Dopamine

One of the reasons we carry extra weight is our overdesire for food.

We desire food that is not used to fuel our body, or we eat when we’re not hungry.

Yesterday we learned that overdesire is a learned behavior and there are certain things that can trigger us to eat. If you missed it, you can find it HERE.

Reason #2 we overdesire food: Dopamine

It is our brain’s job to keep us alive.

One way it does this is by releasing dopamine.

Dopamine is a chemical that lights up the neuropathways in your brain and makes you feel happy and good.

Each time you eat, dopamine is released. This helps your brain remember that eating is good, it is keeping you alive, and you should eat this again.

Our brain pays close attention to learn what we did so it can repeat the experience again without really having to think about it. Remember the brain likes to be as efficient as possible to conserve energy, just in case.

Most of the food that is in our food supply right now creates ginormous dopamine hits.

We’ve taken naturally occurring food and concentrated it. Instead of oranges, we now have orange juice. Instead of sugarcane, we have sugar.

Instead of wheat, we’ve overly ground it up and turned it into flour which then gets turned into something else.

We’ve taken whole foods in their natural state, full of soluble fiber and vitamins and minerals, stripped them down, over-processed them, and concentrated them.

These concentrated foods substantially increase the dopamine released in our brains, so much so that the neurotransmitters down-regulate to accommodate it.

Now it requires even more of these products in order to get the same dopamine response you once did.

Flour and Sugar

The two biggest food culprits are flour and sugar. When we eat these products, our brain is like “What!? Pay attention to this! Do this again, as often as you can!”. When we concentrate the food, we incidentally concentrate the desire for it. You use to be able to eat two Oreos and now you need the entire row because your dopamine response has gone down.

Your desire for food doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It actually means your brain is working perfectly. You were designed to desire food. It’s part of what keeps you alive, but when the food is concentrated, you overdesire it, and that’s why you “love” food so much.  

Dopamine isn’t a bad thing. It can be very useful. It tells us when something is fun and pleasurable, and that it will keep you alive. The problem is with overconsuming things that give us a huge hit of dopamine but have a negative side effect – in this it’s making you carry extra weight.