Are you an emotional basket case who can’t get by without comfort food? If you had more strength, could you power through your problems without overeating? Should you feel ashamed of yourself for needing emotional sustenance from foods? No! I hope to help you understand why you are using food as self-medication. It’s not because you are weak willed, it’s because you’re low in certain brain chemicals. You don’t have enough of the brain chemicals that should naturally be making you emotionally strong and complete.
These brain chemicals are thousands of times stronger than street drugs like heroin. And your body has to have them. If not, it sends out a command that is stronger than anyone’s willpower: “Find a druglike food or a drug, or some alcohol, to substitute for our missing brain chemicals. We cannot function without them!” Your depression, tension, irritability, anxiety, and cravings are all symptoms of a brain that is deficient in its essential calming, stimulating, and mood-enhancing chemicals.
Why Are Your Natural Mood-Enhancing Chemicals Sometimes Deficient?
Something has interfered with your body’s ability to produce its own natural brain “drugs”. What is it? It’s obviously not too unusual, or there wouldn’t be so many people using food to feel better, or taking Prozac for depression relief. Actually, there are several common problems that can result in your becoming depleted in your feel-good brain chemicals, and none of them is your fault!
You may have inherited deficiencies. If your mother always seemed to be on edge, and had a secret stash of chocolate for herself, it should come as no surprise that you, too, need foods like candy or cookies to calm yourself. Parents who have low supplies of naturally stimulating and sedating brain chemicals often produce depressed or anxious children who use food, alcohol, or drugs as substitutes for the brain chemicals they desperately need.
Prolonged stress “uses up” your natural sedatives, stimulants, and pain relievers that are found naturally in your body. This is particularly true if you have inherited marginal amounts to begin with. The emergency stores of precious brain chemicals can get used up if you continually need to use them to calm yourself over and over again. Eventually your brain can’t keep up with the demand. That’s why you start to “help” your brain by eating foods that have druglike effects on it.
Regular use of druglike foods such as refined sugars and flours, and regular use of alcohol or drugs (including some medicines), can inhibit the production of any of your brain’s natural pleasure chemicals. All of these substances can plug into your brain and actually fill up the empty places called receptors, where your natural brain drugs - the neurotransmitters - should be plugging in. Your brain senses that the receptors are already full, so it further reduces the amounts of neurotransmitters that it produces. As the amounts of these natural brain chemicals drop (remember, they can be thousands of times stronger than the hardest street drugs), more and more alcohol, drugs, or druglike foods are needed to fill newly emptied brain slots. This vicious circle ends when these substances you ingest are unable to “fill the bill” any longer. Now your brain’s natural mood resources, never fully functional, are now more depleted than they ever were, and you still crave your mood-enhancing drugs - whether it’s sugar or alcohol and cocaine.
You may be eating too little protein. In fact, you almost certainly are if you’ve been dieting or avoiding fatty foods, many of which are high in protein, too. Your brain relies on protein - the only food source of amino acids - to make all of its mood-enhancing chemicals. If you are not getting enough protein, you won’t be able to manufacture those crucial chemicals. Simply put, eating the equivalent of three eggs, a chicken breast, or a fish or tofu steak at every meal might get you enough protein to keep your brain in repair. Women and men need at least 60gm of protein daily!
Using Amino Acids to End Emotional Eating: When psychological help does not clear up emotional eating, we need to look at the four brain chemicals - neurotransmitters - that create our moods. They are:
1. dopamine/norepinephrine, our natural energizer and mental focuser;
2. GABA (gamma amino butyric acid), our natural sedative;
3. endorphin, our natural painkiller;
4. serotonin, our natural mood stabilizer and sleep promoter.
If we have enough of all four, our emotions are stable. When they are depleted, or out of balance, what we call “pseudo-emotions” can result. These false moods can be every bit as distressing as those triggered by abuse, loss or trauma. They can drive us to relentless overeating. For some of us, certain foods, particularly ones that are sweet and starchy, can have a druglike effect, altering our brains’ mood chemistry and fooling us into a false calm, or a temporary energy surge. We can eventually become dependent on these druglike foods for continued mood lifts. The more we use them, the more depleted our natural mood-enhancing chemistry becomes. Substituting amino acid supplements for these drug foods can have immediate and dramatic effects.
Mood Foods: How Amino Acids Feed Your Brain: The four key mood chemicals (neurotransmitters) are made of amino acids. There are at least twenty-two amino acids contained in protein foods. High-protein foods, such as fish, eggs, chicken, and beef, contain all twenty-two, including the nine amino acids that are considered essential for humans. Other foods, such as grains and beans, have some but not all of the essential nine aminos, so they need to be carefully combined to provide a complete protein (for example, rice and beans, or corn and nuts).
If you are eating three meals a day, each meal including plenty of protein (most people with eating and weight problems are doing neither), your positive moods and freedom from cravings can be maintained. But most people need to kick-start the brain’s repair job, using certain key amino acids. This will allow you to actually enjoy eating protein and vegetables instead of cookies and ice cream. After a few months, you will be getting all the aminos you need from your food alone and won’t need to take amino acids as supplements any longer.
Restoring depleted brain chemistry sounds like a big job - but it isn’t. Three of the four neurotransmitters that color all your moods are made from just a single amino acid each! Hundreds of research studies at Harvard, MIT, and elsewhere (some of which date back to the early part of this century) have confirmed the effectiveness of using just a few targeted amino acid “precursors” to increase the key neurotransmitters, thereby eliminating depression, anxiety, and cravings for food, alcohol and drugs.
Stopping Carbohydrate Cravings: It may sound impossible, but you can stop your food cravings almost instantly with just one amino acid supplement. Any absence of fuel for your brain’s functions is perceived correctly by your body as a code-red emergency. Powerful biochemical messages then order you to immediately eat refined carbohydrates to quickly fuel your brain. There are only two fuels that the brain can readily use:
1. glucose, which is blood sugar made from sweets, starches, or alcohol;
2. L-glutamine, an amino acid available in protein foods (or as a supplement, carried in our offices).
L-glutamine reaches the starving brain within minutes and can often immediately put a stop to even the most powerful sweet and starch cravings. The brain is fueled by L-glutamine when glucose levels drop too low. Don’t be intimidated by the strong effects of supplementation. L-glutamine is a natural food substance; in fact, it’s the most abundant amino acid in our bodies. It serves many critical purposes: stabilizing our mental functioning, keeping us calm yet alert, and promoting good digestion.
Restoring Energy and Focus: When your brain is adequately fueled with its back-up emergency supplies of L-glutamine, you are ready to rebuild your four key neurotransmitters, starting with dopamine/norepinephrine, your natural caffeine. Without this natural brain stimulant, you can be slow and tired and have a hard time concentrating. You don’t sparkle and can’t stay on track mentally. It’s hard to get things done and you can feel dull and sometimes just want to stay in bed. Your physical as well as your mental energy drops without adequate norepinephrine. The amino acid that provides this jet-fuel is the nutritional powerhouse L-tyrosine. L-tyrosine produces thyroid hormones and adrenaline as well as well as norepinephrine. Like L-glutamine, L-tyrosine goes to work in minutes to perk you up.
When Food is Comfort: For many people, overeating helps compensate for a depletion of the natural pain relievers, the endorphins. Life’s pain can be unendurable without adequate amounts of these buffer chemicals. Some of us (for example, those of us from alcoholic families) may be born with too little natural pain tolerance. We are overly sensitive to emotional (and sometimes physical) pain. We cry easily. Like our alcoholic parents, we need something to help us endure our daily lives, which seem so painful. Others of us use up too much endorphin through trauma and stress. We just run out, especially if we were born short on endorphins to begin with. When our comfort chemicals run low, many of use turn to comfort foods.
If you need food as a reward and a treat, or to numb your feelings, your natural pleasure enhancers, the pain-killing endorphins, are probably in short supply. Foods that elevate your endorphin activity can easily become addictive. If you “love” certain foods, those foods are firing a temporary surge of endorphins. Euphoria, joy, the “runner’s high” - these are all feelings produced by endorphins. Some people have so much natural endorphins that they smile all the time and get great pleasure from everyday life. Of course, we all endure suffering and loss. But, with enough endorphins, we can bounce back.
For anorectics and bulimics, the trauma of starving and vomiting can trigger an addictive endorphin high, because trauma of any kind can set off an automatic burst of soothing endorphins. You may know of people who felt no pain for hours after a terrible physical injury. Runners don’t get their big endorphin high until they have run past “the wall of pain.” At that point, they have run too far!
Raising Serotonin: Low serotonin can be the easiest deficiency of all to develop. Very few foods are high in the amino acid tryptophan, which is the only nutrient that the body can use to make serotonin. According to a 1997 Lancet study, tryptophan is one of the first nutrients to be depleted by weight-loss dieting. If, in addition to dieting, you inherited low serotonin levels and experience a lot of stress, your levels can fall low enough to set off a major eating disorder or serious emotional disturbances.
Restoring your serotonin levels can be a life-or-death matter. Suicides and violent crimes are closely associated with deficiencies of serotonin. The sometimes fatal obsessions and self-hate of bulimics and anorectics are clearly linked to low serotonin levels as well.
Drugs like Prozac are called serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) because they keep whatever serotonin we have active. But they do not actually provide additional serotonin. For this reason, most people using SSRIs often continue to have some low-serotonin symptoms. Before there were SSRIs, the pharmaceutical compound L-tryptophan was commonly used to increase serotonin levels. For more than twenty years, psychiatrists and health food stores enthusiastically recommended it for relieving depression and food cravings and normalizing sleep without side effects. Many people found that their symptoms were eliminated permanently after only a few months of L-tryptophan use.
In 1989 a series of bad batches of L-tryptophan, which filled forty people and made many more very sick, prompted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to stop all U.S. sales.
One Japanese company, Showa Denko, had produced all of these batches, which, it was found, were contaminated because they had eliminated three filter systems that they’d been using for years - just why they chose to take away these safety filters is a question that remains unanswered. (most probably the greedy pharmaceutical companies again doing some of their handy work!) Showa Denko has never made tryptophan again. Despite evidence that no other manufacturer has ever made a problem batch, the FDA recommended for years that L-tryptophan not be used as a supplement. (Interestingly, they have made no effort to stop the sale of infant formulas, most of which contain added L-tryptophan.) With L-tryptophan unavailable, drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, and Redux have become our primary tools for combating the crippling symptoms of low serotonin. Unfortunately, these drugs provide only temporary and incomplete benefits, and often have uncomfortable or dangerous side effects. Fortunately, a new version of tryptophan called 5HTP (5-hydroxytryptophan) became available over the counter in 1998 without FDA opposition. Whatever mood-enhancing brain chemicals you have in short supply, they can be replenished quickly, easily, and safely.
When tryptophan deficiency causes serotonin levels to drop, you may become obsessed by thoughts you can’t turn off or behaviors you can’t stop. Once this rigid behavior pattern emerges in the course of dieting, the predisposition to eating disorders is complete. Just as some low-serotonin obsessive-compulsives wash their hands fifty times a day, some young dieters may begin to practice a constant, involuntary vigilance regarding food and the perfect body. They become obsessed with calorie counting, with how ugly they are, and on how to eat less and less. As they eat less, their serotonin levels fall farther, increasing dieters’ obsession with undereating. As their zinc and B vitamin levels drop low as well, their appetite is lost. This can be the perfect biochemical setup for anorexia.
If I could just get you to increase three things in your diet: fruits & veggies and protein… half the battle with ill health and ill moods would change by more than 50%. If we then tested you with the Hair Tissue Mineral Biopsy then we could design a very specific diet plan for YOU based on what you need and truly balance your life. Sure… there are spiritual reasons also for bad moods… but handling the body is the first step to any mood-changing program as the spirit needs a well and balanced body (tool) to work with!
Call us for help. We want you to truly reach health and happiness!