… so now you know why you can’t eat just one!!
Many of my clients tell me they’re chocoholics (especially around that time of the month, for the ladies ;-)). But it’s no laughing matter! Addictions researchers have found that junk food triggers exactly the same responses in the brains of overweight people, as nicotine does in smokers, and cocaine in coke addicts.
Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina found that an area of the brain called the striatum – which is involved in directing us to either avoid or go after something, as well as in establishing habits – ‘lights up’ when smokers look at pictures of other people smoking, or when a cocaine addict sees cocaine.
The same brain region lights up in overweight people when they look at pictures of food (1).
Other researchers (2) found that the pleasure centres in the brains of rats ‘lit up’ initially when they were fed high-fat, high-kilojoule foods such as sausage, bacon, and cheesecake, but as time went by their brains’ pleasure centres became less responsive, indicating that they were becoming addicted – that is, they needed more and more sweet, salty and fatty foods to get a pleasure ‘hit’ in their brains.
Lead author of the rat study, Scripps Research Associate Professor Paul J. Kenny, explained that
“When the animal overstimulates its brain pleasure centers with highly palatable food, the systems adapt by decreasing their activity. However, now the animal requires constant stimulation from palatable food to avoid entering a persistent state of negative reward [i.e. feeling bad – essentially ‘withdrawal symptoms’]”.
The rats’ addiction to junk food was so intense that they would even put up with being subjected to electric shocks in order to get more junk food.
Ethical concerns about the unfortunate rats aside, this study is of huge importance to anyone struggling with their weight, and even people who aren’t overweight but need to clean up their dietary act to overcome health challenges.
Will-power just won’t cut it – your will is badly outmatched by the sheer force of the part of the brain that drives you toward the substance to which you’ve become addicted.
Fortunately, there is hope for addicts of all descriptions! EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) works on the emotions that drive us toward addictive behaviour in the first place.
Addictions in humans – who are emotionally far more complex than rats! – develop when we have painful or difficult emotions that we don’t know how to handle. Engaging in the addictive behaviour gives us temporary relief from the pain. Pretty soon, we’re engaging in that addictive behaviour even before we experience the pain; and after a while we can’t remember what that pain was in the first place.
The addiction is the solution to a problem – the problem of painful emotions. Then at some point, the addict decides that the addiction is a problem in itself, and decides to give it up.
But now the brain has become accustomed to the stimulation provided by the addicting substance (nicotine, cocaine, sugar – there’s no real difference, as addictions researchers have discovered) and when that stimulation is withdrawn, it HURTS! On top of that, the difficult emotions now resurface. Now the recovering addict is in real trouble… unless he or she knows how to use EFT.
I teach EFT to my clients to deal with the physical and psychological discomfort caused by withdrawal (body aches and pains, headaches, nausea, mood swings, abdominal pain).
Even more importantly for long-term success, I also target the emotions that drove the addiction in the first place. Sometimes people can’t even remember why they started smoking, bingeing on junk food or overindulging in alcohol, but the beauty of the EFT process is that those feelings and memories almost always surface once we start tapping.
A client of mine, whom I’ll call Sarah, illustrates this point beautifully. Sarah came to me to deal with her sugar addiction. She just LOVED lollies and was eating them every day, in large quantities. Due to her intense exercise schedule, she wasn’t overweight, but she knew all that sugar was bad for her.
Initially we did EFT on her cravings for specific lollies, and she found that after that tapping, she had no more desire to eat them. There was no will-power involved; she just didn’t want them anymore. Interestingly, she then began to crave chocolate, which had never been of great appeal to her before. So we tapped on that, and in short order she had no more chocolate cravings.
By now it was crystal clear that Sarah’s food cravings were very much emotionally driven. As we delved into her childhood experiences and the meaning she had made of them, Sarah discovered that she ate (and also overexercised, overcommitted herself and overdid everything else you could think of!) in order to keep her feelings down.
As she dealt with her food addictions one by one, these painful emotions were surfacing. This prompted something of a crisis as she had never learned to acknowledge and manage her own emotions in a healthy way – she just kept herself so busy that she could ignore them all! I encouraged her to just do EFT on these emotions as they came up.
Then a rather wonderful thing happened. Sarah talked to her long-time partner about her feelings – something she had never done before – and, instead of frightening him off as she had feared would happen, they became far closer. Using EFT to deal with her sugar addiction has helped Sarah reclaim her emotional life – and with it, her potential to be truly happy and healthy.
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