How to Conquer Sugar Craving Part 2: The Mind Part

We like sugar!

But sugar doesn’t like us!

It is just a total bummer that our brains evolved to love sugar in a time when sugar was very, very scarce. And now, in 2022, we have so much access to sugar and we still have the same brains.  The brain that hasn’t evolved fast enough to temper our love of sugar before it actually destroys us.

Last week we talked about why the body craves sugar. We talked about how metabolic damage leaves us without the ability to use the energy in our fat stores and so our bodies, mainly our liver and brains, are screaming for sugar to keep running.  We learned that sugar is not a good fuel and your body can’t keep much sugar in its blood compared to how many calories we need in a day.

This week we dive into the deep corners of our minds on sugar!

So the first reason and thing we must address when conquering our sugar cravings is the metabolic damage, the body part.

The next thing we must address when conquering our sugar cravings is the mind part.  

When you eat, especially sugar, you're stimulating a feel-good, reward-seeking brain chemical known as dopamine. Dopamine is just one of the many neurotransmitters that drive our behavior and our general feelings of wellbeing.

Dopamine is released when your body recognizes something it likes for survival and it wants you to repeat that action.

Like ice cream.

Sugar and carbohydrates that eventually become sugar in our blood, stimulate large amounts of dopamine. In the days when our brains were forming, sugar was hard to find and if you found let's say honey, it was your dopamine that marked the map in your brain of how to find it again and encourage you to eat it.

Dopamine feels good and is necessary for you to feel good and motivate you to do stuff. You want lots and lots of dopamine. But our environment has changed and there is just too much cheap, easy "honey" around.

Dopamine relieves the stress of emotions and gives us a quick hit of calm. It imitates happiness.

When you're feeling an emotion, sometimes you feel driven to eat. This can happen when we are bored and our brains want a boost of dopamine to break the boredom. This can also happen when we are happy, or sad. Dopamine can make us temporarily feel better when we have feelings.

If you lack the skills to deal with your emotions in a more healthy manner, you may use food to self-soothe. In other words, if you have trouble feeling your feelings at any given time, you may end up eating your feelings instead.

Remember how food stimulates dopamine? Food, particularly sugar, is a fast, cheap, easy, predictable way to produce dopamine. It can induce an exaggerated response in the reward region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. The same region of the brain that lights up with addictive substances such as alcohol, cocaine, and nicotine.

Things get a little complicated when the food that you're driven to eat to soothe your emotion is sugar or carbohydrates.  

This is a double whammy because you are already seeking out sugar to provide energy because your metabolism is broken and sugar is your best hit of energy.  When you eat the sugar it produces a dopamine spike like a drug and you feel better.

You have simultaneously provided your body with quick sugar for a quick burst of dirty energy and a hit of dopamine to reinforce that that decision to eat the sugar was in fact, an amazing one and should be repeated!

The reason you crave the peanut M&Ms or Dr. Pepper or (fill in the blank) and struggle to say no to them is that you have high levels of insulin in your blood driving your hunger AND you have a brain addicted to the dopamine released when you eat the sugar.

No wonder we can't stop snacking on Hot Tamales, chocolate, cookies, cupcakes, soda pop, and sweet drinks!  

You need to know this vicious cycle because too many of us believe we can never conquer our cravings because our willpower is too weak.  We feel like we'll never be able to find lasting weight loss because we love sugar too much and just can't fight it.

We feel shame in the fact that we are unable to resist ice cream as other people can.

When our willpower finally taps out after weeks and months of white-knuckled restriction, our brains and bodies roar back with vengeance, and all the healthy habits that we tried so hard to develop are gone.

This is a heartbreaking cycle of low-energy, high insulin, sugar cravings that lead to addictive sugar cravings, which reinforce the low-energy, high insulin metabolic state.

And around and around we go.

To break this cycle you need to get to the root cause:

1. Metabolic damage
2. Self-soothing with food

For a broken metabolism, you need a step-by-step protocol.

Fully repairing your metabolism to burn fat efficiently and sustainably between meals for energy is an intricate process that takes a step by step protocol. This is deep, lasting work.

This is what we do in the Freese Method. First we deal with the body and then we move into the mind.

If you are ready to slay this dragon once and for all, it’s time to join the 12-week Freese Method Program.  Click the link above to join the program.

Remember, you absolutely have what it takes to lose weight, achieve glowing health and conquer your sugar cravings, we just need to repair your metabolism first.