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Authors: Mike Dow,Antonia Blyth

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In week 3 of Diet Rehab, we began gradually reducing Cindy’s pitfall foods. Instead of several doughnuts for breakfast, she was happy to have just one, along with her yogurt and berries. Although she still had ice cream for dessert at lunch, she switched her mid-morning snack from full-sugar soda to chamomile tea sweetened with stevia, a natural booster sweetener. Her mid-afternoon snack was still a Danish pastry, but she was able to stop comfortably at one pastry instead of her previous two or three. She had dessert after dinner, too—sometimes pie with ice cream, sometimes chocolate cake—but instead of fries and fried chicken, she had lean grilled meats, whole grains, and some fresh vegetables. Her meals were getting healthier, her serotonin levels were rising, and she didn’t feel as though she was punishing or depriving herself.
It takes at least ten exposures to a new food to accept and then enjoy it, so Cindy even found herself looking forward to the taste of some of her booster foods after a few weeks. Since it takes about four weeks to form a habit, her walks and baths were changing from obligations into normal parts of her routine.
Week 4 was transformative for Cindy. With her new, steady serotonin levels, she began to feel a sense of optimism. She could hear herself saying things like “Maybe I’ll give it a try” instead of “I’m sure it will never work.” Because she had been treating herself well, she was beginning to feel that other things in her life besides what she looked like gave her a sense of worth.
In this fourth week Cindy and I talked about what other activities she might like to add to her life. Cindy completely surprised both of us by saying, “I’ve always loved kids. Maybe I could work with them somehow.” She surprised me even more by telling me that her church had a volunteer program for adults who wanted to work with troubled teens, and their next training was coming up soon.
“Is that something you want to do?” I asked her.
Cindy shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said in her soft voice. But the following week, Cindy let me know that she had indeed gone to the training. Before, Cindy had been so depressed about how she looked that she couldn’t stand the thought of meeting strangers, but suddenly going to the meeting seemed possible. True, she spent an hour getting ready, picking out the right clothes and changing three times. But soon after she arrived at the meeting, she got to chatting with another woman around her age, and by the end of the night they had made plans to have coffee the following week.
Cindy had also begun filling her life with some of the booster attributes I shared with you in Chapter 2: in Cindy’s case, passion, purpose, and pride. By stepping outside her own personal experience and helping to change other people’s lives, Cindy also began to find a measure of peace.
I had encouraged Cindy not to weigh herself until day twenty-eight of her Diet Rehab. Because she had never felt hungry or deprived, she was worried that she hadn’t lost weight and might even have gained. In fact, Cindy had lost nine pounds, which surprised her deeply.
“It didn’t seem like I was doing much of anything,” she said. When I reminded her of all the changes she had made, she shook her head once again.
“I guess each thing made the next one easier,” she said. “Because the first thing I did was those baths, and that wasn’t really very hard. And each thing got easier after that.”
What inspired me about Cindy’s story was precisely the way that each change helped support the one that came after. Each of Cindy’s positive experiences reinforced her new way of looking at the world, while her booster foods and activities raised her serotonin levels, in turn increasing her confidence and her sense of self-worth. When I asked her how much of her new mantra she believed
now,
Cindy laughed.
“On a good day, about seventy-five percent,” she told me. “And lately I’ve had a
lot
of good days.” We both felt that even more improvement—in brain chemistry, attitude, and weight—was coming slowly but surely.
Satisfying Serotonin
 
When you begin your twenty-eight days of Diet Rehab, you’ll be working to boost and balance your serotonin levels. For the first two weeks, like Cindy, you won’t cut back on anything, but you will feed your body and your spirit with lots of serotonin booster foods and activities.
As you begin to make new, healthier food choices, be sure to arm yourself with information. Part of why sugar is so hard to avoid is because it’s
everywhere—
even in foods you probably thought didn’t have any. Sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and other addictive sweeteners are added to bread, cereal, ketchup, fruit juices, and many other foods that you probably never thought of as “dessert.” The foods you do think of as sweets may also contain far more sweetener than you imagine. A Dunkin’ Donuts “Coffee Coolatta with skim milk” sounds like a healthy replacement for soda, right? After all, coffee is very low in calories and skim milk is good for you. But it actually has about the same amount of sugar as a McDonald’s milk shake!
Don’t let deceptive marketing sabotage your efforts to balance your serotonin. Read the labels, look up favorite fast-food treats online, and arm yourself with my booster food swap list on page 246.
When you start to feel positive reinforcement—in the form of people noticing you’ve lost weight, your own glances at the mirror, and your improved energy and mood—it will be easier to continue transforming your mantra into a positive and life-affirming one. Your cravings for sugar and starch will vanish, and your blood sugar will remain on an even keel. You’ll feel hungry periodically, not constantly, and your food will satisfy you. And if you still desire an occasional treat—go ahead! Enjoy yourself! When your serotonin levels are high, everything about your life—including dessert—just feels better. Your mantra, your diet, and your brain chemistry will all support your going forward to create the life you were born to live.
5
 
Feeling Blue: Ravenous for Dopamine
 
When you’re feeling anxious and fearful, you’re hungry for serotonin. But when you’re sad, lonely, or listless, you’re ravenous for dopamine.
Dopamine is the brain chemical associated with thrills and challenges. When we ski down a mountain, go out on a romantic first date, or visit a foreign country for the first time, our dopamine levels rise. We feel that rush of excitement that makes life seem truly worth living.
Dopamine comes mostly from anticipation—more the thrill of the chase than the satisfaction of winning the race. It’s the chemical that pushes us to seek out sex, and it’s what fuels our feelings of being in love. Those first, hot six months of passion? That’s dopamine. (The slower, steady warmth of a loving marriage? That’s oxytocin, the “bonding chemical.”) No wonder dopamine makes us feel so good!
Substances or Behaviors That Cue Our Brains to Release Dopamine
 
caffeine
cocaine
driving fast
falling in love
fatty foods
gambling
heroin
hunting
nicotine
red meat
risk
sex/sexual desire
shopping (not the mundane kind, but the kind known as “retail therapy”)
sports, especially extreme sports
stock trading
taking risks
video games
watching an exciting sports match
 
 
Dopamine is also released with just twenty minutes of moderate exercise or eating lean protein.
When our dopamine levels are healthy, life seems fun and interesting, and we are frequently tingling with excitement. When our dopamine levels are low, we tend to feel listless and blue, trapped in a boring, dead-end life.
Lack of dopamine can also make us feel unmotivated. It becomes harder to focus on long-term goals, to defer gratification, and to muster the patience for a long, hard slog to the finish line, whether it’s a project at work or a demanding emotional situation.
Low dopamine levels can send us rushing for quick-fix foods and behaviors, partly because we don’t have the mental, biochemical resources we need, and we know that a high-fat treat or a stimulating behavior will give us at least temporary relief from our brain-chemistry blues. High-fat foods cue our brains to release unsustainable amounts of dopamine, giving us a chemical rush of excitement and pleasure—and setting us up for an addiction to food.
You might end up dopamine deficient for a number of reasons. Perhaps your recent life circumstances have been constricting, boring, or enervating. Lack of sleep and stress can also cause a dopamine deficiency, which is why you often crave fat more when you’re feeling tired or under pressure. Or maybe you’re coming down from an intense, thrilling period—a passionate affair, a series of challenges, a bout of risky behavior—and you’re feeling the crash. You might have inherited a tendency to lower dopamine levels or developed them through a childhood marked by high-stress and high-risk situations, such as when children grow up with a mentally ill or addict parent, or parents who are prone to rage, tantrums, or abuse. While this type of high-stress childhood can also deplete serotonin levels, it sometimes creates a kind of “roller-coaster” emotional ride for children, who get “hooked” on the adrenaline-fueled challenge of high-stakes crises, such as how to calm an out-of-control parent or how to cope with financial turmoil.
Another possibility is that, like the rats in the Scripps study, you have harmed your dopamine-pumping neurons with a high-fat diet. You may have overwhelmed your brain’s ability to process the chemical, which often leads to lowered natural production.
Any type of dopamine deficiency leaves us feeling low and listless, so that we naturally turn to high-fat foods that will perk us up. Once again, we’re trapped in a downward spiral:
 
In Chapter 4, we saw how low serotonin levels were connected to anxiety, pessimism, and lack of self-esteem. Low dopamine levels can lead to their own set of pitfall attitudes that soon manifest themselves in pitfall behaviors (see the chart below). Ironically, the response to both the unpleasant feelings and the upsetting behaviors often seems to be self-medication with high-fat foods. While this provides temporary relief, it also locks us even more firmly into the downward spiral.
ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS ASSOCIATED WITH LOW DOPAMINE LEVELS
 
Are You Ravenous for Dopamine?
 
Just a quick look at the mammoth portions in U.S. restaurants should be enough to tell us that, in addition to being serotonin-starved, many of us are also dopamine-deprived. Why else would we chase high-fat foods in the form of fatty red meat, fried foods, high-fat desserts, and snacks such as chips? Why else would we consume so much caffeine? Why else are the airwaves full of ads for energy drinks and caffeine pills? We’re all exhausted, run down, and sleep-deprived—and our eating habits show it!
I have a lot of sympathy for this one, too. I look at my patients, who are often working multiple jobs or stretching themselves to the limit trying to work a full day
and
raise a family, and I can’t believe how stressed they are. We’re all anxious about layoffs, shutdowns, and other economic threats, and we’re all under pressure to work around the clock, as well as to expend enormous energy parenting our children. Many of us are working jobs we don’t enjoy or feel trapped in situations that drain us. Dopamine deficiency is the result—and craving fat, caffeine, and perhaps also sugar is the consequence.
BOOK: Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat
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