I walked up to the bar at the jazz
club to get a refill, and a woman in her 40s, sitting at a nearby table with
her mother and her mother’s friend, struck up a conversation with me. I engaged the
brazen (lonely?) hussy, gave her my “business” card (“The Nutrition Debate”)
and began immediately to proselytize about Very Low Carb eating. She indulged
me, with indifference bordering on insouciance, and then said, “Can I ask you a
personal question?”
Two thoughts crossed my mind: How
much had she had to drink? And why am I feeling on the defensive? Anyway, I
said “sure.” It could be interesting, and, as my readers know, I do not guard
my health and medical privacy. I am thrilled to share the news about how
changes in what I eat over the last 17 years have transformed my health.
I won’t repeat all the statistics here. For
new readers, though, I have been a Type 2 for 33 years, and 17 years ago I
weighed 375 pounds. After changing what I ate from the Standard American Diet
(“balanced” and very high in carbs), I lost 170 pounds, my blood
glucose went from “uncontrolled” on 3 oral meds to “well-controlled”
(“non-diabetic”) on a minimum dose of Metformin. My cholesterol also improved
very dramatically, my blood pressure improved (on fewer meds) and my
inflammation marker also dramatically improved. So, I said, “Ask away!”
To my surprise, she asked, “How can
you drink on your diet?” Relieved, I went into a boring explanation of how many
carbs are in 2 glasses of wine (my “limit”), how much ethyl alcohol, etc. It
must have sounded like a rationalization, but she was satisfied. Short answer:
I am not an ascetic; I am a hedonist. I do not eat (or drink) to survive; I eat
and drink for pleasure. Bottom line: I had better like what I eat (and drink)
or 1) I wouldn’t like doing it and 2) I wouldn’t be able to do it indefinitely
as a “lifestyle change,” which is needed if I am to succeed long term.
This is not just about my former glutenous
and bibulous lifestyle. It’s true I had to change what I ate to save my health.
But I am not an ascetic, so I had to find an “alternate” lifestyle with equal
or greater gustatory rewards. Eating is not a volitional thing. This is about a
driving force that controls the urge to “consume food just for pleasure”
and not just to “maintain energy homeostasis.” This is called
“hedonistic hunger.” I’m not making this up.
I had just read an article in the
Journal of Clinical Endocrinal Metabolism titled, “Hedonic eating is associated
with increased peripheral levels of ghrelin and the endocannabinoid
2-arachidonoyl-glycerol in healthy humans: a pilot study.” The story line: the
hunger hormone (ghrelin) and opioid receptors in the brain regulate eating
behavior based on palatability. It’s not will power, folks. So, the “trick” to sidestep cravings
is to transition from a high-carb dietary, engineered by processed food
manufacturers for maximum palatability, to an equally hedonistic lifestyle
based on energy homeostasis. Eat for pleasure, but just enough to be healthy. The
key is to avoid
feeling hungry.
Cravings, as we know them, are
signals from the stomach (ghrelin) and the brain (hypothalamus) telling us to
eat. The signals are, frankly, sometimes almost impossible to resist. Our
response: to eat low energy density foods (carbohydrates) with high
palatability. But, if you eat a breakfast that enables you to go all day long
without feeling hungry, because your blood glucose has been stable all day
long, you will not have hunger cravings.
The body will regulate energy
homeostasis using different mechanisms. You body is “happy” to burn body fat for energy if you
don’t eat carbs. It is
designed to work that way. We didn’t evolve eating “three squares” a day. We ate “catch as catch
can” and sometimes went days working off stored energy from a previous feast.
It’s natural.
This PubMed Abstract concludes: “The
present preliminary findings suggest that when motivation to eat is generated
by the availability of highly palatable food and not by food deprivation, a
peripheral activation of two endogenous rewarding chemical signals is observed.
Future research should confirm and extend our results to better understand the
phenomenon of hedonic eating, which influences food intake and, ultimately,
body mass.”
I always ate for pleasure, but I was hooked on carbs.
I craved carbs; now, I still eat for pleasure, but I am not
craven. I eat foods that satiate (fat and protein), and so I am not hungry
between meals. In fact, I often skip lunch.
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