It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways (5 page)

Ideally, the brain would signal us to stop eating when our bodies have sensed that we’ve digested and absorbed enough nutrition to support our health. In this case, satiation and satiety would be one and the same. Let’s use the example of a prime rib dinner.

Prime rib contains complete protein, the most satiating of all the macronutrients, and naturally occurring fat, which makes protein even more satiating. As you eat your prime rib, you’ll find yourself wanting prime rib less and less with every bite. The first bite was amazing, the second fantastic, but by your tenth bite, the texture, smell, and flavor are less appealing. And by the twentieth bite, you’ve had enough, and you no longer desire the flavor or texture of the meat—so down goes your fork.

This is satiation.

Prime rib also takes longer to eat than processed food (as you actually have to chew and swallow), which gives your brain a chance to catch up with your stomach. As you eat and start to digest the meat, your body recognizes that the dense nutrition in that prime rib is adequate for your energy and caloric needs. This sends a “we’re getting nourishment” signal to your brain while you’re still working on your plate, which also reduces your “want” for more food.

This is satiety.

This scenario plays out differently for foods lacking the satiation factors of adequate nutrition—complete protein, natural fats and essential nutrients. Let’s compare prime rib to a tray of Oreos.

Oreos are a highly processed food containing almost no protein, saturated with sugar and flavor-enhancing chemicals, and filled with added fats. As we eat the Oreos (generally at a much faster rate than prime rib), they move through us quickly and don’t provide enough nutrition to induce satiation
or
satiety. So unlike the prime rib, there are no “brakes” to decrease our want. We
want
the tenth Oreo just as much as the first. And we never
stop
wanting more because even though we’ve eaten plenty of calories, our bodies know that we are still seriously lacking in nutrition. So we eat the whole darn package because
satiety can’t be fooled.

In the case of Oreos, the only reason to stop eating is when our bellies are physically full, and we realize we’re about to make ourselves sick from overconsumption.

If we stopped right here, we’d have made our point. Clearly, these foods violate our first Good Food standard by provoking an unhealthy psychological response—heck, they were designed to do just that!

Unfortunately, there’s more.

Chronic consumption of these foods doesn’t just affect our taste buds, our perceptions, and our waistlines.

Pleasure, reward, and emotion are all interconnected in our brains. Reward circuitry is integrated with parts of the brain that enrich a pleasurable experience with emotion, making it more powerful, and easier to remember. The combination of pleasure, reward, and emotion pushes you
toward
rewarding stimuli—including food.

The foods in question—supernormally stimulating without adequate nutrition to invoke satiation or satiety—tell the brain to release dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with the pleasure center. Dopamine motivates your behavior, reinforces food-seeking (“wanting”) and energizes your feeding. It gives you that rush of anticipation before you’ve even taken your first bite. (You’re daydreaming at work and start thinking about your favorite cookie from the downtown bakery. You’re visualizing the taste, the smell, the texture. You start to get excited and happy at the thought of picking up cookies on the way home. You
want
those cookies. That’s dopamine talking.)

On the way home, you stop at the bakery, pick up a dozen cookies, and take your first bite before you’ve even pulled out of the parking lot. (Of course, because that cookie is supernormally stimulating, but lacking in nutrients that satiate, you don’t stop at just one.) Immediately, the brain releases opioids (endorphins—the body’s own “feel good” compounds), which also have a rewarding effect. The release of opioids brings pleasure and emotional relief, releases stress, and generally makes you feel good.

Over time and with continued reinforcement, those dopamine pathways begin to light up at the mere suggestion of the food, like when you’re driving past that bakery, see someone else eating a similar-looking cookie, or watch a commercial for cookies on television. This preemptive dopamine response (and the memory of the reward you’ll experience when you indulge) makes it all but impossible to resist the urge to satisfy that craving. Your
want
has turned into a
need
.

The kicker?

You don’t even have to be hungry—because it’s not about satisfying your
hunger
. It’s about satisfying the
craving
.

After just a few trips to the bakery, your memory circuits tell your reward circuits that the cookie will bring you joy. Dopamine promises satisfaction, if you only give in to your urge. You can’t resist, so you eat the cookie(s) and your endorphins help you feel good (for a while). And so the vicious cycle serves only to reinforce itself until you have developed a
habitual
response—the automatic craving for a specific food in response to certain triggers.

Automatic cravings do not sound psychologically healthy to us.

Stress is another factor that promotes the reinforcement of these unhealthy patterns. We don’t need a scientific study to tell us that many people eat when they’re stressed to distract themselves from the situation and help themselves relax. The trouble is, chronic stress (whether it stems from anxiety or worry, lack of sleep, over-exercise, or poor nutritional habits) is driving us—via our biology—to overeat.

Stress affects the activation of reward pathways and impairs your attempts to control your eating habits. Did you catch that?

When you are under stress, the urge to “pleasure eat” (eating for reward) is strong—and you are far more likely to overeat. Stress also causes you to change the
type
of foods you eat, moving away from healthier choices toward—you guessed it—highly palatable foods that are sweet, salty, and high in fat. (Who craves grilled chicken and steamed broccoli when they’re stressed?) And when you finally, inevitably, indulge, one thing is true:

This works via the same old mechanism we’ve been talking about—dopamine and opioid pathways in the brain. We experience stress, we eat the cookies, and we really
do
feel better.

This creates two problems, however. The first is that, during stress, these strong opioid and dopamine responses in the reward center of your brain promote the encoding of habits. Future stress triggers you to remember the relief you experienced the last time you ate those cookies. Memories of these responses are stored in your brain and you quickly establish a learned behavior—a “want” for more cookies. Which means that the next time you’re stressed, you’ll find yourself
automatically
reaching for the cookies.

The last nail in your stress-cookie coffin: The stressed brain expresses both a strong drive to eat and
an
impaired capacity to inhibit eating
. You may not even want to eat the cookie, but because your ability to not eat it is impaired, you sort of
have
to. You tell yourself you’ll have only one, but under stress, you’ll probably end up eating the whole bag—which, in turn, makes you pretty stressed-out.

It’s a vicious cycle—and you probably didn’t even realize you were stuck in it.

Until now.

Of course, we can’t always eliminate stress in our lives—that half of the equation may, unfortunately, be here to stay. Our only recourse is to concentrate on the other half by eliminating the foods that
play into
this unhealthy stress response.

Not coincidentally, they’re the same highly processed, supernormally stimulating, non-nutritive foods that have been causing us trouble all along.

It’s all the same story.

By now you probably agree that the food you eat shouldn’t mess with your head. You may even be a little bit mad at the way some of the things you’ve been eating have manipulated you into cravings and overconsumption. And we bet if we said, “Let’s kick all of these sneaky, tricky foods off our plates forever and eat only
naturally
delicious, nutritious, satiety-inducing foods,” you’d probably throw up your hands and say, “Hurrah!” Theoretically, that is. There’s just one small problem with this plan.

First, it’s difficult to radically change your diet when you have so many powerful emotional associations with the foods you’re eating—especially if you’re eating as a coping mechanism, instead of from hunger.

Second, these foods are designed to be hard to give up. Through the misuse of biological and natural cues, our modern technology has made these foods supernormally stimulating, rewiring the reward, emotion, and pleasure pathways in our brains to create an artificial demand for more. And when we tell you which foods are the worst offenders, which ones you’ll be kicking to the curb, that’s when the real trouble will start.

You may panic.

You may think, “No way can I do this.”

You may say to yourself, “I cannot live without [fill in food].”

We assure you, you can. And you will. We’ll walk you through it. And when you’re done, three things will happen.

First, you will once again be able to appreciate the natural, delicious flavors (including sweet, fatty, and salty) found in whole foods.

Second, the pleasure and reward you experience when eating that delicious food will once again be closely tied with good nutrition, satiation, and satiety—you’ll be able to stop eating because you’re satisfied, not just because you’re “full.”

Third,
you will never again be controlled by your food
.

Freedom.

“Just finished my Whole30, and my (diagnosed type 2 diabetic) blood sugar levels are now normal—completely normal. I have cut my diabetes medications in half, and my blood pressure is in the normal range too. All of my pain, stiffness, soreness, and puffiness is gone… and I lost twenty-five pounds. The Whole30 has changed my life.”

—Alan H., East Bremerton, Washington

Our second Good Food standard states that the food you eat should produce a healthy hormonal response in the body. This is probably the most science-y section of the whole book, but as promised, we’ll use a lot of analogies and examples to make the science easy to understand. We’re also going to simplify things quite a bit, because you don’t need to understand how
everything
works to know how to apply it.

Let’s start with some basics.

Hormones are chemical messengers that are usually transported in your bloodstream. They are secreted by cells in one part of the body and bind to receptors in another part of the body. (Think of a courier carrying a message from one person to another.) Hormones have many roles, but one essential function is to keep things in balance.

Essentially all biological processes have regulatory mechanisms designed to keep systems operating within safe, healthy parameters and maintain homeostasis (equilibrium) in the body. Think of the thermostat in your house. The furnace kicks on to keep the temperature above the lowest point set, but as the temperature rises to the top end of the range, the thermostat turns on your fan or air conditioner. Much as your thermostat keeps your house within a “healthy” temperature range, hormones work in delicate, intertwined ways to maintain homeostasis in your body.