What Are You Hungry For? (20 page)

It’s important to turn that attitude around, because your body knows what you’re thinking and feeling. You are feeding it your negativity. Trillions of cells are receiving chemical messages from your brain at every moment, encoded as chemicals. A stress hormone like cortisol plays a vital role in two functions essential to life: eating and sleeping. When I studied it as an endocrinologist, our whole focus was on the structure of the cortisol molecule and how it interacted
with other hormones. The interaction was complex and fascinating. I was mesmerized by how a sudden stress, like hearing the words “You’re fired,” instantly causes a spurt of stress hormones, and two minutes later, the entire body has changed—all from two words.

Now I use that clue to see cortisol not as a molecule but primarily as a threat. “You’re fired” is being sent through the bloodstream like a text message bringing bad news. We ignored the messages in medical training because everything was materialistic; the human side was secondary. But of course “You’re fired” is a human message, and so are the negative thoughts about being overweight. “You’re fat” are two words that no one wants to hear, and they can be just as devastating as, or perhaps more devastating than, “You’re fired.”

Let’s look more closely at what you body is doing with the messages that constantly circulate through it. There are hundreds of feedback loops, and being interconnected, they regulate each other. So how can you reset them in a simple, effective way?

As I’ve already mentioned, the most important factor in homeostasis is balance, but in physiological terms, what is being balanced, exactly? The key elements are daily cycles known as biorhythms. Bodily processes aren’t random. They are rhythmic, and each rhythm is meshed with every other, like an imaginary clock shop where a hundred clocks keep the same time even though they tick-tock at different rates. Your blood pressure, for example, follows a daily wave pattern as it goes up and down. The hormone cortisol tracks the rhythm of waking and sleeping (throwing this chemical cycle off leads to the bad effects of jet lag or working the night shift—although night workers may think they have adjusted to being awake when they should be asleep, their cortisol levels tell a different story).
The menstrual cycle in women depends on hormones, and although the causes of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) aren’t well understood, researchers have suspected that a cyclical shift in hormones, accompanied by changes in the brain, may be key. With a different physiology, men are hormonal, too, and if you do a Google search for “male period,” you will find advocates of a male monthly cycle of testosterone, linked to moodiness, sexual arousal, and depression. Medically, such a cycle has been little reported and less studied, but testosterone does go through a daily cycle, peaking in the morning.

There’s a symphony of hormones coursing through your body, and when they are balanced with one another, your biorhythms follow a natural pattern. When your body is out of balance, hormone levels reflect that, too. Lack of sleep, for example, as it throws off your cortisol levels, affects the hunger response, which is why people tend to eat more when their sleep is bad. This factor is so important that losing your natural sleep rhythm could be the key to why you overeat (for people with chronic depression, the first sign of an attack can be irregular sleep, and if this is attended to immediately, the oncoming depression may not arrive).

Hormones are regulators, or gatekeepers. They keep the most important bodily functions within a certain range, neither too high nor too low. This includes breathing, drinking water, eating food, digestion, metabolism, elimination of waste, and sensory experience through sound, touch, sight, taste, and smell. All must be self-regulated within the right limits. If you are suddenly frightened and your breathing becomes fast and ragged (a physical sign of fight-or-flight), a hormone—adrenaline—has pushed your heart to its upper extreme. Your body knows that this extreme can be safely maintained only for a short while, so adrenaline passes quickly from the system.

How are hormones relevant to being overweight? We’ve already discussed how eating too much or eating the wrong foods throws
off your blood sugar, affecting insulin levels and posing a risk for developing diabetes (although being prediabetic is also unhealthy; you aren’t safe just because disease symptoms haven’t appeared yet). More troubling perhaps is belly fat that develops around the waist. Just the fact that the fat is placed here on your body makes a difference. Women before the onset of menopause who carry abdominal fat were seen to have inferior bone quality and lower bone formation than women who carried their fat elsewhere on their bodies.

In both sexes, the adverse effect of belly fat, which has only recently been targeted by researchers, is that these fat cells constantly secrete hormones into the bloodstream. In particular, they introduce leptin, the hormone that increases your appetite, which is naturally counterbalanced by ghrelin, the hormone for satiety. It’s been found that leptin levels are directly proportional to body weight. In other words, the more you weigh, the hungrier you’ll feel, which is a cruel irony, since of course body fat is nature’s backup for when food becomes scarce. Leptin is also central in metabolizing fat, and this too is cyclical. Your fat metabolism is highest 9 to 10 hours after you eat dinner at night. Introducing a snack before you go to bed is thought to interfere with the cycle. You are causing trouble in two ways, by taking in food when the body doesn’t want it and by inhibiting its ability to metabolize fat.

Leptin is also tied into the “diets don’t work” syndrome. The rebound effect after people come off a crash diet and regain the pounds they lost, with a few more added on, is related to increased leptin. Your body reads a crash diet as a famine, since both bring drastically fewer calories. When the famine is over, leptin levels rise to make you hungrier while at the same time your metabolism is adjusted—also by hormones—to turn more food into fat. The trick of eating a bit of food an hour before a meal works because it triggers the leptin/ghrelin cycle to move from eating to metabolism, when hunger is naturally suppressed.

Medical science validates how what you eat and how you feel are connected through a symphony of hormones. But you are the best judge of your own situation. Now that you have learned to use an appetite scale for your true hunger levels, it can be linked to how eating affects your mood and energy level.

For the next two weeks, keep a daily log that tracks these three factors—here’s a template for how each page will look:

To gauge your mood, use a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is a state of blissful well-being and joy and 1 represents feelings of deep unhappiness or emotional pain. Also rate your energy levels on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 indicating the highest level of vibrant energy, and 1 the feeling of being wiped out and too tired to get out of bed.

In my own experience keeping track of my appetite, mood, and energy levels, I began to notice patterns emerging. For example, when I stopped eating at levels 4 to 6 (associated with a light meal), I almost always felt energized and content. If I let myself get too full, however, I persistently noticed that I felt sluggish and uninspired.

In the opposite direction, if I waited too long to eat, letting myself dip to a 1 or 2 on the appetite gauge, I might wind up devouring the next meal, feeling tired, or getting irritable.

Keep in mind that the daily log is a mindfulness tool to help you increase
self-awareness. Simply observe any patterns without judging or criticizing yourself. As your awareness expands, you will naturally be guided to make any shifts in your eating that help you feel happier and more energetic.

Clearly your body needs to have normal hormone levels to stay in the flow of biorhythms. If biorhythms have gotten thrown off, you need to find a way to reset them. In terms of the imbalance caused by weight gain, it’s useful to divide overweight people into two categories. The first category has issues with insulin and blood sugar. The main way to reset your body’s insulin levels is through the foods you eat, concentrating on natural foods and avoiding refined sugar and other simple carbohydrates. I say more on this in the section on the Chopra Center’s philosophy of food.

The second kind of overweight person has issues regarding stress. The connection between eating too much sugar and throwing your blood sugar out of balance is direct, but the link between stress and gaining weight is more indirect, involving some hormones that at first glance have little to do with hunger and body fat. Even so, they are woven into the symphony of hormones, because these chemicals do not act alone.

The dividing line between blood sugar issues and stress issues is vague, because no matter which category you fall into, once you gain extra body fat, those cells start secreting hormones that affect your blood sugar and appetite. Is this happening to you?

Check the items that apply to your eating and general situation.

___ Are you a woman? (Women are more likely to be stress eaters. They turn to food for comfort, whereas men are more likely to turn to alcohol and smoking.)

___ Are you sedentary, not engaging in regular exercise? (Exercise has the effect of making you hungry in the short term but seems to reset the stress response if you exercise vigorously on a regular basis.)

___ Are you lonely or isolated socially? (Lack of social support means that you don’t have an outlet for releasing daily stresses.)

___ Do you snack when you are feeling nervous or restless?

___ Do you cope with stress entirely on your own?

___ Does daily stress and strain make it hard for you to fall asleep and keep sleeping for at least 7 to 8 hours? (Irregular sleep throws off the daily cortisol cycle.)

___ Do you find yourself grabbing food between meals to relieve boredom or pressure at work?

___ If you feel stressed, do you immediately reach for sugary, fatty snack foods?

Score: ______

Rating Yourself

If you checked
1 or 2 items,
you are likely not a stress eater. You haven’t set up a feedback loop between daily stress and food. A score of
5 to 8 items
puts you firmly in the category of stress eating. You are coping with life using food, and a feedback loop has been set up so that the more you use food for comfort, the less effective it is, leading to even more eating.

What Should I Do?

Dealing with stress in a better way is the key to breaking the cycle of stress eating. Don’t fight your appetite; teach your brain that you can cope with the stress response more effectively. As noted in the quiz, dealing with stress should include selections from the anti-stress menu:

Meditation

Yoga

Relaxation techniques, including breathing exercises

Good sleep

Exercise, if vigorous and regular

Close social connections

Stress is such a major suspect in America’s obesity problems that it deserves detailed attention, so look at the “Making It Personal” section at the end of this chapter, which says a lot more about this issue, which affects most people in hidden ways even when they think they aren’t leading a stressed-out life.

Stress eating is a paradox. In the short run, adrenaline, which triggers the fight-or-flight syndrome, shuts down the digestive tract and dampens your appetite. “I’m too upset to eat anything” is a first response to stress. (This is chemically linked to a gland in the brain, the hypothalamus, which secretes corticotropin-releasing hormone, which essentially says to the body, “This is an emergency. It’s no time to eat.”) Some people are nervous eaters, and they remain thin; being overreactive to small, everyday stresses, their hormones keep them from feeling hungry.

But in the aftermath of stress, thanks to the hormone cortisol, which stokes appetite and provides strong motivation, you can find yourself driven to eat. After fighting a battle or winning a football
game, a person is so charged up that eating becomes a big, immediate need. Cortisol levels naturally fall after a stress has passed, but if the stress is constant, even though it’s low-level, eating can become compulsive. (I remember the touching story of a man who had just lost his wife, and as part of his grieving, he found himself driving all night down the Pacific Coast Highway, stopping at every roadside diner to have a steak.)

Although the research here is less clear, stress seems to make people crave sugary and fatty foods. It is thought that this is another hormone-controlled feedback loop, because sugar and fat seem to suppress the part of the brain that responds to stress. There’s a physiological reason a big piece of chocolate cake is comfort food. The secret isn’t to keep eating more and more chocolate cake to remain comforted—that leads to disaster as far as your body is concerned—but to deal with the stress that has thrown off your hormone balance.

Thirty-five years ago, when I was in training and first became interested in what were then dubbed “molecules of emotion,” an amazing landscape opened up. Hormones are the key to self-regulation, and the mind-body connection was impossible to ignore once you saw how dramatically hormones are involved in how we think, how we feel, how we behave—and how we eat. Earlier we looked into the four hormones directly connected to eating (leptin, ghrelin, insulin, and adiponectin). Although they don’t take center stage, four other hormones are at play in weight issues: