Cookies and Prozac

I'll say it. Whoever is running the Weight Watchers ad campaign right now is hitting the nail on the head of our insecurities around food. At the end of 2014, Weight Watchers came out with this commercial.

(Surely, there are problems with the portrayal of people in this commercial but I'll let you read this article by binge eating disorder specialist, Jennie Kramer, for that).

In the commercial, to the tune of  If You're Happy and You Know it, they sing if you're sad, bored, lonely, or stressed, you might turn to food for comfort. Not only did this resonate with me because I teach kids and babies but also because it's something that comes up often in my one-on-one client sessions. In fact, it's even come up in my blog posts before.

The 7th principle of Intuitive eating is, "honor your feelings without using food." When you start to eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full, you might start to notice the times you would eat despite not being hungry.

WHY????!!!!

Before you start beating yourself up over it, I want you to recognize:  

There is NOTHING wrong with you. 

In fact, there might be something deeply right. We eat to celebrate, to distract, to numb, and to comfort. (We eat for pleasure too).

For anybody who regularly craves sweets, sugar, or carbohydrates, there's actually a SCIENTIFIC reason for that.  Check out this quote from a scientific study:  

"Serotonin-releasing brain neurons are unique in that the amount of neurotransmitter they release is normally controlled by food intake: Carbohydrate consumption--acting via insulin secretion and the "plasma tryptophan ratio"--increases serotonin release....[The] tendency to use certain foods as though they were drugs is a frequent cause of weight gain, and can also be seen in patients who become fat when exposed to stress, or in women with premenstrual syndrome, or in patients with "winter depression," or in people who are attempting to give up smoking. (Nicotine, like dietary carbohydrates, increases brain serotonin secretion" (Wurtman & Wurtman, 1995).

In laymen's terms, carbohydrates make it easier to create serotonin in your brain. Serotonin makes you feel good. SSRI inhibitors, or drugs that people often take for depression, help prevent serotonin re-uptake so you have more of it. People who are experiencing stress, seasonal affective disorder, or even PMS, are likely to reach for food that helps to manage the low "feel-good" neurotransmitters in our brains.

Turns out this is also true when it comes to dopamine levels and protein.  A craving for a burger might signal an overworked nervous system or that your desk job is too damn boring. 

So, maybe if you're sad, you're using those cookies to self-medicate. 

Good for you. You're taking care of yourself. But, they may not work as well as pharmaceutical drugs and they certainly don't last as long.  Worse than that, you're treating a symptom of the problem, not the cause. 

I like to tell my own story about this for my clients:

I used to have this job that was pretty physically demanding but not very intellectually demanding. Most importantly, it felt like a dead end. I was going nowhere. I was depressed but I didn't have the insight at the time to recognize all those feelings.

After my late night shifts, I would come home and eat  A LOT of cereal.

Like, bowl after bowl of cereal until I was physically uncomfortable from my fullness. I also used to feel really guilty about every bowl and I think I got a little high from "being bad."Once I quit that job and moved on to more exciting things, a funny thing happened: I stopped eating cereal. I stopped craving cereal. I don't even like it. I almost never eat it now. 

So, here's the solution: 

We need to identify the root cause of why we're eating emotionally.

What are our emotions????

Lonely? Bored? Try hanging out with your friends or doing something exciting like skiing or snowboarding. Or ski or snowboard with your friends.

In fact, I really love this article from the Huffington Post. It has a super easy way to identify the neurotransmitter you're missing when you're feeling a certain feeling. I highly recommend going there to see what alternate activity you could engage in to re-balance your brain.  The bottom line: dopamine=bored, serotonin=sad, oxytocin=lonely, and endorphins=anxious. You get dopamine from accomplishing goals, serotonin from feeling significant, oxytocin from cuddling, and endorphins from exercise and laughing. 

I spoke to fellow health coach Kylie Reiffert, MS in nutrition and Nutrition Therapy Provider, to help me untangle some of the scientific nuances of this phenomenon with food. While she recommends some healthy protein and fat along with magnesium supplements to help curb cravings for carbs, she notes that when we take different actions, like those listed above, to manage those chemical imbalances, "the concentrations are different because it's hard to measure the serum level increases, but [it works] nonetheless."

So there you have it. You need a hug, not a Hershey's Kiss. Still, don't blame yourself for buying the chocolate. 

Happy Valentine's Day!

**If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health issues, please seek the advice of a professional. You don't have to do this by yourself.**

Are you satisfied?

 I'm really happy that next week is Valentine's Day and that 50 Shades of Grey is coming out because........ 

The 6th principle of Intuitive Eating is "Discover Your Satisfaction Factor."

One of the most radical concepts of eating intuitively is learning to embrace how your body feels about food. This includes pleasure. 

No offense to puritans, but American puritanical beliefs around sexuality also extend to our overall experience of pleasure, including food. Many of my clients express a fear of overeating should they indulge in the food that they actually enjoy. They fear that they'll eat like some kind of voracious, wild animal that can't seem to stop when it's appropriate (ironically, many wild animals show wonderful control around their appetites). 

In Caroline Knapp's book, Appetite, she opens the book discussing the depiction of women in a Renoir painting. She writes,

"This is an image of bounty, a view of female physicality in which a woman's hungers are both celebrated and undifferentiated, as though all her appetites are of a piece, the physical and the emotional entwined and given equal weight. Food is love on this landscape, and love is sex, and sex is connection, and connection is food; appetites exist in a full circle, or in a sonata where eating and touching and making love and feeling close are all distinct chords that nonetheless meld with and complement one another." 

I could write a 10 page paper on this quote, but the essence of what Knapp is getting at is this: 

For Caroline Knapp, this an ideal.  Male or female (Knapp finds the female body especially relevant), our physical beings should be sanctified. One's connection to one's body interplays with one's relationship to food, to sex and other people. She emphasizes that by honoring our bodies,  we find more love and connection. That connection exposes a harmony in our lives. This idea is not that different from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition's philosophy on primary food (I will definitely have another blog post about this topic). My coaching practice aspires to bring people who have fought with their bodies and their desires for a long time to become connected again, to take care of their bodies again, and to listen to their bodies. 

Sexual appetite provides a mirror into understanding how we interact with our bodies with regard to food.

For some, sex is only a means to the end of making children but even the most devoutly religious often find pleasure in the process. Likewise, for chronic dieters, food is a means to an end: sustenance or weight loss. For most people, even chronic dieters, sex is mostly a means to the end of pleasure. When we give in to our desire for pleasure and reallllly enjoy it, we feel satisfied (unless we're not. That happens.) Sometimes that satisfaction is enough to keep us for a while - days, weeks, months. 

Married lovers tell us a tale about pleasure and satisfaction. When you first start to have sex with someone whom you find desirable, you might enjoy them in "excess."  Over time, the desire becomes less overwhelming and we either form a romantic connection with that person or we move on.

We can see this pattern, too, in food that we eat. The first time you eat cheesecake, it might be divine but have it every night for a week, and you'll likely get sick of it. If not, you might still love it so much that you don't want to get sick of it so you save it for special occasions or to make a Wednesday night a little more exciting.  Maybe you marry cheesecake but you want to make sure cheesecake has a life outside of you and you have a life outside of cheesecake so you also pick up racquetball. 

It's something I've mentioned before; habituation is programmed into your body. It's the reason that drug users need to up their dose to get the same high. 

If you're listening to your body and taking care of your body, I promise you will not die of an oreo overdose. 

Pleasure is not an enemy to be avoided. It is something to be fully experienced. It is something we need to pay attention to, especially when it comes to food. 

So, for now, I just want all of you to make plans to really enjoy Valentine's Day.

Respect Your Fullness

I know what you're thinking right now. 

What fullness? I don't ever feel full. If you've been on diets for a long time, I believe you. 

You've programmed yourself to "feel satisfied" when you've eaten 300 calories or a banana and 1 tbsp of peanut butter. Cantaloupe? Yes I can.... feel full on it (that link is for any Brooklyn 99 fans). 

But, when it's time to cheat, you are straight up plowing past "full" all way to stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey.

I could get all Rousseau on you about this but, effectively, modern society encourages us to stray from our natural inclinations. Living in NYC, I know this all too well. We are a city that never sleeps even though, biologically, we need to sleep to survive. 

Add in "Clean Plate" moralism, a compulsive need to finish everything on your plate, and you've got the reason why we never feel full. Here's the most important component of intuitive eating:

LISTEN TO YOUR BODY!

The 10 principles of intuitive eating are written in a specific order for a reason. You have to follow everything up to this point to be able to honor your fullness. 

You have to give yourself "unconditional permission to eat." You have to be done with dieting. You have to eat when you're hungry. You have to legalize all foods and challenge any rules, guilt or shame you have around food. 

Here's the action item this week: 

Become conscious again.

Pay attention to your body and cravings. Do a yoga class or meditation. Do something that helps you bring awareness back to your body. 

Take a break from your TPS reports, email, Facebook or Netflix binge and sit your ass down at your table and eat. 

Give yourself permission to just feel whatever you're going to feel when you're full. Maybe you will keep eating and get REALLY full. 

Whatever you do is fine. Remember this is not a "hunger and fullness diet."

Just listen to your body. See if you can hear your body say, "Hey dude. I'm full."

Then maybe, just maybe, the dude abides.

Like a Cop Car

Wee-ooh Wee-ooh Weee. Wee-ooh Wee-ooh wee. 

This week the 4th principle in the "10 principles of Intuitive Eating" is Challenge the Food Police. 

(For my thoughts on the 1st principle, 2nd principle, and 3rd principle, click on the corresponding links here)

Don't worry. You don't have to get out your umbrella for this one, go on a hunger strike or fly to Ferguson. Listening to Lil' Wayne, however, is strongly encouraged. 

1. Think of all of your food beliefs. Identify them. Write them down if you have to. 

The first step in challenging the food police is identifying where he or she lurks in your psyche. What are your beliefs around food? Is kale good? Are hamburgers bad? Think about all your "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts" when it comes to food and exercise.

A helpful way to start this process is to think of all the diets you've been on. For example, I once just didn't eat french fries for 40 days. I used to believe french fries were the worst. 

Feel like the list is too short or can't shake a feeling of the complex religion in your head of food and diet? 

What foods make you feel GUILTY? Those are likely to lead you down the rabbit hole of what you believe about food. 

2. Let it go! Let it go! That perfect girl/boy is gone!

Frozen lyrics aside, (have I mentioned I teach 3 year olds how to swim?), just drop those beliefs like a hot potato or like you're getting down on the dance floor. 

To do this DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy) style, take that list that you just made and destroy it. If there's a safe way to do it, burn it. Cross out all those beliefs with a pen. Crumple it up. Shred it. Laugh maniacally while you rip it up into tiny little pieces. Flush it down the toilet. 

That's all for this week. Just allow yourself the freedom of an agnostic relationship to food. 

Legalize it

The 3rd principle in "10 Principles of Intuitive Eating" is Make Peace with Food. 

As someone who has explored the field of nutrition for the past six years, I know that food is a loaded topic. I know vegans who adhere strictly to their diet for animal rights and ecological reasons. I know people on ketogenic (aka little to no carbohydrates) diets that have quite possibly saved their lives. The Paleo diet sometimes seems as controversial as the latest immigration legislation between Republicans and Democrats. 

Food is absolutely political and charged. So, it's no surprise when I have clients coming to me with years and years of food beliefs deeply ingrained.  "Pizza is bad." "Salads are good." "French fries are bad for you but whole baked potatoes are good." "You shouldn't really eat cookies but you should have smoothies." 

So what do you do? 

 It's not that different from what I told you last week:

EAT.  Legalize it. Make all foods legal. Make all foods neutral. 

Eat the foods that you've forbidden yourself to eat in all your years of dieting. 

For those of you freaking out right now, KEEP READING!

Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch describe this in detail in the their book, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works: 

 "Psychologist Fritz Heider stated that depriving yourself of something you want can actually heighten your desire for that very item. The moment you banish a food, it paradoxically builds up a 'craving life' of its own that gets stronger with each diet, and builds more momentum as the deprivation deepens. Deprivation is a powerful experience both biologically and psychologically," (Tribole & Resch, 75).  

In other words, your low-carb diet is like Eve in the Garden of Eden. As long as you can't eat that piece of bread on the Tree of Forbidden Carbohydrates, you will increase your feeling of deprivation and desire for that piece of bread. This will impact you on a biochemical and psychological level.  

The book also describes the "see-saw syndrome" of deprivation and guilt. At a certain point, our willpower runs out and we end up overeating the very thing we've been trying to avoid.  

To banish any guilt or deprivation you might be feeling, here's my story: 

I went on a pretty serious "28 day challenge" where I was eating a vegan, whole foods, no oil, low salt, low sugar diet. And I did it for 27 of those 28 days (one day I indulged with some oil in my vegetable soup), including a small bout of stomach flu. I lost about 5 pounds.

However, I also had a building obsession with macaroni and cheese. Like, it was all I could think about. I tried eating the "28 day challenge" version of it, which tasted good but didn't satisfy me like the genuine, ooey-gooey article. So, at the end of what I later called "Vegan Ramadan," I ate  an inordinate amount of macaroni and cheese,even though my stomach was curdling in response to it. 

I ate SO much macaroni and cheese that I actually gained back a lovely 10 pounds.  (See my other blog post for more information about why diets don't work).

But the truth is, I got over the macaroni and cheese because of a lovely thing Tribole and Resch call, HABITUATION. In laymen's terms, habituation is the process of you eating something so many times that you eventually get sick of it - kind of like the latest Taylor Swift single.

To explain habituation, I love to tell the story I heard from Geneen Roth during my training at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN). 

In her lecture, she describes a transformative experience when she went from battling a very serious eating disorder to drawing a line in the sand and choosing never to diet again. She notes that for two weeks she ate nothing but cookie dough.

That's right, folks, she allowed herself to have all the cookie dough she wanted. And you know what she discovered? After those two weeks, she didn't want cookie dough anymore. Her body started to crave salad, fresh fruits and vegetables. 

And that's just it: when you stop treating a vanilla milkshake like Olivia Pope treats the President, you'll actually probably feel less inclined to secretly binge on it.