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Emotional Eating
Emotional Eating This is a big one for a lot of us. because we’ve never been taught how to handle our emotions. We just eat to escape them, and to not feel them. In the world today, we have so much immediate quick pleasure available that we haven’t had to live through many hardships. We can easily escape discomfort through food, television, the internet, pornography, social media, gaming, etc. We’ve created this entitlement that life should be fun and happy and pleasurable all the time; and when it’s not, and things get hard or uncomfortable for us, the best thing to do is to escape the overwhelm, or the…
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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.…
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Overdesire
Not only do we have to contend with overhunger, we also have to contend with overdesire. Overdesire is the desire for food not used to fuel our body, or the desire to eat when our body does not need any fuel. Desire is a feeling or an emotion. All emotions begin with a thought. Most of these thoughts are unconscious due to repetition and neuropathways created by our lower brain. Let’s talk about why we overdesire food. We experience overdesire for three reasons. Today is reason #1. Reason #1 –It’s a learned behavior. Desire is something that is learned. The good news is that…
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Your Hormones
It’s not excess calories that are the culprit of your weight gain, it’s your hormones. Let me explain. There are three hunger hormones. Hormone #1 – Ghrelin Ghrelin is the hormone that tells you that you’re hungry. An easy way to remember this is that ghrelin sounds like growlin’ (what your stomach does when it’s hungry). Ghrelin is very useful if it is regulated properly. It operates on an internal clock. If you’re use to eating at certain times during the day, your body will release ghrelin at those times. If you change your eating schedule, say you want to cut out snacking, you’re going to feel hungry during…
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Joyfully Lean
The photo on the left was me three years ago, I was clearly carrying a few extra pounds, but what most people didn’t see was how I felt on the inside. I was really struggling with who I was and what my life had become. Not only did I feel terrible mentally I also felt terrible physically. The photo on the right is me now. Big difference, huh? The past three years have been a metamorphosis for me. So many people have asked me what I did and how I changed. The whole purpose of this website, A Joyful You, is to share just that. Over the course of this…
