Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat (3 page)

“I’m just so ashamed,” she kept saying as she detailed her struggles to control her weight. “I don’t know how I ever let it get this bad.” First, she explained, she had been satisfied with an occasional candy bar at work, a sugar rush that helped her get through the most stressful “deadline days” at the online magazine where she reviewed computer software. Then, she’d started having dessert at lunch—a brownie, a piece of cake, a frosted muffin. Somehow her lunchtime treat had expanded into a dinnertime ritual, then a breakfast Danish, then a second candy bar. Now, Rosemary explained, she was essentially eating sugar all day long, a fact that embarrassed her so greatly that she could barely look at me as she spoke.

“So you think this is all your fault,” I said carefully when she fell into a long silence, her hands still gripping the armrests.

“Whose fault is it? Nobody put a gun to my head.” She forced herself to meet my eyes.

“I’m just weak,” she said bitterly, her voice full of defeat. “I’m weak and disgusting, and I deserve to look the way I do.”

I often encounter a sense of shame like Rosemary’s, whether my patients are struggling with food addictions or substance abuse. In fact, the feelings underneath both conditions are strikingly similar. Most of us like to feel powerful and in control. Acknowledging an addiction makes us feel weak and helpless. It’s as though our brain chemistry, and not us, was suddenly in charge of our destiny.

When my patients can accept that
willpower is not the problem,
they often feel liberated and relieved. When Rosemary understood the brain chemistry of food addiction, she began to view herself with more compassion.

“Maybe I’m being too hard on myself,” she told me at one session. “I thought I could just stop eating sweets—and then I didn’t understand why I
wasn’t
stopping. But you’re telling me that I was actually developing a physical addiction to sugar. Like an addict, I needed more and more and more—and if I tried to cut back, I felt so awful I could hardly stand it.”

She took a deep breath. “So it wasn’t just willpower,” she said, repeating the words I had once said to her. “I was actually going through withdrawal.”

In fact, Rosemary had been going through a rapid, almost violent detox, certain to produce unpleasant and often painful symptoms that were virtually guaranteed to sabotage her efforts. Later in this book, I’ll show you how to go through
gradual
detox, so that your Diet Rehab experience is painless and even pleasurable.

First, though, let’s find out what Rosemary learned. Let’s understand exactly what it means to be addicted to food.

Scientific Proof: Food Addiction Exists!

In March 2010, the Scripps Research Institute released a groundbreaking study. Rats who were fed high-fat, high-sugar diets of bacon, sausage, chocolate, and cheesecake developed full-blown
food addictions
: actual neurochemical dependencies as powerful as those caused by cocaine. Here was the concrete evidence of what I already knew: My favorite mac and cheese was chemically active. It literally affected my brain, just like nicotine, cocaine, or heroin.

In the study, rats were given different kinds of access to high-calorie foods. Some were limited to only an hour of human treats a day, while others were allowed to eat bacon and chocolate virtually around the clock. While the rats with limited access ate moderately and were able to maintain their weight, the rats with more access quickly became obese—and obsessed.

It was astonishing how far those food-addicted rats would go to maintain their habit. When researchers withheld the junk food and tried to put the rats back on a nutritious diet, the obese rats refused to eat, almost to the point of starvation. The rats would even choose to endure painful shocks to get junk food. Their desperation to stuff themselves with sweet and fatty food and their willingness to endure pain in its service was strikingly similar to those of rats in other studies who had become addicted to cocaine or heroin.

Using special electrodes to monitor the rats’ responses, researchers discovered that high-sugar, high-fat foods had changed the animals’ brain chemistry—again, in virtually identical ways to cocaine or heroin. Both excessive junk food and other types of drugs overload the brain’s pleasure centers. Like Rosemary, the rats needed ever-larger quantities of sweet, fatty food to get the same “high.”

We tend to think that food’s comfort is an emotional issue and blame ourselves for being childlike or weak. But rats don’t have psychological issues, and yet they were behaving exactly like food-obsessed humans. Because of the way the food had altered their brain chemistry, these overweight and food-addicted rats
physically
needed more and more junk food to experience pleasure—or just to feel normal. Unlimited access to these foods had turned them into addicts.

Now here’s the even scarier part. After cocaine-addicted rats stopped taking the drug, it took only two days for their brain chemistry to return to normal. For the food-addicted rats in the food study, though, their brain chemistry took
two weeks
to return to normal. In other words, food habits affected the brain
more
than drugs in some ways!

The Scripps study shows that we can no longer view unhealthy eating as a matter of willpower. After all, rats don’t have emotional issues, childhood histories, or deep-seated associations between food and love. They know only what their brain chemistry tells them. And the obese rats were hearing the message loud and clear:
Go for the bacon and cheesecake.
This new research suggests that drug addiction and food addiction are products of the same neurobiology. That means that sugar and fat can be as addictive as crack. In some ways, maybe even more so.

The Scripps study also showed that these foods don’t
have
to take over our lives,
if
we enjoy them in limited amounts. Remember the group of rats that was allowed to eat only bacon- and cheesecake-type foods for one hour each day? Those rats enjoyed their treats, but they did
not
become addicted. Nor did they gain much weight. They had access to seductive “pitfall” foods—but that access was
limited.
As a result, they never became addicted, and their weights remained normal. In fact, their weight was quite similar to a group of rats who were
never
given “pitfall” foods and who were fed only rat chow. But the rats who had access to high-fat, high-sugar foods round-the-clock experienced immediate weight gain. The rats became obese quickly, and their weight spiraled out of control.

Dopamine: The Body’s Energizer

Let’s take a closer look at what was going on in the addicted rats’ brains. All of us—rats and humans alike—respond to the brain chemical dopamine, an energizing, vitalizing substance that our brains produce in response to pleasure and excitement. When you ride a roller-coaster, gamble for high stakes, or go on a thrilling romantic date, your dopamine levels rise. When you feel listless and bored, your dopamine levels have fallen.

Dopamine is responsible for the rush you feel when you first fall in love. It’s also one of the brain chemicals that is stimulated by cocaine. That’s why people who use the drug feel jazzed-up, wide-awake, and filled with short-lived pleasure. When you think about how good dopamine makes us feel—whether from healthy sources or unhealthy ones—it’s hard not to want to be flooded with it all the time.

But here’s the problem: The body was not designed for a twenty-four-hour high, whether from romance, cocaine, or anything else. Sooner or later, what goes up must come down. And too great or too intense a thrill inevitably produces a crash.

If you’ve just gotten back from your first trip to Paris, for example, maybe you feel a little let down your first day back at work. Paperwork seems mundane. Your favorite TV show seems dull. All you want is to get back to the exciting, dopamine-releasing newness that made your heart sing.

Likewise, coming down from a cocaine high is disappointing at best, painful at worst. You feel tired, listless, and burnt out. You usually feel lower than before you did the cocaine in the first place.

So what causes that crash? In most cases, your brain has used up your dopamine stores too quickly. After a few hours of excitement, your brain just can’t keep up. Your dopamine stores temporarily run out, and you have even less than you usually do. You feel flat, listless, exhausted, and let down. Time for a rest, so the brain can make more dopamine.

Ideally, we’ll get nice, level doses of dopamine that keep us “up” and happy but that aren’t so intense and abrupt that they’re followed by a crash. That’s what happens normally. But what if, like the rats in the study, you are continually pumping up your dopamine levels with regular infusions of “exciting” high-fat foods? Then, like the rats, you may come to depend on those foods—not for excitement but just to feel normal.

Keeping Your Brain in Balance

Our brains are amazing chemical systems. They are designed to keep a nice, steady balance with just the right chemical levels to keep us happy and allow us to function. We have in our brains pretty much all the chemicals we need to recover from pain, rise to a challenge, enjoy a thrill, or just feel good.

When a biochemical reaction modifies your brain chemistry, however, all sorts of problems occur. Suppose you eat a bacon cheeseburger or a nice big bag of chips. You’ve just cued your brain to release more dopamine, which is why you get that short-lived rush of pleasure.

Indulging might be fine if you did it only occasionally. But if you overdo the high-fat foods, your brain chemistry begins to change. The neurons that release, receive, and keep dopamine moving through your brain first become overloaded, then damaged. They can’t carry dopamine as efficiently as they once did. As a result, you need greater and greater quantities of dopamine to compensate for these overworked neurons.

Meanwhile, by giving yourself a big, extra jolt of those chemicals, you’ve confused your brain. Soon, instead of producing its own dopamine, slowly and steadily, it “waits” for that big chemical jolt and then produces a flood of dopamine in response. Gradually, your brain begins to depend on that jolt from the outside. Instead of sticking to its own internal, stable rhythm, it responds to those high-fat jolts.

Now that your dopamine neurons are damaged, you need even more dopamine to feel normal than you did before. That outside jolt—the extra fat in your cheeseburger—has to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Where once a single cheeseburger could give you that dopamine rush, now you need two cheeseburgers and a double order of fries.

Just as the bingeing rats found out, unrestricted access to high-fat foods creates a vicious cycle. The more you eat, the more you want. Your brain chemistry starts to need ever-higher amounts of the outside substance just to function at all.

So what happens when you eat a fat, juicy cheeseburger every day for six months and then suddenly switch to a nice lean chicken breast on a bed of romaine lettuce? Your brain chemistry is seriously disrupted. Since the cheeseburgers had been helping to flood your system with dopamine, your brain now needs more fat than the average, healthy brain just to get a normal dopamine response. So when that low-fat chicken breast
doesn’t
generate lots of dopamine, your brain is at a loss. It needs dopamine but it doesn’t have any—and the only way it knows how to get more is to be supplied, once again, with fat.

That’s where your cravings begin. That chicken breast might have tasted delicious, but if it doesn’t give you huge quantities of unhealthy fat, it leaves you feeling listless, let down, and depressed. As we’ll see in Chapter 2, you start to have actual withdrawal symptoms, just like a cocaine addict, including sleep disorders, memory problems, difficulty concentrating, and a general feeling of intense discomfort.

Sooner or later, your brain will realize that it has to start making its own dopamine, and slowly production starts again. But remember how long it took the rats in that study to resume eating normally? Two whole weeks. That’s how long it takes your brain to kick back into gear.

Serotonin: Feeling Calm, Peaceful, and Positive

The Scripps study wasn’t the only one to deal with food addictions in rats. In 2008, another study confirmed that rats can become addicted to sugar. This study showed rats manifesting responses remarkably similar to those of humans: cravings for the sweet stuff, anxiety-based withdrawal, and then a manic,
increased
desire to binge on sugar.

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