CHAPTER 4:
YOUR BRAIN ON FOOD
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“This program has shown results that I didn’t think were possible. Prior to the Whole30, I recognized that I had severe difficulties dealing with food cravings and knowing when to stop eating. Cheat meals turned into cheat feasts and cheat weekends. My frustration with controlling my cravings and urges skyrocketed. Daily I asked myself, ‘How can I get these urges under control? Why do I feel like I need these bad foods? Where should I go for help?’ Whole30 is the answer. I haven’t felt the deep desire to binge since I’ve submerged myself into this program. I don’t feel like I have to struggle to make decisions when trying to decide what to eat. The way I eat now is how I honestly desire to feed myself.”
—Aubrey H., Manassas, Virginia
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Surprised that we’re leading off with psychology and not calories, energy, or metabolism? Stay with us, because we suspect this section is going to resonate with you. As a rule, we think the foods that are good for your body should also not mess with your mind. And we think the psychological effects of your food choices are perhaps the most important factors to consider during your healthy-eating transformation.
How many times have you tried a new plan, bought new foods, and stuck to the new menu for a few weeks, only to fall right back into your old habits—and old waistline? (Every time you’ve tried to “diet,” we suspect.) Want to know why your previous efforts have failed?
Dieting doesn’t work.
But you knew that already, didn’t you?
Calorie-restrictive plans have been found to help folks lose weight, but only in the short term. Most folks can’t sustain their new dietary habits, and after a year or two, the vast majority end up gaining back even more weight than they lost. (Kind of a bummer, right?) The truth is, simply reducing your calories isn’t likely to change or alleviate your food cravings, even if you do lose weight. And we’ll show how your cravings, habits, and patterns are critical to your long-term success.
In addition, creating healthy dietary habits isn’t just about restricting or eliminating certain foods. You already know that fast food, junk food, and sweets aren’t good for you. You know you shouldn’t eat them if you want to lose weight, get off your medication, or be healthier.
Yet you continue to eat them.
You struggle with food cravings, bad habits, compulsions, and addictions. You know you shouldn’t, but you feel compelled to eat these foods. Sometimes, you don’t even want them, but you eat them anyway. And you have a hard time stopping.
All of which makes you feel guilty and stressed—and more likely to comfort yourself with even more unhealthy food.
We’re here to tell you:
It’s not your fault.
You are not lacking willpower. You are not lazy. And it’s not your fault that you can’t stop eating these foods.
Now we’re not trying to say that the choices you make aren’t your own or that you don’t have any responsibility for your current health status (or waistline). But what you have to understand is that these unhealthy foods have an unfair advantage. They are designed to mess with your brain. They are built to make you crave them. They make it hard for you to give them up.
And until you know their dirty little secrets, you will never be able to leave these foods, and your cravings, habits, and patterns, behind.
We are going to spill their secrets.
We are going to help you understand why you crave the foods you do and explain how these unhealthy foods trick you into eating them. Then we’ll show you how to outsmart your cravings once and for all.
HARD TO RESIST
Food craving can be defined as “an intense desire to consume a particular food (or type of food) that is difficult to resist.” Cravings aren’t merely about your behavior related to the food in question—they’re about your emotional motivation and the conditioning (habit) that is created with repeated satisfaction. You don’t even have to be hungry to experience cravings—in fact, they’re more closely related to moods like anger, sadness, or frustration than to hunger. In addition, your capacity to visualize the food and imagine its taste are strongly correlated with craving strength—so the more you fantasize about indulging, the less likely you are to resist.
Specific food cravings can turn into poor eating habits in just a few days, leaving us stuck in a cycle of relentless urges, short-term satisfaction, and long-term guilt, shame, anxiety, and weight gain. To effectively change our relationship with food (and maintain new, healthy habits forever), we need to understand what is behind our cravings, habits, and patterns.
It all starts with biology and nature.
ANCIENT SIGNALS IN A MODERN WORLD
If we were hunting and foraging our food in nature, our bodies would need some way to signal to us that we’d found something useful. For example, bitter tastes signify toxic foods while sweet tastes signify a safer choice. Thanks to nature and our biology, our brains have been hardwired to appreciate three basic tastes: sweet (a safe source of energy), fatty (a dense source of calories), and salty (a means of conserving fluid). When we came across these flavors, neurotransmitters in our brain would help us remember that these foods were good choices by sending us signals of pleasure and reward, reinforcing the experience in our memories. These important signals from nature helped us select the foods best suited to our health.
But there is one very important point to keep in mind with respect to these signals from nature. They weren’t designed to tell us which foods were delicious—they were designed to tell us which foods were nutritious.
In nature, pleasure and reward signals led us to vital nutrition.
The trouble is that in today’s world, the ancient signals persist —but the foods that relay them are anything but good sources of nutrition. And that creates a major disruption in our bodies and in our brains.
Over the last fifty years, the makeup of our foods has dramatically changed. Our grocery stores and health food markets are packed with shelves of processed, refined food-like products—which no longer look anything like the plant or animal from which they were derived.
Food scientists caught on to the fact that our brains respond strongly to specific flavors (such as the aforementioned sweet, fatty, and salty), and armed with this knowledge, they began to modify our whole foods. They sucked out the water, the fiber, and the nutrients, and replaced them with ingredients like corn syrup, MSG, seed oils, and artificial sweeteners, colors, and flavors. All of this with the specific intention of inducing cravings, overconsumption and bigger profits for food manufacturers.
They’ve turned real food into Franken-food.
These foods light up pleasure and reward centers in the brain for a different reason than nature intended—not because they provide vital nutrition, but because they are scientifically designed to stimulate our taste buds. The effect is a total disconnection between pleasurable, rewarding tastes (sweet, fatty, and salty) and the nutrition that always accompanies them in nature.
In nature, sweet tastes usually came from seasonal raw fruit, rich in vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. Today, sweet flavors come from artificial sweeteners, refined sugars, and high fructose corn syrup. In nature, fatty tastes usually came from meats, especially nutrient-packed organ meats. In modern times, fats come from a deep-fryer or a tub of “spread.” In nature, precious electrolytes like sodium came from sea life, or from the animals we ate. In modern times, salt comes from a shaker.
Do you see the problem with this?
Modern technology has stripped the nutrition from these foods, replacing it with empty calories and synthetic chemicals that fool our bodies into giving us the same powerful biological signals to keep eating.
This means we are eating more calories with less nutrition.
Persistent biological signals lead us to overeat sweet, fatty, salty foods while keeping us malnourished.
These Franken-foods are ridiculously cheap to produce.
They unnaturally electrify our taste buds.
They contain little, if any, nutrition.
And they mess with our brains in a major way.
VIVA LAS VEGAS
“Supernormal stimulus” is the science-y term for something so exaggerated that we prefer it to reality—even when we know it’s fake. A supernormal food stimulus arouses our taste receptors more intensely than anything found in nature. Candy is far sweeter than fruit. Onion rings are fattier and saltier than onions. Sweet-and-sour pork is sweeter, fattier, and saltier than actual pork. And Franken-foods like Twinkies and Oreos outcompete any taste found in nature, which is, of course, exactly why we prefer them. These supernormal stimuli are like the Las Vegas Strip of foods. Dazzling! Exotic! Extreme! But entirely contrived. Not at all realistic. Totally overwhelming. (And if you take a good, hard look in the light of day—i.e., read your ingredients—you’ll see that they’re actually cheap, dirty, and kind of gross.) But the over-the-top flavors found in these foods (and the extra-strong connections they forge in your brain) make it hard to stop eating them—and make natural, whole foods look bland and boring by comparison.
You may be thinking, “If these foods taste so good that I can’t stop eating them, maybe I should just stop eating foods that taste good.” But that just sounds miserable to us—and flavor restriction would probably be just as unsuccessful long-term as caloric restriction! Thankfully, this strategy is wholly unnecessary. The problem isn’t that these foods are delicious.
The problem is that these foods are supernormally stimulating in the absence of nutrition and satiety.
They are the essence of empty calories—foods with no brakes.
PRIME RIB AND OREOS?
The idea of food brakes can be explained by satiety and satiation. They sound the same, but biologically speaking they are two separate and distinct concepts.
Satiety occurs in your digestive tract—specifically, in your intestines. When you’ve digested and absorbed enough calories and nutrients to satisfy your body’s needs, hormones signal to your brain that “I am well nourished now,” which decreases your desire for more food. Satiety can’t be fooled or faked, as it is dependent on the actual nutrition in your food. But since digestion is slow, these signals may take several hours to be transmitted, which means they can’t do a very good job all by themselves to keep you from overeating.
That’s where satiation comes in.
Satiation is regulated in the brain and provides more timely motivation to stop eating. It’s based on the taste, smell, and texture of food, the perception of “fullness,” even your knowledge of how many calories are in a meal. As you eat, you perceive various sensations (“This is delicious,” “I shouldn’t eat the whole bag” or “I’m getting pretty full”), all of which send your brain status updates to help you determine whether you still want more. But unlike satiety, satiation is an estimate dependent on your perceptions, not an absolute measurement.
Ideally, the brain would signal us to stop eating when our bodies have sensed that we’ve digested and absorbed enough nutrition to support our health. In this case, satiation and satiety would be one and the same. Let’s use the example of a prime rib dinner.
Prime rib contains complete protein, the most satiating of all the macronutrients, and naturally occurring fat, which makes protein even more satiating. As you eat your prime rib, you’ll find yourself wanting prime rib less and less with every bite. The first bite was amazing, the second fantastic, but by your tenth bite, the texture, smell, and flavor are less appealing. And by the twentieth bite, you’ve had enough, and you no longer desire the flavor or texture of the meat—so down goes your fork.
This is satiation.
Prime rib also takes longer to eat than processed food (as you actually have to chew and swallow), which gives your brain a chance to catch up with your stomach. As you eat and start to digest the meat, your body recognizes that the dense nutrition in that prime rib is adequate for your energy and caloric needs. This sends a “we’re getting nourishment” signal to your brain while you’re still working on your plate, which also reduces your “want” for more food.
This is satiety.
This scenario plays out differently for foods lacking the satiation factors of adequate nutrition—complete protein, natural fats and essential nutrients. Let’s compare prime rib to a tray of Oreos.
Oreos are a highly processed food containing almost no protein, saturated with sugar and flavor-enhancing chemicals, and filled with added fats. As we eat the Oreos (generally at a much faster rate than prime rib), they move through us quickly and don’t provide enough nutrition to induce satiation or satiety. So unlike the prime rib, there are no “brakes” to decrease our want. We want the tenth Oreo just as much as the first. And we never stop wanting more because even though we’ve eaten plenty of calories, our bodies know that we are still seriously lacking in nutrition. So we eat the whole darn package because satiety can’t be fooled.
In the case of Oreos, the only reason to stop eating is when our bellies are physically full, and we realize we’re about to make ourselves sick from overconsumption.
Those aren’t brakes at all—that’s just an emergency ejection seat.
LET US SUMMARIZE
These scientifically designed foods artificially concentrate highly palatable flavors (sweet, fatty, and salty) that stimulate our pleasure centers with a far bigger “hit” than we could ever get from nature. This processing removes any nutrition once found in the food but still leaves all the calories. The final concoction (we can’t really call it “food” at this point) offers a staggering variety of over-the-top flavor sensations in every single bite—but your body knows there is no nutrition there, so you continue to want more food, even past the point of fullness.
If we stopped right here, we’d have made our point. Clearly, these foods violate our first Good Food standard by provoking an unhealthy psychological response—heck, they were designed to do just that!
Unfortunately, there’s more.
Chronic consumption of these foods doesn’t just affect our taste buds, our perceptions, and our waistlines.
Over time, they literally rewire our brains.
PLEASURE, REWARD, EMOTION, AND HABIT
Pleasure, reward, and emotion are all interconnected in our brains. Reward circuitry is integrated with parts of the brain that enrich a pleasurable experience with emotion, making it more powerful, and easier to remember. The combination of pleasure, reward, and emotion pushes you toward rewarding stimuli—including food.
The foods in question—supernormally stimulating without adequate nutrition to invoke satiation or satiety—tell the brain to release dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with the pleasure center. Dopamine motivates your behavior, reinforces food-seeking (“wanting”) and energizes your feeding. It gives you that rush of anticipation before you’ve even taken your first bite. (You’re daydreaming at work and start thinking about your favorite cookie from the downtown bakery. You’re visualizing the taste, the smell, the texture. You start to get excited and happy at the thought of picking up cookies on the way home. You want those cookies. That’s dopamine talking.)
On the way home, you stop at the bakery, pick up a dozen cookies, and take your first bite before you’ve even pulled out of the parking lot. (Of course, because that cookie is supernormally stimulating, but lacking in nutrients that satiate, you don’t stop at just one.) Immediately, the brain releases opioids (endorphins—the body’s own “feel good” compounds), which also have a rewarding effect. The release of opioids brings pleasure and emotional relief, releases stress, and generally makes you feel good.
Over time and with continued reinforcement, those dopamine pathways begin to light up at the mere suggestion of the food, like when you’re driving past that bakery, see someone else eating a similar-looking cookie, or watch a commercial for cookies on television. This preemptive dopamine response (and the memory of the reward you’ll experience when you indulge) makes it all but impossible to resist the urge to satisfy that craving. Your want has turned into a need.
The kicker?
You don’t even have to be hungry—because it’s not about satisfying your hunger. It’s about satisfying the craving.
After just a few trips to the bakery, your memory circuits tell your reward circuits that the cookie will bring you joy. Dopamine promises satisfaction, if you only give in to your urge. You can’t resist, so you eat the cookie(s) and your endorphins help you feel good (for a while). And so the vicious cycle serves only to reinforce itself until you have developed a habitual response—the automatic craving for a specific food in response to certain triggers.
Automatic cravings do not sound psychologically healthy to us.