The Psycology of Being Fat

 Here is a little Brain Chemistry 101 for you.  Your brain produces four different chemical that are responsible for making you experience pleasure.  The four chemicals are endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine.  Dopamine is the chemical that makes you feel pleasure when you experience food.  Every time you smell, eat, or even think about food the production of dopamine is triggered and you feel happy.  When you stop and think about it, this response makes sense in terms of our survival.  If we didn't experience pleasure when eating, we wouldn't eat, and we would die.  Responding with pleasure to food is a very primal instinct.  (So the next time someone accuses you of being an emotional eater, point out that we are all emotional eaters, hence the survival of our species on the planet earth.)  But being severely overweight throws this system off balance.

A 2001 study by the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory investigated the difference in brain activity between people who were obese (having a BMI greater than 40, in this particular study) and people who were of average weight.  Their findings fascinate me!  In a nut shell, scientists found that the people who were obese experienced greater amounts of dopamine when they thought about food than people who were of average weight.  However, they also found that the same obese people experienced far LESS dopamine when actually eating.  So basically, when a fat person imagines eating, she gets very happy, but when she actually eats the pleasure is not as intense.  So she eats more in an attempt to reach the same levels of euphoria that thinking about food gave her.  It’s similar, in a way, to a drug addict who is always chasing that high, unable to attain the same intensity that he first experienced. 

How does this affect my weight loss efforts?  I’m not sure.  But it does fascinate me.  If you believe in mind over matter, then this information can be very helpful.  I think, in the very least, its interesting and encouraging to learn how the brain works and how my brain chemistry responds to food.  I sincerely believe that knowledge is power, and that the more I understand about how my body works, the better I can help it work for me instead of against me.