losing weight Archives - Nirvana Diet

Here’s what I have learned in the ten years of working with people who struggle with diet plans and are seeking healthy ways to lose weight.

Although Kelly Brownell who wrote Food Fight is focusing on children who are certainly victims of the obesity epidemic, we are all prey to these insidious and dangerous phenomena of the addictive substances in processed food. What is going on?

I think we have all been misled into believing and thinking that diet and exercise are the answer. You have been programmed to think that if you are challenged by losing weight it is because you don’t have enough willpower. There is only one problem with that solution.

You can’t diet and exercise if you are addicted to sugar.

According to Robert Lustig MD, an endocrinologist at the University of San Francisco, you don’t have a chance because sugar is for some people as addictive as the ethanol in alcohol and should be a controlled substance.

Despite this, sugar is literally in everything. This is a biochemical problem that wreaks havoc with your brain and disenables the hormones you rely on to tell you when you are hungry and full. They no longer work when you are under the influence of this toxic addictive substance. According to the Harvard Health Letter, October 2006 issue, annual consumption of sweeteners has increased to about 100 pounds per person over the past 20 years. During this period more people especially children have become overweight and obese…added sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup may be the reason. Artificial sweeteners added to drinks are particularly troubling because people believe these drinks are healthy. People who drink two cans of diet soda a day over a decade are 70% more likely to be obese. Not only are you saturating your body with sugar, it is debilitating your energy so you can’t exercise even if you want to.

The cure for this like all addictions is to become knowledgeable and ready to make some changes. The pain of continuing to eat like this has to become in your mind greater than the reward you think you get.

This includes taking a hard look at the underlying emotional or life issues that created it. As with most addictions the cure is abstinence and or a modification of how you eat that includes the consumption of plant based foods supplement with moderate amounts of concentrated protein preferably fish. This means focusing on eating real foods such as vegetables, salad, fruit and some “truly” whole grains.

Lustig said this is such a problem for our children. It starts with the baby formula we feed. If we do not have government intervention to help protect us…we will be sorry. This of course will not happen. So you have to take charge of your health yourself. The New York Times has run several articles on the merits of taxing food such as soda and subsidizing vegetables:

We need to treat the food industry just like we did the tobacco industry.

The best diet plan is to eat real food and take up something like meditation and walking to help rebalance the brain chemistry in a This is why I put together a great home study program for stress reduction that includes a great beginner course: Doubt Free meditation.

This is why I put together a great home study program for stress reduction that includes a great beginner course.

Sugar Cravings: Why you can’t follow a plan to lose weight.

Why are we reluctant to call eating disorders and other negative habits that relate to food eating addictions?

According to Gabor Mate, MD, author of In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, a powerful book, the definition of an addiction is:

a habit that causes negative consequences and despite these consequences you cannot stop or change easily.

According to most addiction experts, an addiction is also a chronic neurobiological disease, characterized by behaviors that include: impaired ability to control use of the drugs, which eventually becomes compulsive, and continues despite the harm it brings to the person. Typically when one tries to stop, there is a relapse of the behavior.

Perhaps the reason the medical community is reluctant to categorize eating problems as an addiction this way is because they do not consider food to be an addictive substance.

I believe until we begin to acknowledge the drug-like effects of processed sugar and flour especially when combined with other ingredients such as fat that hook and high jack the brain, we are denying one of the most prevalent addictions our society today.

Recently, Marcia DeSanctis wrote a powerful article in Vogue’s April issue about her fear that her sugar cravings and eating behavior were in fact an addiction. The medical community calls it “hedonic eating.” This means eating for pleasure as opposed to sustenance. In my own practice, I have come across this problem in about 30% of the cases I saw.

What I do now when I come across a case like this is to refer them for testing. Often there is an insulin sensitivity that goes along with this condition, and a brain chemistry imbalance, although this is hard to unravel. DeSanctis discovered a correlation between her cycles being “out of whack” and carbohydrates became a “tranquilizer of sorts on which she was “overdosing.” Interestingly what she found was trying to quit cold turkey is partly why we fail. Although the key is to address the imbalance, and remove the addictive substance from the body to allow the brain chemistry to heal, it is the drastic change of trying to stop all at once that causes failure and relapse.

Kelly Brownell, PhD, and director of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity says: “the magnitude of the effect that sugar has on the body is not as strong as what you get from cocaine or morphine or alcohol, but the whole body of evidence suggests that sugar affects the brain in a very similar way.”

Understanding this takes away some of the shame associated with addictions and food addictions in particular. It is not something that is so easily controlled by one’s will and it is often an attempt to self-medicate an underlying chemical imbalance in the body/brain. I do not necessarily advocate that people automatically turn to antidepressant medication either which is now the most frequently prescribed drug in the U.S. and our most popular export.

There is new body of work suggesting that nutrition therapy holds more promise to treat the underlying condition than antidepressants. This is why I work with teaching mindfulness skills and meditation, a process I have worked with for years. Research is showing that meditation has the ability to change the brain by creating new brain cells in the part of the brain that registers happiness and compassion. The stress reduction process I work with which includes an easy effective way to make meditation a part of your life is in my opinion, the best way to start breaking a sugar addiction.

One thing is for sure, treating these problems the way we have been doing does not do them justice. If you have any experience curing a sugar addiction, I would love to hear about it.