Can your brain make you eat donuts?

A study was just released yesterday that may suggest why some people have a more difficult time staying away from poor food choices that result in weight gain.

The study was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and found the following – using MRI scans, individuals who lost weight, and were able to keep it off, had greater activity in parts of the brain that have to do with behavioral control than people who lost weight but regained it after the diet was over.

This makes complete sense when you look at how the brain works, but is a FAR cry from being an excuse as to why some people have less control over their food choices.  It has to do with stress and specifically, the impacts of stress on the brain.

It’s pretty cool how this works.  Let’s take a look.

Animal vs. Human

For simplicities sake, humans have a few layers to their brain.  One layer is the animal brain (limbic system), which of course is the same brain animals have.

When an animal sees food, it goes right up and eats it.  The animal will take food from another animal, out of the hands of a human, and even kill another animal in order to eat.

Thankfully, most humans don’t do that.  We might see a donut in someone else’s hand, think it looks good, but have restraint from walking over to them and grabbing it out of their hand.  We can thank our “human brain” for this, or more specifically the neocortex.

Here’s how it works.

The fact that the donut looks good to us is the animal brain talking.  But when our human brain is working properly, we restrain ourselves from stealing the donut.  The instinct and desire is still there, but we restrain ourselves due to the human brain’s ability to override the animal instinct.

The Stressed Out Animal

Stress is an emotional event and therefore impacts our animal brain.  Stress affects us on a more primal level and engages our survival instinct.  The stronger our animal brain is, the more difficult it is for our human brain to inhibit it.  When stress becomes chronic, our animal brain gets so efficient at firing (called plasticity), the human brain has a difficult time stopping us from making rational choices.  This coupled with the fact that as a society we have limited stimulus to our human brain, we become far more impulsive when it comes to eating, sex, and other such animalistic behaviors.  (Lights, sounds, television and lack of exercise all put our human brain on vacation.)

Impulsivity and poor eating choices is not a personality issue, it’s a brain issue – the animal brain continues to fire and the human brain has limited capacity to inhibit it.

This process helps explain the results of the study I mentioned – certain individuals have a more difficult time saying no to food choices because the part of their brain that stops this behavior is not firing properly.

If this sounds like you, what do you do?

Taming Your Animal Brain

It’s not terribly complicated, but there is a lot you can do for brain health.

The first thing to do is manage blood sugar and optimize oxygen to the brain.  Without these components, your brain doesn’t have a chance in working properly.  However, you need blood work to determine how well your body is doing this.

The next thing is to evaluate your neurotransmitters – the chemicals in your brain that impact mood, motivation, will power, etc.  In our office we use a questionnaire to help point us in the direction of which neurotransmitters are deficient.  (This questionnaire is available in Fat Is Not Your Fault.)

Lastly, when your animal brain becomes plastic, meaning it fires very, very efficiently, you must get your human brain to become more plastic.  In other words, you want to do things that stimulate the part of your brain that inhibits impulsive behavior so much that it fires with incredible efficiency and dampens the effects of the animal brain.  Things like meditation, reading, learning a new subject and participating in new hobbies and activities can be helpful.  These all create new connections in your brain.  Even driving to and from work using a route can be helpful.

Your goal is to do relaxing things that can positively impact human brain function.

It may seem difficult, but it is possible to correct this tendency.  Brain function is far more important than people realize.  In fact, every aspect of aging is more about brain function than it is anything else.  Memory, inability to smell, lack of taste, loss of balance, incontinence . . . these are all due to brain deterioration.  If you take care of anything in your life, take care of your brain.  When it rots, you rot.