Your Emotional Eating Is Driven By Your Energy Hungry Brain
Overeating is the result of overhunger.
Overhunger is the result of the body’s inability to fuel itself with its built-in, constant supply of fuel, body fat.
Can you recall your childhood experience with hunger?
I can recall summers off from school riding my bike to my friend’s house, playing all day long outside in the yard or at the neighborhood pool, only stopping for lunch because her mom reminded us we needed to break for the meal.
Hunger never entered my mind, or the fear of what skipping a meal and the inevitable hunger pangs may feel like.
If I did notice I was hungry, the thought quickly passed as I continued running around, swimming, or enjoying whatever outdoor activity with my friends and siblings knowing my next meal was just a short time away.
My energy levels never dropped, I didn’t become irritable, I didn’t develop a headache, dizziness, or nausea.
Hunger as a child was never at the forefront of my thought.
How is your current experience as an adult with hunger?
Does it develop slowly over time without any sense of urgency, and retreat when you don’t eat right away?
Or does your hunger have control over you coming on suddenly often times with a craving for certain foods, and generating a feeling of desperation?
Additionally, do you experience brain fog, feel drowsy, or nauseated and dizzy when hunger sets in?
Maybe your mood changes and you become irritable, or “hangry” if you’ve gone without food for a few hours?
If your experience with hunger as an adult fits any or all of the symptoms above, your hunger has developed into an unhealthy “mind” hunger.
“Mind” hunger, as I prefer to call it over the more common term “emotional” hunger, “represent a severe energy deficit occurring in your body and are not a normal accompaniment to hunger,” as author and family physician Dr. Catherine Shanahan explains in her book, The Fatburn Fix.
Dr. Shanahan continues, “When you feel bad after going just a few more hours than usual between feedings, that is a red flag indicating metabolic damage. That feeling is not a need for nutrition. It is not healthy hunger. It is an energy crisis. And most people have learned to treat that energy crisis with something that will raise their blood sugar.”
The brain is the first organ impacted by a lack of fuel because of its constant need for energy 24 hours a day, 7 days per week.
When our body works by design, making ketones in the liver and burning stored body fat to provide a constant supply of fuel to the brain, we do not experience a lack of energy.
However, with our American diet that is high in processed foods containing sugar, refined flour, and vegetable oil, over time these ingredients create inflammation in the appetite control center of the brain (hypothalamus).
Dr. Shanahan explains, “…vegetable oil is toxic to your appetite regulation systems even in the context of a low-sugar diet. But the combination of the two is what truly sets up for appetite dysregulation, catapulting your metabolism into a cycle of hunger, weight gain, inflammation, and hormone resistance that is difficult to break.”
Many have begun snacking as a way to increase their energy between meals, exacerbating the problem because it does not give the body a chance to tap into its fat stores for fuel.
Instead, the ingested snacks raise your blood sugar providing sugar to your fuel-starving brain, and offering temporary relief from the unhealthy hunger symptoms.
At the same time, however, the pancreas wants to move sugar out of the bloodstream and into fat cells.
Because insulin’s main job is to turn on fat storage, the net effect of this energy battle in your body is weight gain for many people.
According to Dr. Shanahan, “Your brain controls your food cravings. When your body fat stops serving your brain as an energy source, the brain is pretty smart; it very quickly learns to instruct you to seek out sugar. Your brain also controls your moods and how you will behave at work, at home, driving your car, and everywhere else. This means a sugar-dependent brain can hijack any and all of your habits to serve its need for energy. A sugar-dependent brain will drive specific food cravings. It will rewire your emotional reward system, the dopamine pathways in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of your brain so that food becomes your primary source of joy when you’ve had a bad day—a source of joy that might be more reliable than anything else in today’s depersonalizing environment.”
Curbing your cravings for sugar becomes very difficult once your brain’s fuel source has become sugar instead of body fat.
The brain believes these concentrated foods are much more important than they are not only because they provide fuel to the brain, but they also release dopamine the feel good neurotransmitter.
It is imperative to shift your brain’s fuel source from sugar to body fat, and putting body before mind health.
Dr. Shanahan elaborates, “In other words, good mental health depends on being good at burning your body fat. That means the moment you start to fuel your body and mind with energy from your body fat, you’ve started down a path that takes you to where weight loss alone never could: toward greater joy in every facet of your daily life. The key to weight loss success is not more willpower, but rather more energy.”
How do we make this change from eating sugar, refined flours, vegetable oils, and processed foods to heal our energy system, reducing overhunger, resulting in lasting weight loss?
First, it is important to become aware of what you are experiencing when you feel hungry.
According to the Mayo Clinic, there are several differences that might help clue you in to what you’re experiencing.
Physical hunger:
It develops slowly over time.
You desire a variety of food groups.
You feel the sensation of fullness and take it as a cue to stop eating.
You have no negative feelings about eating.
Emotional (Mind) hunger:
It comes about suddenly or abruptly.
You crave only certain foods.
You may binge on food and not feel a sensation of fullness.
You feel guilt or shame about eating.
Second, using the “Hunger Scale” tool created by Geneen Roth, you can rate the hunger you’re experiencing.
Roth explains in her online article Satisfying Mind Hunger, “The way I learned to listen to true physical hunger was by rating myself on a scale of one to ten. "One" is so hungry that you're ready to eat what doesn't eat you first. "Ten" is so stuffed that when you roll over, your stomach stays on the other side of the bed. "Five" is comfortable. If you start eating at five or above on the hunger scale, you're eating from mind, not body, hunger. But if you start at two or three, and ask your body what it wants to eat (which is different than what you think you should or shouldn't eat), you're eating from true, physical hunger.”
Be present with yourself when you are experiencing hunger.
Use this “Hunger Scale” as a tool to get curious with yourself, and assess what you’re experiencing.
The American diet is laden with vegetable oils, sugar, and refined flours that wreak havoc on our metabolic energy system.
In order to move away from your hunger controlling you, it is necessary to shift from having a sugar-dependent brain to what nature intended, a brain fueled by the body’s built-in, constant supply of energy-rich fuel, body fat.
Dr. Shanahan summarizes, “Right now, stuck in a body that can’t guarantee your brain a steady supply of energy, you’re living with a metabolic handicap. Once you repair your fatburn and restore energy to your brain, you will be vastly more able to achieve your potential. Abundant brain energy is the key to being the true active, resilient, and incredible person you really are.”
If you’d like to take this work to a deeper level, sign up for a free 30 minute consultation here with me to see if my weight maintenance program, 3 to Free™ is right for you, or if you’re ready to get started, sign up for my 8 week 3 to Free™ program here.
In my program we take a deep dive into topics like beliefs, desire, deprivation, emotional management, diet mentality, understanding hunger, intermittent fasting, relationship with yourself and others, self-confidence, and many more, and apply these topics to your life so you may understand yourself and the results you are creating. From the knowledge and self-awareness you will gain, you will have the skills, tools, and self-confidence to maintain your goal weight for a lifetime, and finally turn your focus to new goals and creating your best life!