When Eating is Out of Control
Next to breathing and drinking water, the most important thing we do to stay alive is to eat. It’s no wonder, then, that our bodies and our brain are fine-tuned to help us use food as efficiently as possible. Hunger, satiety, feeling energetic, feeling tired, are all parts of a critical biological system called energy regulation. We need food for energy, and so we have mechanisms like hunger, taste preferences, and acquired knowledge of how to find food to insure that we take in nutrition. The brain is involved, the liver is involved, our muscles and even our fat stores are all involved in regulating our energy and our behavior and communicating what energy state we are in. We convert food into energy, and we use that energy every moment that we are alive, storing what we don’t need for times when food is not available. We’ve evolved from ancestors who frequently went through periods of feast and famine, and accordingly, we have both behavioral and physiological processes to take advantage of food abundance and to cope when food is scarce.
Given this absolutely critical life-and-death role of energy regulation and the exquisite feedback systems in our body to maintain us, why are we seeing a worldwide epidemic of obesity, of diabetes, and of other illnesses such as fatty liver directly traceable to how much and what kinds of food we are eating? Why are we so out of balance, and what’s happened to bring us to this health crisis?
Well, lifestyle and food choices both immediately come to mind, because without question, we are eating much more sugar and fat than our grandparents did, and certainly more than their grandparents did, and we are using far less energy by not walking as much and not working as hard physically. That’s pretty obvious, and nearly unanimously agreed upon by scientists and nonscientists alike.
Hundreds, no thousands of researchers from a variety of disciplines are involved in working out the details. From areas of the brain that regulate hunger and satiety (the feeling of “thanks, but I’m full”), through the intricate hormonal and other physiological processes that are involved in energy production, utilization, storage, feedback and regulation, we’re learning more every day. And without a doubt, the more we learn, the more complex the picture becomes. However, at this point in time, there has been no reliable solution to help people with problems of being overweight or obese to remedy their problem permanently. A variety of diets work until the dieter stops following the diet and then, usually within a year of stopping, the dreaded “weight rebound” happens and the person is back at his/her original weight or even heavier. Exercise helps but by itself doesn’t resolve the problem. Some medications suppress appetite but we still don’t have a completely safe medication to reduce or eliminate the obesity epidemic.
Experts are in stark disagreement about how to deal with our expanding waistlines. Eliminate lectins? Go super low carbo? Paleo? Mediterranean? Even radical procedures such as bariatric surgery, while helping many, has a significant failure rate and certainly doesn’t appear to be an answer for the millions of people who weigh more than they should.
We are confident that science will ultimately get all this figured out, but we can’t afford to wait until the right expert hits on the precise solution. What we need to do right now is go to what we know the most about, and that’s our own behavior. Our behavior is intimately linked to our physiology but it’s actually easier to control and predict with current levels of knowledge than which set of physiologic parameters we need to unravel.
So what behavioral changes do we need to make to return to food and energy regulation that would be healthiest for us? Let’s see if you agree, and if you do, we’re building an app for that!
•We need to eat less high fat, high sugar, high salt foods. Today’s food choices with those components can overwhelm our bodies’ normal regulation mechanisms. We’ll never be able to achieve and maintain a healthy weight while eating those foods in excess. The challenge, of course, is that those foods taste wonderful, are marketed constantly to us, and are presented to us in ways so that they are instantly available with virtually no preparation time.
•We need special behavioral skills to shift to healthier eating patterns that include self-control or willpower improvement skills until new healthier habits are firmly in place.
•We need to develop enjoyable increases in our exercise and most likely to increase muscle mass to have a healthier energy balance in this food-rich, low energy-demand world we find ourselves in.
•We need behavioral changes to reduce stresses in our life and to cope effectively with stresses that we cannot avoid.
•We need to shape and maintain good sleep hygiene (that means we need to have restful, restorative sleep on a regular basis).
•We need to cope with the addictive-like quality some unhealthy foods have over us.
•We need awareness and multiple strategies to break out of eating patterns that are linked to triggers other than physiologic hunger.
If you mastered those behavioral skills and they became in time effortless or near effortless, would that be something you’d like? We’ve developed an app -- Willpwr+ EE (Emotional Eating) -- available for iPhone users in the Apple App Store. We believe that given the current level of knowledge, behavioral changes, if you can only do them and maintain the changes, offer the best hope of controlling your weight problem. Look for this app and learn more about it at our website, http://willpwr.io