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Overview: Quest For Endorphins and Diet Strategies
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Chemicals: Without Them, There Wouldn't be Anything
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Everything is made up of chemicals, including our bodies. Cells, DNA, mitochondria,
blood, genes, other stuff - you don't even want to know what it is: all made up of chemicals. And chemical reactions: Trillions of bags of
chemicals with reactions going on all the time.
Nearly all these reactions are involved with energy somehow. They break down nutrients
to obtain energy, build fat to store energy, and utilize energy to maintain and
power the body. No nutrients in air and water, so they all come from food
and other liquids we ingest.
Like any chemical reaction, the results vary depending on the exact makeup and
proportions of the ingredients. If they
vary too far from the ideal, the undesired side effects range from
feeling unpleasant to being violently ill to death.
To take advantage of this, one approach I've used is to focus on how I feel in the morning.
If I eat late at night,
I usually suffer to some degree in the morning. I'm more lethargic, coffee doesn't taste as good, and
I'm generally out of sorts until I jump rope. When I avoid eating late, and especially if
I've been eating relatively clean lately, I literally roll out of bed because I feel so
good.
Notice I said 'when'. It sounds great, but it's not that easy to do, but just the process of
trying to get there leads to successes on its own.
The starting point is to begin to eat small, frequent meals and eat as clean as you can manage.
Eat slowly, if you can, and stop eating before you get full. Wait 15 minutes and see if you don't feel full then.
Satisfaction nearly always lags, so if you eat until you're full, you've eaten more than you needed, you just
didn't wait for it.
Especially avoid eating heavily late at night because it interferes with sleep and saps your
energy and mood when you wake up.
Try demonstrating this to yourself. On some morning when you've eaten junk food
the night before, notice how your stomach feels. Do you really feel hungry, or do you feel queasy, and
only something nice and greasy or nice and sweet will calm it down?
Now, the same morning, or the first morning you can manage it try eating a banana, or an apple, or oatmeal.
Definitely something non processed and don't try to get filled up on it, just get something on your stomach.
Then just be patient and the queasiness
will go away after awhile. Now try eating light meals all that day and notice how much better you feel
the next morning. If you keep it up, after awhile you won't feel that sickening hunger anymore. You'll
be able to tell when you're hungry, but it's just an empty feeling you can deal with. And when you
really need something to eat, you know that too, and it's a nice healthy hunger.
You have to accept that when you eat clean and don't overeat there are periods when you will be hungry for awhile,
but you need to get past that sickening hunger
you experience when you start to eat clean. For that reason, I think it's helpful if you can take a couple of
days off and just indulge yourself in everything other than eating the way you normally do. Divert yourself with video
games, movies, exercise, music, whatever it takes so you can make it through "withdrawal" without having to focus
on other responsibilities.
Trying to work and get past the urges to eat that seem to be non-stop is extremely difficult to cope with.
If you're like me your constant though is: "If I'm going to get any work done, I have to eat something satisfying.", and that usually blows
the whole thing out of the water. If you eat light and reasonably clean for two or three days, it should be a lot
easier the next day to work and diet at the same time. Actually, you should feel better than usual, except
for the psychological stresses of dieting that go beyond appetite. If you ever quit smoking, you know what it's
like to get past the cravings and feel great at last, but still want a cigarette. For me, that feeling gradually faded away, but it never would
have, if I had given in everytime the thought of how great a cigarette would taste tried to overwhelm me.
To make a long story short, in connection with Physiology and
happiness according to me the key is to convince your metabolism there's adequate food but it requires a fair amount of
effort to obtain. Neither feast nor famine, which means don't try starving yourself thin. Trying to
live off your fat alone just doesn't work. You need a balanced, adequate diet. Your metabolism is just a lot of chemical
reactions from combining everything you eat and drink. If balance, quality, or quantity is too far off, you suffer.
If you're in the position of "needing to go on a diet", your metabolism has probably adjusted to the high fat
and sugar plus god-knows-what additives in your current diet, so when
you reduce it there's a period when you suffer because it takes awhile for the chemical reactions in
your body to adjust to the new content. Your metabolism has to convert over to the
right bile and whatnot.
A positive survival trait in ancient times when famine was practically inevitable would be a metabolism that wants to keep on
storing fat, so if you
try to stop supplying the requisite ingredients, it makes you feel like crap until you start shoving them in again
so you'll try really, really hard to find high-calorie / high-fat food more desperately.
If there's just none to be had,
then eventually you adjust, stop suffering from cravings, and deal with the situation. Back then, of course, the
situation was famine, so everybody was so busy trying to avoid starvation they probably didn't notice the finer
points of how they felt because they were preoccupied with finding anything edible.
In modern times, of course, most of us never have to deal with famine. Our trauma is to cope with voluntarily
avoiding the exact foods we most crave. So instead of being distracted from withdrawal,
for awhile it becomes the center of our lives.
And you don't want to go to the extreme of simulating famine - that's way unhealty
and may lead to unwanted side effects. Don't be fooled if you go on an extreme diet and feel good at first -
it may be your body pumping you up to deal with famine, and the good feeling won't last; you will crash hard.
Instead, as I described above, you need to gradually
get past the initial period when your body is demanding more "junk food", otherwise known as withdrawal.
We're wired to recognize "good things", we're just not wired to recognize too much of a good thing.
Here's a discussion of a study that indicates appetite decreases along with weight, especially if you're obese. So
you don't have to fear that initial, hopeless craving for food will always be there. I also discuss the study on the
Figures, Lies, and Experts page in the context of study implications being
overlooked because of tunnel vision or a conflicting agenda.
I make the dieting thing sound really straightforward, I know. And it really is, but that doesn't make it
easy. I think you'll find, as I did, if you persist in the kind of approach that takes the factors I discussed into
account, whether they are accurate or just a colorful analogy, eventually it will make a change in your attitude. I'm
sure it's already been said, but diet is a war of many battles, and you don't even have to win the war, you just have
to win enough battles to push the enemy back and keep him bottled up.
More than once I've actually thought I had the war won - it's great when you can get into the state of eating clean, but all too soon
you get complacent, making it extremely hard to stay there. I think of an alternate reality where my clean eating
self is enjoying all the benefits. There's a wall between us about three days thick, because that's how long it usually takes me to start
feeling really good after I seriously get onboard with eating clean and small meals, never eating until I'm full.
To some degree, I'm helped everyday because I'm motivated to get back to that place. I lapse over and over again, but
I eat better everyday than I would have otherwise. I persistently focus on trying to get there so it keeps my head in the game because every day is a new
chance to influence how I'm going to feel not just the next day, but in the next few hours. As opposed
to feeling depressed because I gained a pound and who knows how long it will be before I can take it
off again. And believe me, I'm terrible at self-discipline, so I'm sure some of you can run with these ideas and
take them all the way to diet nirvana.
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