Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat (17 page)

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Authors: Mike Dow,Antonia Blyth

BOOK: Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat
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You can easily see how dopamine deficiency creates food addictions and weight gain. The more unmotivated and discouraged you feel, the more you reach for the caffeine to perk you up while turning to high-fat foods that bring you momentary pleasure. You’re ravenous for a sense of aliveness and purpose—and caffeine, fat, and perhaps risky or exciting behavior may feel like the only pleasure you can expect.
Transforming Your Mantra
 
Seeing how your old pitfall mantra keeps you stuck in an unsatisfying cycle—and how it contributes to weight problems—you may now be ready to choose a new, positive mantra to replace it. Here are some possible choices for a booster mantra:
• When I’ve made a real effort to communicate with people I love, they are willing to help me.
• There are many things I am good at, and the more I focus on my strengths, the better I feel.
• I am successful in many areas of my life, and weaknesses are opportunities for growth.
• There are many people who love me.
• My life is not exactly how I imagined it, but there are many things that I’m proud of and still some things I’d like to achieve.
• When I use successful strategies, I’m effective at getting things done.
• There are many things that make me happy. The emptiness I’m still feeling is information that I need to change or add something to my life.
• Here I am, and I’m going to
live
this life I was given.
• I’m here on this earth to find out what life wants out of me—not what I want out of life.
Choose a booster mantra from the list or create your own, writing down exactly the phrase that expresses how you would like to see yourself and the world. We’ll come back to it again later, so I’d like you to have it ready. The right booster mantra can be a powerful tool in shaping your life, not to mention your body, and I want you to choose one that you feel perfectly articulates the self and the life you want.
Using Diet Rehab to Transform Your Mantra
 
As we saw in Chapter 4 (pages 71–100), changing your mantra is not necessarily a simple task. No matter how often you tell yourself that you
should
feel different about yourself, the fact remains that you feel the way you feel. If you’re discouraged, unmotivated, or depressed, then those are your feelings, and logic doesn’t necessarily enter the picture.
However, what does change your self-concept and your mantra is
experience
. Trying out new actions and noticing the consequences allows you to re-create your life.
Check out these examples of old beliefs transformed into new. Can you relate to any of them?
 
Taking action to create new experiences is what makes Diet Rehab effective. Going on a trip to a place you’ve never been, challenging yourself with puzzles and brain teasers, trying out different types of food, exploring a new hobby or a new form of exercise—all of these are dopamine booster actions that will allow you to see fresh possibilities, in both your life and yourself. That’s how to change a downward spiral into an upward spiral:
You won’t necessarily be able to change everything overnight. But you can make small changes that you’ll feel right away. Over time, step by step, change by change, you’ll discover that you’ve created a new mantra—and a new life. The first step is simple: Add a few booster foods and activities to your diet and your life. After that, who knows?
Supporting Your New Mantra
 
As we saw in Chapter 4, I always ask my patients to create support for their new mantras by giving reasons why they’re true (see page 93). Here’s an example of how that might work for a dopamine-boosting mantra:
I am successful in many areas of my life . . .
 
because I try hard.
because I am talented at what I do.
because of who I am.
because when given a challenge, I rise to it.
Jim’s New Mantra: Losing Weight, Gaining Zest
Jim was a good-looking thirty-nine-year-old guy who loved to hit the bars most nights after work, where he’d hang out with his buddies and chat with women. He was proud of his ability to score, and usually went home with a different woman a few times a week. He lived on pizza and burgers and never cooked for himself, relying on smoking to curb his appetite and keep his weight under control.
Lately, though, he noticed that he’d been gaining weight. He’d also been trying to quit smoking, unsuccessfully, and it was the frustration with both situations that pushed him to seek psychotherapy with me.
“I try to stop smoking,” he told me, “but three days is the most I’ve ever gone without a cigarette. I just feel desperate and like I can’t get anything done if I’m not smoking.”
“What do you do when you’re
not
smoking?” I asked him.
Jim laughed, bitterly. “Mostly, I just eat,” he said. “It’s kind of out of control. The other day I had pizza for breakfast and then a huge plate of chili cheese fries for lunch. I’ve always been a big eater, but this is getting ridiculous.”
Eventually, Jim told me that he was becoming dissatisfied with other aspects of his life. Picking up women—though he still felt successful in that regard—had lost a lot of its appeal. He was tired of spending time with women he didn’t really like, who either wanted more than he felt like giving or whose lack of interest made him feel even less satisfied with the routine sex. His job as an advertising salesman required him to be constantly charming, peppy, and “up.” But, Jim told me, “Nobody really cares about me. They just want to know what I can do for them.”
Jim had seen himself as a wild man, a daring rebel who played by his own rules. He’d spent a lot of time pursuing extreme sports when he was younger and had broken some bones skateboarding and playing rugby. In his twenties, he’d had the energy to be physically active even though he smoke, drank, and got little sleep. Now he felt as though everything was catching up with him and he wondered what the point was. As he sat before me in my office, I saw a depressed, overweight, and lonely man with no energy, motivation, or zest for life.
Together, Jim and I agreed to embark on a 28-day Diet Rehab program that was designed to boost his dopamine levels with healthy, sustainable choices so that he could let go of smoking, get his drinking under control, and lose the weight that was making him feel bloated, lethargic, and unattractive. I explained that we needed to “reboot” his natural production of dopamine, which I believed was severely impaired by his lifelong high-fat diet.
For the first two weeks of Diet Rehab, I told Jim to smoke and drink as much as he usually did, and to eat all the same high-fat foods he craved. But I also had him add a few new dopamine booster foods each week: lots of lean meats and fish, some celery sticks with salsa, a few servings of dark green, leafy vegetables, some sweet peppers. To increase his motivation, I had him check out my booster food swap list and a few booster recipes, so he could still have pizza and burgers but without gaining weight because
most
of his food would be coming from healthier sources.
I also encouraged Jim to add some dopamine booster activities to his life. Because Jim felt so listless and unmotivated, he didn’t really feel like starting anything new, but after some brainstorming, he realized he might enjoy Sudoku. He carried a book of puzzles with him that first week and found the mild challenge to be pleasantly stimulating.
The second week of Diet Rehab, Jim was looking for another dopamine booster activity, and he remembered that he used to be interested in hiking. Reluctantly, he joined a local hiking club and forced himself to get up early one weekend morning for a brisk walk through the mountains. Almost against his will, he enjoyed himself—partly because he met a woman who, he told me, “Is the first girl I’ve been excited about in a long, long time.” The woman in question had just come out of a messy divorce and wasn’t eager to get involved. For Jim, the challenge of wooing and winning her over proved to be just the dopamine booster activity he’d been looking for, besides giving him motivation to continue with the next two weeks of Diet Rehab.
A few months after Jim’s first twenty-eight days of Diet Rehab, Jim finally accepted that this woman wasn’t really for him. But by then he’d lost a lot of the weight he’d wanted to let go of, developed a new interest in hiking, and shifted his food choices. He still loved burgers and pizza, but he wasn’t eating them compulsively. Maybe twice a week he would have a burger and twice a week pizza. The rest of his weekly meals were far more balanced—and, now that Jim had reset his brain chemistry, they were satisfying, too.
Through the course of his twenty-eight days on Diet Rehab, Jim also worked on changing his mantra. Originally a mixture of “I’m just not good enough” and “My life isn’t going the way I envisioned it,” it had morphed into “There are many things I’m grateful for, and my feeling of emptiness is information inviting me to make some changes.”
Jim is still struggling with what he truly wants out of life. He’s reevaluating whether he’s in the right line of work, thinking about the kind of woman he’d like to be involved with, and figuring out what his life plan should be. By adding dopamine booster foods and activities to his diet and his life, he’s regained his motivation. Oh, and he’s also quit smoking. “For the first time in a long time,” Jim told me recently, “I’m excited about the future instead of depressed by it.” His words are a tribute to the power of brain chemistry—and to Jim’s personal power to re-create his life.
Revitalizing Dopamine
 
Your goal through your twenty-eight days of Diet Rehab is to restore your body’s natural production of dopamine, which will in turn restore your ability to enjoy your life. For the first two weeks, like Jim, you won’t deprive yourself of anything you want, but you will simply add dopamine boosters like high-protein, low-fat foods and challenging activities. The booster foods will cue your body to make sustainable amounts of dopamine, getting you off the “buzz-crash” cycle that caffeine and high-fat foods can create. Your fat cravings will evaporate while your caffeine cravings will decrease. You’ll find yourself losing weight without even trying, even as you still enjoy your favorite foods—but in moderation, not in excess. Your reward will be a renewed pleasure in all aspects of your life and renewed motivation to go forward making the choices you want.
6
 
Feeling Powerless: Starving for Everything
 
If a common serotonin deficient mantra is “I don’t feel safe” and a dopamine deficient one is “I’m not good enough,” the double-deficiency mantra is “Help! My life is out of control!” If you tested low in both categories, you may feel that both you and your life are out of control. You may have gone through a series of stressful events—perhaps a parent’s illness, the end of a relationship, a child’s crisis, or difficulties at work. You might feel that you once used to have an easy relationship to food and eating, but that now, for the first time in your life, you don’t. Or perhaps you always struggled with your relationship to food but now you feel it’s gotten the best of you. Possibly you feel that you’ve always been out of control when it came to food—and perhaps to other life issues, too—and you’re turning to Diet Rehab with the hope that you can finally regain control and restore your sense of personal power.

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