just take my herbal concoctions 🌿 instead of something stronger to sleep…
I’ve taken enough Benadryl in my life to be assured of dementia… muscle relaxants, those can’t be good every day… the sleep prescriptions scared me so I never really took them…
People ask how I read two to three health books a week? I don’t watch TV and I know better than to be on a screen with insomnia so what the heck else am I going to do at 3am? 📚📚
I also have an uncanny knack for assimilating and retaining a whole lot of that information – that’s an interesting part of this story and has the same etiology as why I can’t sleep so stay with me.
Well-meaning friends suggest that I may have anxiety. Ya think? 30 years with no sleep would make anyone anxious.
Well-meaning doctors suggest I should lose some weight, it must be hormones… Cool – yep, I know that every hormone in my body is off and yes I’m overweight… because… have I mentioned, I DON’T SLEEP?
How about a sleep test… the first one when I was in my early 20’s told me I didn’t sleep enough to diagnose my sleep… and my official diagnosis was an excessively sleepy light sleeper… SUPER helpful… 👍
The second one in my 30’s… still didn’t sleep enough to diagnose but he said, “You are overweight so you probably have sleep apnea, here’s a breathing machine”…
👍Also SUPER helpful… I spent the next two months lying awake while hooked to an uncomfortable breathing machine… If I had waking apnea, that machine may have helped…$4000 sleep machine gifted to my dad.
Well-meaning family members remind me that I better figure this out because my health is at risk… Cool thanks, I had no idea that not sleeping for 30 years could be a problem. I’ll make a note of that.
What about exercise before bed? 🚴‍♀️ Now I can’t GET to sleep and when I do, I still wake up a few hours later.
Exercise earlier in the day? Now I’ve used up every tiny bit of myself there was and there is nothing left of me with hours to go until bedtime.
Sleep books… try this herb, go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time… check – I go to bed at 10 and wake up at the same time every day…. 3am – hmmmm… I’m not feeling any better with this sleep hygiene thing?
How about I sleep in a dark room? Oh wait, I’ve done that since I was born. Turn down the heat. Nice, now I’m frozen while awake at 3am. Weighted blanket. Now I’m sweating and awake at 3am.
You get the picture. I have tried EVERYTHING. Read all the books. Done the yoga. Taken the prescriptions. Fasted. Juiced. Cleansed. Hormones. Carbs. No carbs. CBD. THC. Melatonin. Every herbal sleep blend on the planet. I tried drinking a bottle of wine a night. Quit drinking. Gave up coffee. Six thousand dollar alkaline water filter. Acupuncture. Magnets. Energy work. Massage. Meditation. Hypnosis. 🧘‍♀️
I read at least 2 health books a week. Believe me, I’ve tried it.
Enter some amazing synchronicity. 🌸
A client asked me to help her discern what dietary changes she may need for her MTHFR issues with elevated homocysteine.
I just happen to have an interest in MTHFR because learning about that 15 years ago saved my marriage. A story for a different day but I saw the effect firsthand that supplementing and eating properly for a particular genetic variant could have.
In researching for my client, I stumbled upon genetic information that has literally changed the course of my life. 🙏🙏🙏
I’d previously not given this any credit because there are some really sketchy companies out there offering genetic testing but honestly, they’ve looked at one study to make their conclusions and they neglect to tell you that 3 other studies contradict the one they’re sighting to give you their recommendation to buy their supplements.
I knew genes mattered (obviously) but I had no idea how much control we really have over the expression of our genes or how much information is now available to us thanks to the human genome project.
And if you have a devour the research and connect the dots brain like I do (thanks to the same gene actually) and enough of a science background to weed through some pretty in-depth Pubmed studies, the answers to all your persistent health problems can actually be found in your genes!
I’d been looking for answers in the symptoms (insomnia, overweight, moodiness, anxiety, hormones). No wonder nothing ever worked long term, I wasn’t addressing it at the genetic (cause) level.
I immediately realized that my infertility, estrogen dominance, and weight issues are all SYMPTOMS of the same gene and what I’d been eating (or maybe I should say, not eating) was actually exacerbating my insomnia through this pathway.
I realized that my insomnia is also related to another gene that doesn’t allow me to turn serotonin into melatonin. AHA! That’s super helpful to know! I’m not crazy, weak, and unable to control my “anxiety”, and I’m never going to “just tell myself to stay asleep”. My sleep hormone fails to turn on!
None of my “symptoms” is the actual problem and chasing symptoms is pretty useless if you don’t know what’s causing the symptom to begin with!
Everything I’d tried was just a bandaid at best. A lot of what I’d tried over the years actually made my particular (fairly serious) gene variants even worse.
I’d been looking for a solution to the symptoms of my problem, not the problem itself.
I’m a health coach, a nutrition expert, I have a degree in nutrition and exercise science, and I’m a complete health information junkie. I eat extremely healthily most of the time (I’m human) and have for years. In fact, I was already eating very similarly to the way experts suggest we all eat to keep our genes as healthy as possible. 🥬
It was just that this one gene required me to add in a category of foods to my dinner plate that I’d been convinced were the devil.
It took an inexpensive but very specific genetic test and quite a bit of research beyond my initial resource…
But once I poured over the research and put the pieces of the puzzle together – I determined which trouble gene is causing almost all my most pressing problems, made one quite subtle and counterintuitive shift to my already healthy diet and within days a whole shit ton of my “symptoms” started to disappear.
We’re talking – a whole new Michelle emerged!
And hopefully, I’ve also saved my life by getting to the bottom of my sleep issues and estrogen dominance. I already had thyroid cancer, I certainly don’t want breast cancer too!
Now I know that those of you with insomnia, weight issues, and estrogen dominance are dying to know what I changed. We all want it to be as simple as a diet or a pill.
I’m not going to tell you what I changed though and here’s why. 🤐
➡️ What I’m eating is what I specifically tweaked for my exact genetic biochemical makeup. Not yours.
Two of my closest friends have the exact same symptoms but a different gene is causing their struggles and my tweak is the exact opposite of what they need to do.
We’ve all tried every single thing that works for those around us and instead, we have to figure out what works for us. What supports our unique genetic code.

If someone’s health greatly improves with a particular diet (including the insanely healthy one I designed) it’s not because that diet is perfect for everyone, it’s because that diet is working with, instead of against their genes.

What appears to balance their system can actually tip into imbalance over time – that’s exactly what happened to me. This is why you can feel amazing on a new plan for a few weeks but ultimately cravings take back over and derail you. That’s often your body’s wisdom trying to get your attention.

Luckily there is a base eating plan that supports all our genes and detox systems and the key is in what you aren’t eating as much as what you are. The biggest tip I can give you is that if it comes in a package, don’t eat it.

From there it’s just tweaking to remove foods you’ve become sensitive to and include those that support your genes.

You have to be empowered to approach it in this way instead of treating it as just another weight loss diet though.

We are all unique and have our own set of genetic variants. There are about 10 of them that are becoming more and more well researched because they are the big guns when it comes to causing really serious health problems in our modern lifestyle if they aren’t taken care of properly.

You might have insomnia, estrogen dominance, and anxiety too but remember those are just symptoms and what matters is changing the way you eat in accordance with your unique genetic makeup (more specifically your particular combination of the big 10) because that is what is causing those symptoms.

Treating the symptoms, even at the hormonal and neurotransmitter level, (although super important and sanity-saving) is still just a bandaid if you don’t understand why you have these imbalances to begin with.

Tweaking your lifestyle to support your own unique genetic makeup is where the magic happens!

I share all about this and more in my free Facebook group. I invite you to join the conversation there!

>>> https://www.facebook.com/groups/wildwomanwellness

🦋

Michelle

New Diet, Same Shit

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If you struggle with weight no matter which diet you try, this might help you understand why.
When working with women to overcome their cravings – hormonal stabilization provided through reducing carbohydrate consumption is crucial.
This study proves exactly what I, and hundreds of my clients have experienced. Reducing carbohydrates reduces cravings (hormonal cravings specifically). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31878131
Reducing body fat quickly with a micro-nutrient dense low carb diet has always been the first goal when women work with me. We must stabilize biochemical cravings first.
I wish this was the entire answer. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if it was? We’d all go on a well designed low carb diet and live happily ever after.
Unfortunately… although a well-designed low carb diet reduces almost all hormonal cravings, it doesn’t eradicate emotional, environmental, and habitual cravings and those are the reasons we continue to struggle even when we’re on a well-designed diet.
It’s these other three that blindside dieters usually about week 4 on their new plan.
It goes like this… you’re cruising along – feeling better than you’ve ever felt – losing about a pound a day – certain that you will NEVER, under any circumstances – EVER go off this diet… then WHAM – something happens – a vacation, a stressful event, dinner out – it doesn’t really matter what it is – an environmental, emotional, or habitual craving gets triggered.
You realize there is more to this than just finding the perfect diet.
Next, guilt and shame flood in – and you find yourself emotionally eating because you ate “off your plan”.

Then the hormonal blood sugar roller coaster sets in and now you’re emotionally, hormonally, habitually, and environmentally craving everything in sight.
What happens next? Every dieter knows this well…

Screw it – I’ll start over on Monday mindset kicks in – meanwhile, I’m going to eat every single thing in sight – all or nothing thinking takes over and you’re into a full blown 5-day binge.

Can you relate?
Yes, your diet matters but the reason you’ve struggled no matter what diet you’ve gone on is that we have 4 craving triggers and they all have to be tamed to keep the weight off for good.
It’s woman-nature to blame the diet for not working but really it’s just that a well-designed diet only tames one of the four craving triggers.
This is why diet #102 ends the exact same way diet #1 through #101 did.
You’re not broken – you’re not weak – you just were blessed with a craving body and brain.
There’s a solution I promise, but it’s not just another diet. 🦋

I invite you to join me in my free Facebook group to learn more. 

Ever tried (and failed) intuitive eating???

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I was recently at a conference in Phoenix with a room full of mental health professionals. 

We were there learning a fascinating technique to unlink the emotional memory of trauma in the brain. The implication for using this technique in helping my clients overcome stress or emotional eating is more than exciting. 

What this post is about, though, is a conversation I had over dinner with a psychologist who was extremely interested in learning more about my program. She told me that the worst advice she ever gave a patient was to take an intuitive eating course. 

I guessed immediately where she was going with her story, so what she told me next was no surprise. 

Mary desperately wanted to lose weight and had already tried diet after diet, so she took her psychologist’s advice to try something different and she enrolled in an intuitive eating course. 

This course was designed to help her reject dieting and give herself unconditional permission to trust her body to eat whatever she feels like whenever she feels like eating. 

That sounds like a dream, right? And it might work for someone with zero environmental, biological, emotional, and habitual drives to overeat. 

Here’s the problem for the rest of us in one word:

Leptin

What I can tell from their writing is that most intuitive eating coaches don’t believe all of the hundreds of thousands of scientists that have proven over and over that the organ that controls eating is not the stomach but the brain. 

I’m going to simplify this down to its core, so bear with me a moment, please, as I get a tiny bit neuroscientific, because it’s crucial for your health that you understand leptin 101. 

I’ll share leptin 102 in another post which involves a fascinating multi-million dollar scandal in which pharmaceutical companies, not overweight consumers, are the big-time losers. 

Leptin is THE MASTER hormone in the body, controlling all metabolism and also the thyroid gland itself. Leptin wasn’t discovered until 1994 due to of a combination of the newly emerging field of obesity neuroscience, technology advances, and because no one suspected that fat cells could be a crucial part of two major body systems -Endocrine and Immune – and at the end of the day, that those cells can be actually self-perpetuating. 

Leptin’s implications throughout the entire body can’t be stressed enough. Leptin is driving the entire show, which is why it’s super important to understand how it gets messed up as we become overweight. 

Leptin (and other recently discovered endocrine and immune functions of the fat cell itself) is the reason that we lose the argument as to whether it’s possible to be both overweight and truly “healthy.” 

Leptin’s main job in a healthy right weight body is to tell the hypothalamus how much fat we have on the body. The hypothalamus then up- or down-regulates all other metabolism in the body, and the most important task for this convo is that it either turns off or turns on hunger. It quite literally functions as a hunger switch.

From an evolutionary (pre-supermarket by about 500 million years) standpoint, we need just enough fat to continue to reproduce even when food is scarce, yet not so much that we are unable to move quickly and nimbly to escape danger. 

When leptin sends its signal (that there is enough fat for survival), the hypothalamus immediately sends out signals that that we’re full, and we immediately don’t need or want to eat anymore. 

If a little too much fat accumulates, leptin gets really loud and the hypothalamus up-regulates metabolism (enter leptin’s control of the thyroid) and burns that extra little bit of fat off so that we can stay nimble and quick and ready to jump over the candlestick. 

Okay, just making sure you’re paying attention…it’s so that we aren’t carrying excess weight and can therefore more easily escape danger. 

That’s the way the system is designed to work. 

But…however…pause for emphasis. 

Our system was never designed to be subjected to the barrage of sugar and highly palatable foods we now have readily available with as little effort as it takes to rip open a package.

Unfortunately, in overweight individuals, what has happened is that the body has become insulin resistant and the brain has become leptin resistant. 

Leptin is screaming,”THERE IS ENOUGH FAT ON THIS BODY! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, CEASE THE EATING!” 

And the hypothalamus is like my three-year-old – it’s absolutely not listening. It doesn’t even register that the fat cells are talking to it. 

The hypothalamus has become leptin resistant and literally can’t hear leptin telling it to send out the “stop eating” signals and turn off hunger. 

The hypothalamus does not see what we see in the mirror, and since it can’t hear leptin screaming, it actually thinks we’re starving. So it sends out, “WE’RE STARVING, CUE THE HUNGER AND CRAVINGS and UP-REGULATE THE DOPAMINE REWARD ADDICTION CENTERS IN THE BRAIN TO FORCE THIS FAMISHED BODY TO SAVE ITSELF AND EAT EVERYTHING IN SIGHT,AND DON’T STOP UNTIL LEPTIN TELLS ME TO TELL YOU TO STOP!”

Poor misunderstood leptin is wondering why in the hell no one listens to her. She’ been screaming so long that her partner, the hypothalamus, has totally tuned her out. Familiar to anyone else’s family!?

So what happened to Mary in her intuitive eating course? 

She went in metabolically imbalanced and totally emotionally discombobulated around food. 

Her leptin resistance was causing her to feel constantly hungry, be super rewarded in her brain for finding evolutionarily dense foods that would have helped her survive three bad winters with one bite, and insulin resistant enough that she re-entered the “blood sugar rollercoaster of hell,” which added to the cravings and confusion. 

Her coach told her that to lose weight, she must give herself a license to eat any time she’s hungry, to eat absolutely anything she’s craving, and to stop when she gets full.

Are you still with me in this story?

Mary hasn’t felt “full” in over a decade. She has no clue what “full” feels like because it’s not a signal that her body sends since her brain thinks her body is starving. 

She notices when there is zero physical space left in her stomach from- time-to-time, but 5 minutes later she’s hungry again, questioning whether or not she’s losing her mind, and if she needs to be locked in a psych ward to get this under control. 

Here’s how it played out: Mary started off gingerly enjoying some of her favorite sugary foods. I mean, her coach assured her that this was the right thing to do. 

Her blood sugar now thrust her back on the “eat every two hours rollercoaster of insanity.” As her system became even more imbalanced and she decided to honor her nearly constant hunger as she’d been instructed, she dove head first into the most highly palatable and addictive foods she could find. 

She overate partially because processed food is designed to make us overeat, and partially because she was back on the “blood sugar roller coaster from hell,” which drives even more cravings. Yet, all the while, her leptin resistance worsened so that her brain continued NOT to hear the now even louder messages from the additional fat cells telling it to stop the freaking eating already. 

How did the whole thing derail with such good intentions?

Evolution, baby. 

So what’s the solution for Mary and the rest of us?

No amount of intuitive eating work (bring the Doritos in and embrace them) is going to override the true metabolic drivers of overeating, and consequently, no amount of the perfect diet is going to resolve the emotional and habitual drivers of overeating. 

This stuff is cyclical and self-propagating, and it gets too mixed up in our cognitive dissonance between our unconscious drivers of hunger and our rational brain’s desires to live in a healthy right weight body which is free of this eating/diet/body insanity for good. 

How do we fix it? 

So glad you asked. 

In my Wild Woman program, we use the Craving Freedom Matrix to calm, balance, and restore the whole metabolic and emotional system.

First, we have to stabilize the metabolic and hunger hormones with a properly designed Anti-Diet Eating Plan diet free of processed food and addictive food additives. 

Next, we optimize that eating plan so that weight is peeling off at an insane rate (this is how we know we’ve started the journey back to re-sensitizing the hypothalamus to leptin). 

Then, we keep leptin and the brain from panicking over lost fat cells by… (well…that, my dear, is a huge part of why my approach is so successful).

Finally, we leverage the cool, calm, and collected state of the hypothalamus, the rekindled connection with our body because it’s behaving well for the first time in 20 years, and the clarity of mind of a low-allergen, high-micronutrient dense, low-carb diet to get serious about unwinding all of the emotional and habitual drivers of overeating. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s the chicken or the egg…we all have emotional and habitual shit we need to dissolve to have long-term stress reduction helping with weight loss success. 

If we don’t dissolve these issues, it’s like we always have a pilot light lit, and the moment life gets a little wonky around us, we lose our newly found resilience and we return back to eating to soothe, distract, or calm ourselves, and this sets the whole cycle off again.  

Once we have all of the hormonal, emotional, environmental, evolutionary, and habitual drivers to overeat balanced, then it becomes totally natural to intuitively eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. 

Do you have to be hyper-vigilant forever? 

Nope. 

But you do have to understand everything that’s driving you to eat outside of hunger, do the work it takes to get your eating under emotional, hormonal, environmental, and habitual control, and give your body and brain time to allow metabolic healing to occur. 

And now you know why, although I can help you lose half a pound a day with my Anti-Diet Eating Plan, we absolutely can’t stop there. 

We have to have a holistic, whole body and mind approach to end the roller coaster of diet insanity for good.

Join my free Facebook group to get on the list when the Wild Woman Weightloss doors open next.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/wildwomanwellness

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