Eating to Live or Living to Eat?

at 9:16 AM

Lunch is over and it's one of your colleagues birthday.  There it is... a delicious chocolate cake.  The 'homeostatic' eaters say, no thanks.  But the 'hedonistic' eaters don't listen to the body's mechanism that regulates hunger.  This second group is more likely to be obese.  Now I don't think that we need to be one or the other, after all, food is supposed to be enjoyed, but you also need to listen to (and obey) that 'feeling' which is telling you that you no longer 'need' food. 

According to obesity experts, there are basically two systems: The system built for survival- homeostatic.  When food reaches the digestive system, there are chemical messengers such as leptin that signal to the brain to stoop eating.  In the obese, the leptin system somehow does not work as well.  The second system is eating for pleasure- hedonistic.  Seeing, smelling and even hearing the word 'cake' activate areas in the brain that are involved in reward and emotion which trigger the release of dopamine, the brain's pleasure neurotransmitter.

In experiments, brain scans show that over weight subjects when shown pictures of foods such as cookies or chocolate had strong reactions in the amygdala (the emotion center of the brain), whether they were hungry or not.  The healthy-weight subjects showed an amygdala response only when they were hungry.  In addition, people who have successfully lost weight have more activity in the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex of their brain, the part that is involved in impulse control.

Bottom line: think before you eat that extra bite and ask yourself: am I truly hungry?  The extra food will always be in your reach and you can eat more later if you are hungry.  But when you eat regardless of your need of more food, you are basically over riding the built-in mechanisms of your brain that are designed to keep you from gaining weight.