Ever wonder where that craving for your Mama’s mac and cheese, fresh baked bread or chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting come from and why? Well, let’s take a look at your wonderful, magical brain. It stores, sorts and organizes so much information, and has so many systems and functions. Taste stimulates your body’s primary pleasure system, the opioid system. When you eat delicious, palatable foods, your neurons are stimulated by the taste along with other things and produce chemicals in the brain that have a rewarding effect, or pleasure sensation, comparable to getting high. You take something, feel something, and want to feel it again.
Once you take those heavenly bites of whatever dish or desert you are enjoying, your taste buds send signals to your lower brain, enabling your body to receive it’s reward, it’s perception of pleasure. Babies smile (like in a study when given sugar water), an animal might unconsciously move it’s jaw, and you,–well, you tell me how you react to the pleasure of your favorite foods. I picture your brain making a record of this as it moves to the higher part of your brain and gets into your awareness and consciousness. Now it’s etched in mental stone who/what/where/when and how you came about this delectable goody, so you can do yourself a favor and do it all over again.
It may really be out of your control that you feel as if you ‘need’ another cupcake, or cheated on your ridiculous diet. Your brain is just trying to look out for you and give you a reward:) Do you realize that it may not be a testament to your lack of will power, but a testament to your brain functioning properly? Except, it’s causing you to overeat and feel out of control when it comes to food sometimes.
How to overcome this? Well you could take opioid blockers to stop the pleasure or reward that the food would bring, but that would involve something like naltrexone, the stuff they give to drug addicts! Or maybe you could just give in and try to control yourself? Or maybe try to reprogram your brain to receive pleasure from other healthy options if the original palatable bites were considered bad for your waistline. If you love cookies, bake your own with healthier substitutes (chia over eggs, spelt or kamut over white flour, brown sugar or agave over white refined sugar). If you’re attempting to embrace a new, healthier lifestyle, try to reprogram your brain with new pleasure principles. Set the mood with your next meal and create an experience, not just a kale salad. Play music, smell your food, eat with people you love, cook it yourself and don’t be afraid to use a lot of seasoning. Close your eyes while you take a bite and chew, and chew, and chew some more. Savor the flavor that is massaging your palate, and connect with your taste buds. Get involved in this process of activating your neurons. Put that healthy meal memory on a permanent mental note, written with a sharpie neuron marker. Just please, make sure it tastes good and is satiating, because there really is no point trying this hard if your healthy food is gross.
I actually have yet to figure out how to overcome this battle myself, so maybe you want to take my advice with a grain of sea salt. 🙂
Please share this and let people know that their brain is functioning properly! Just stay away from restaurants, they prey on this neurological function! More to come on that one 🙂 🙂 🙂
You are so right Nette. Sometimes I get a taste for bread which I rarely eat. However when do eat it I can smell Grandma’s yeast rolls!