The big reason you're fat or metabolically unhealthy
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room
ADDICTION… that’s right addiction… Addiction is how we got into this mess in the first place and addiction is the reason why we continually fail at our attempts to lose weight and improve our health. Think about it… If the ‘foods’ (processed carbs and sugars) that are making us fat weren’t so addictive we’d have given them up long ago… and after giving them up, we wouldn’t have been tempted at any stage to go back to them.
Don’t believe me? Why then, do you think it's so hard to quit your daily pastry or corn chips, beer, cake, coke, muesli bars, crackers, pasta, chocolates, fast food etc. especially when you know these things are making you fat and unhealthy. For a second, just stop and think about giving up your favourite carb or sugary treat.. How does it make you feel? Stressed, anxious, angry, helpless, sad, defensive or weak?… if yes, then you’ve got an addiction problem. But you’re not alone, up to 60% of Americans are thought to have a food addiction (1), clearly most of us are addicted to something. I was. Thinking back to my teens it was muesli bars with choc chips, then at uni eating BBQ shapes by the box washed down with sweet orange juice, followed by Gatorade and lolly snakes in my 30’s because I thought I needed the energy for cycling, baguettes from the French bakery spread thickly with Nutella and most recently triple choc brioche buns from another French cake shop as well as dark choc Kinder Beuenos. It’s little wonder despite all the hours of exercise I ever did, that I was never as trim as I thought I should be… in fact I have been technical overweight as per my BMI most of my adult life… I just thought I had heavy bones… such is the power of denial.
But here’s the clanger…. IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT. I honestly believe that we’ve been set up to fail at this on many levels and it sucks. It sucks so badly because it has caused so much hurt and illness for so many and this infuriates me. Think back to the little girl in my previous post standing there in the middle of the shop fixated, unable to hear, see or walk as the reward centre part of her brain was being flooded by dopamine. Like a drug addict or alcoholic she was powerless to resist the effect of the sugar drug being given to her. Tragically she never asked for her first “hit”. It was provided to her by her parents thinking they were doing an innocent thing by given her a sugary ‘treat,' something fun or a reward for doing something well or being good. And that’s the moment in time when her addiction began. She had no choice and now she has to live with it. She may be one of the lucky ones that can control their cravings with will power and discipline but unfortunately it's unlikely.
Once we’ve got the taste for sugar and processed carbs we’re pretty much hooked and then the problem is exacerbated because they are everywhere and unlike alcohol and other drugs, they can be legally given to us when we’re still children. They make us feel good when we eat them. They help console us when we’re stressed or angry. They provide instant gratification when we lose our ability to soothe ourselves by other means and for many people they become the single way of dealing with many of life’s problems… just the same as alcohol does for an alcoholic. In fact, the two are eerily similar in many ways besides from what I’ve already mentioned. They both act on the reward centre of the brain exactly the same as all the other addictions like drugs, shopping, pornography etc. They both end up causing damage to your liver in the form of fatty liver disease and metabolic disease. They both can only be beaten by admitting that you actually have a problem, understanding the problem and actively seeking ways to beat your addiction and just like any addiction it's bloody hard work.
There are facets to processed carbs and sugar addiction that make it even more challenging to give up compared to other vices. We live under the false belief that we need carbs and sugar to survive. This is absolutely untrue. While there are essential fats and essential proteins that we need for our survival, have you ever heard anyone talk about essential carbohydrates? No, because they are not essential for our survival. Human beings can very comfortably survive without a gram of carbohydrate passing through their lips. How can this be true? It's one of the reasons that we have a liver. Our liver is capable of making all of the glucose that we need if necessary. It's one of its primary jobs and it was designed that way so when we went through periods of starvation, for example on unsuccessful hunts on the savannahs of Africa, we didn’t die of hypoglycaemia if we weren’t able to get a feed after a few days. Our liver can convert fat from our fat stores into glucose and if we run out of fat which is unlikely these days, it can break down muscle protein to make glucose. Historically the advantage of having carbohydrates when you could find them was to fatten up in times of need and then to be able to access this fat for for later… but now there is no survival pressure as they’re everywhere.
But we’re told that we should eat more “healthy grains,” in fact grains make up the base of famous food pyramid and they are the part of a 'healthy balanced diet’ (I will explore the food pyramid and balanced diets in future posts). Because of this we condone the consumption of carbohydrates in their many forms even though as I have mentioned in previous posts, they spike your insulin preventing you from being able to burn excess energy and thereby storing it as fat, lead to fatty liver disease, insulin resistance and metabolic ill health. We’ve been told to eat low fat for 40 years because of the false belief (more on this in another post) that dietary fat is the cause of heart disease, so what we do is replace fat with … sugar and carbs… and boom, in the past 40 years our obesity, diabetes and heart disease rates have skyrocketed. In addition our elevated insulin levels also block the hormone leptin which is the signal to our brain that we’ve enough to eat, compounding the effects.
The processed food industry knows all about addiction and is using it to their advantage. Highly processed foods have the same common ingredients: sugar, highly refined carbs (ultra processed flour, corn, rice, potatoes) and processed oils. These substances just light up our addiction centres and keep us coming back for more and more. It's just too easy to hoover down a fast food burger, fries, ice cream and wash it down with 600mls of your favourite soft drink. But how often do we overeat steak, eggs or fat or drink too much water… well it's almost impossible. While our ability to over consume fat and protein is limited by built in hormonal feedback mechanisms, there are no such control mechanisms in place for refined carbs and sugars and when you combine them in the right ratios with fat and salt to give you that mouthfeel (known as the “Bliss point" by industry) which we all love, these processed foods are onto a winner. A recent study (2) showed that people on an ultraprocessed diet consumed 500 extra calories a day compared to another group that were fed unprocessed foods but with the same macronutrient content. This crap that we call food drives hunger and interrupts the normal signalling processes. Sure it’s cheap, has a long shelf life, convenient being ready to heat or eat but its just feeding our addictions. It's just criminal. You don’t see people over eating healthier version of carbohydrates like those found in above ground vegetables because even though the carbs are present, they don't trigger the same responses. No one goes to town on a kilo of broccoli or is ever hanging out for a plate of kale or spinach. Compounding the issue, is that the over consumption of processed food prevents you from ingesting the real food which contains the essential amino acids that are required for neurotransmitter production like serotonin, GABA and endorphins that help our brain modulate our emotions and behaviours. Without these important levels of chemicals in our brain, we are even more susceptible to remaining addicted. It's no wonder there is an epidemic of metabolic and mental ill health.
So how do we overcome our addiction? I’m not an addiction specialist and I don’t expect that writing a few words here on it will truly change your life but here’s a general framework that might help. I’ll provide some links to some books and videos from the experts in carbohydrate addiction that will give you a lot more guidance than I can ever do. But regardless of the technique you try I think you need to:
Own and admit that you have an addiction… spend a lot of time thinking about this and understand the issues and how you became addicted and how the addiction is affecting your life
Remove the processed carbs and sugars from your life. Yes, this is the tough part and you don’t have to do it all at once. Start by removing the sugary drinks and replace with diet versions or better yet water. Be proud of the change. Try no carbs on the dinner plate, just protein and salad or above ground vegetables. Next is to remove snacking because this is always an emotional event. We don’t NEED to snack but we do it to satisfy something inside our brains… not our stomachs.
Replace the sugars and processed carbs with healthy high fat foods that will satisfy you and provide energy and nutrients that your body needs to heal. In my next post I will explain why fats, especially saturated fats, are actually good for us and how and why they’ve been demonised over the past 40 years.
Replace that gaping hole that sugars and processed carbs have been filling… the emotional management side… learn to use other bridges like exercise, meditation, creative arts, spirituality, coffee or whatever helps you cope better without feeding the addiction centre. Try low carb snacks like cheese, olives, beef jerky or low carb baked goods as a bridge to get you through. Long term though, the goal is to end that addictive relationship with carbs and sugars, so replacing them with artificially sweetened low calorie options doesn’t really address the addictive behaviour as the desire for the sweet taste remains. However as a bridge some safer recipes can be found on https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/recipes
We need to stop focussing on a quick fix or short term results. It's taken years to get to this point and it may take many attempts to get this right but from every attempt you make you will learn something. Ultimately though, if you are addicted and this has caused you harm you need to practice abstinence, just like an alcoholic needs to avoid alcohol because all it takes is one bite of that cake or a handful of chips to reignite the addiction and so for many people it's an all or nothing approach. You would never offer an alcoholic a beer at the end of week as a reward for not drinking...the same goes for processed carbs and sugar.
Please take the time to watch these videos and look into these books for further information.
Interview with Dr Robert Cywes expert in Carbohydrate Addiction and obesity management
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdjGold_RsM
Dr Cywes Youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk4Mk7vArjSYBa1VKv9-chA
Dr Robert Lustig expert on sugar addiction
https://robertlustig.com/food-addiction/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfwnU-uXrhI
The Craving Cure by Psychologist Dr Julia Ross
https://www.amazon.com/Craving-Cure-Identify-Activate-Appetite/dp/1250063191?tag=thechalkboardma-1-BG-20
References
"The prevalence of food addiction as assessed by the Yale Food Addiction scale: a systematic review.” Nutrients 6(10) 2014
Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake. Hall et al 2019, Cell metabolism 30, 67-77