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Article Series: Weight Loss & Dieting
How Do I Really Lose Weight?
The
Role of Dopamine on Weight Loss
The body eats in order to live, but many of
live to eat. Food is so tasty, and the act of eating so pleasurable,
that we relish in those moments spent engaged in the activity.
And stopping ourselves, it turns out, is more than merely an
act of will. There is a biological component to this phenomenon
of the enjoyment of food, the understanding of which, can free
you to make sounder and healthier choices in your diet and
your eating habits.
The culprit, many scientists and researchers now believe,
is Dopamine: a neurotransmitter involved in producing the feelings
associated with pleasure. When large amounts of dopamine are
present in our brains, we feel good; we may even experience
a little “high”. The natural inclination of any creature, when
experiencing this feeling, is to seek out more of it, sustain
it. And so begins the unconscious cycle driving us to seek
out, increase, and sustain our feelings of pleasure through
the intake of food.
Seen this way, it appears that the same motivating force that
keeps us alive, left unmonitored, can also lead to our own
undoing, through obesity and its related illnesses.
Here is how the cycle that’s kept our special alive can turn
into a vicious and unyielding chain of compulsive overeating
that leads to excessive weight gain and increased difficulty
with weight loss: research has shown that overeating
causes a depletion of the dopamine receptors in our brains. This dopamine
depletion leads to an increase in the very same feelings that
caused the overeating in the first place.
The consequence of this is that a heavyset person will have
to eat more food to receive the same quantity of those feelings
of pleasure than a more slender person would from eating a
significantly smaller portion of food.
Resisting the temptation to overeat will slowly cause more
of the dopamine receptors in the brain to reactivate, making
it easier and easier as time goes on for that person to derive
increased pleasure from smaller amounts of food.
Human beings are designed, like all animals, with the inherent
drive to seek out food, and thank goodness for that, as food
is our sustenance. But in our modern civilization with so many
delicious varieties of food available to us, and the means
to have it available at all times, we’ve become desensitized
to our body’s natural cues, and conditioned to misread them.
Instead of basing your decisions on when to eat and when to
stop eating on your feelings of pleasure (or lack thereof),
try basing them on the physical sensation of the stomach walls
stretching or collapsing. If we feel with our bodies and not
with our heads, we can all access the feeling of truly being
hungry, when our stomach is empty, and truly being full, when
the walls of our stomach stretch – even if we haven’t been
in touch with those sensations since early childhood. Getting
in touch with that feeling will allow you to focus on deriving
your feelings of pleasure from sources other than food.
If you’ve been desensitized to this sensation from enough
years of compulsive overeating to have developed a stretched-out
and enlarged stomach, take heart. Being aware of the dopamine
phenomenon can at least empower you to persist with a conscious
program of weight loss knowing that, as you proceed and your
stomach shrinks to a more appropriate size, you’ll get more
and more in touch with the physical sensations of fullness,
and as such more able to derive pleasure from the smaller amounts
of food that you do eat.
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by SolveYourProblem.com
: 2008
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