If you know food addiction is a real thing, and you know you’re not in full control of your eating you might have found yourself wondering “why am I addicted to food?”
The thing is, you’re not addicted to real food. The problem lies with ‘food’ that isn’t really food at all. ‘Food’ such as refined sugar and refined white carbs like white flour, aka drug food – and with good reason.
Drug Foods Wreak Havoc With Hormones
The human body hasn’t evolved to cope with refined sugars and white flours – because they are not really food.
These ‘foods’ increase the level of insulin in your body to abnormally high levels.
Leptin is supposed to reduce your appetite when you’ve eaten enough, but abnormally high levels or insulin block its action. The result – you feel disproportionate hunger to what your body actually needs.
Basically this ‘food’ has tricked your body into thinking it’s starving when the reality is you could be massively overweight!
But there’s more..
The Drug Effect
There is an area in the brain that is designed to motivate various important behaviours, one of them being eating.
When you eat dopamine is released and you feel good – this motivates us to eat and was important when food wasn’t available 24/7 like it is now. It made sure we ate enough when food wasn’t always easy to get hold of.
It’s this area of the brain that gets people into big trouble when they try something like crack or heroin.
The dopamine stimulation from the first hit of crack is huge, and the resulting high is massive. The user wants to achieve that level of high again, but it never happens because of down-regulation.
When the dopamine system is over stimulated it’s down-regulated.
The crack user is chasing something they’ll never achieve again because of this down-regulation. It very soon gets to the point where in between hits the crack user feels awful, and taking the drug only gets them back to feeling ‘normal’, a high is no long achievable.
This is the exact same thing that happens with ‘drug food’ – refined sugar and processed white carbs like flour.
They are not food and they over stimulate the dopamine system – this results in down-regulation.
A food addict will need more and more of their preferred ‘drug food’ to get an effect. This effect wains over time, leaving the ‘user’ feeling empty between hits, or grazing all day long just to feel normal.
Why Am I Addicted To Food But Not Everyone Else Is?
Think about it – 90% of the population drink alcohol which is an addictive substance. Not everyone is an alcoholic.
It boils down to susceptibility.
Some people are more susceptible than others to addiction, but that doesn’t mean you can’t beat it if you get the right help.
Spotting the Signs of Food Addiction
Have a great week!
Dr Julie
PS Do you think you’ve got what it takes to lose weight? Take the quiz