As 2023 is well underway, many have already found that their resolutions to detox and lose weight are failing or are already dead. This yearly pilgrimage back to the gym, the healthy areas of the grocery store, and away from the holiday cookies proves to be very difficult for all of us. The struggle along this journey stems from the fact that we all desire things that bring us pleasure in the here and now. While waiting to see the results of the perseverance of healthy eating and living takes time. I want to take a few moments to highlight why this fight is so difficult and what are the areas where we can begin to detox and win the weight loss battle.
The American Pro-Inflammatory Diet
In many of our previous articles we have highlighted the damaging effects of the traditional American diet. The typical diet of high sugar foods, processed ingredients, trans fats, etc. that we find in our convenience and fast food world is killing our society. This way of life leads to chronic inflammation and promotes disease. All diseases are actually chronic inflammatory states. Most people spend half their lives suffering with the benign results of chronic inflammation like aches and pains, osteoarthritis, malaise, and depression.
There are multiple reasons why pain develops in patients. Too much stress, a lack of sleep, sedentary living, and a pro-inflammatory diet all predispose one to develop chronic pain. These same factors will also promote obesity. These lifestyle factors coupled with obesity have shown to be highly correlated with back pain, disc herniation, joint pain, tendonitis, fibromyalgia, headaches, and depression. As time passes we can succumb to the chronic pro-inflammatory state in more lethal episodes like a heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, or cancer.
So, why do we find it hard to turn our back to this way of living? Why can we not cut the cord that these foods have on our decision making? The simple answer, our brain betrays us.
Our Happiness Seeking Brains
As individuals we are nearly constantly looking for something to make us happy. Look around at how we consume sports, use our phones, where we spend our money, and you will see patterns of how we look for small hits of things that bring us temporary happiness. Happiness is a transient state of elevated physiology expressed as increased pleasure chemicals, such as dopamine. The more frequent these behaviors bring about these hits of dopamine, the more addicted we become to the behavior. Addictive patterns also form as we try to find more hits of happiness to escape the trials, losses, and pain that everyday life brings. These hits of happiness can come in many forms, but in the context of this article I want to highlight what happens when we use food to create some temporary dopamine surges of happiness.
Historically food was not a major source of happiness. The dopamine producing areas of the brain are not stimulated to high levels with most traditional food sources. Food used to be mostly about sustaining life and giving us the resources to carry about the things needed for living out our day. But, in recent years eating has become about pleasure that is pursued throughout the entire day, at every meal, at every age. The relentless pursuit of not being unhappy has conditioned us to ceaselessly pursue happiness in all forms including the mindless consumption of unhealthy, high calorie foods, which leads to pain, obesity, and chronic disease.
The Top 10
The top 10 sources of calories among Americans age 2 and over will give you a quick sense of where we are sourcing our happiness from.
Note: no vegetable or fruit even make it into the top 25 most commonly consumed foods in America.
- Grain Based Desserts
- Yeast Breads
- Chicken
- Soda/Energy/Sports Drinks
- Pizza
- Alcoholic Beverages
- Pasta
- Tortillas, burritos, and tacos
- Beef
- Dairy products
No one should feel guilty about wanting these foods. Unless you are an extremely rare person, we all desire one or more of the foods on this list. Some of that desire is the result of 100 years or more of marketing by food companies and our own Food and Drug Administration. The only way to truly detox your way away from some of these foods is to take control of your brain’s corrupted pleasure and happiness seeking patterns and start to recondition it with a new 
perspective on food. One major tool in that reconditioning can be L-glutamine. Known for its ability to help with sugar cravings, L-glutamine can give you an advantage in changing your eating habits. This semi-essential amino acid is also used to reduce muscle soreness and repair a healthy gut. If you are trying to break old eating habits, work out more, and are looking to improve your gut health, L-glutamine is the best tool.
Remember Food’s Purpose
Food serves a purpose of nourishing your body and sustaining it for the day, not to make you happy. It is easier to promote weight gain when it is understood that the suffering from eating far outweighs the normal level of stress that we deal with on a daily basis.
Create Some Margin In Your Life
Our modern living environment ceaselessly tempts us to overeat and avoid physical activities. When the daily calendar stays so full that food shopping, food preparation, and even time to eat becomes scarce, our ability to make good food choices drops dramatically. The more margin that you have in the day to maintain a focus on what you are eating and to manage the stress of the day, will prove valuable.
Mindfully Eat
Most people eat with a mindless rather than a mindful attitude. Mindfulness is defined as the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something. Being mindful of what we are putting into our bodies requires what used to be called self-discipline or will power. The key to mindful eating is to remember why you are making the choice to consume the food that you are eating. Is it helping you attain your goal? And how can you make that dietary mindfulness a way of life?
You are probably already mindful in other areas of your life. If you care about your grades in school, you will study hard and do what it takes to get a good grade. If you desire to have a happy marriage, you will think about your spouse and consider their needs in order for the relationship to thrive. If you want to retire, you have to prioritize saving money over spending every dime that you make. When it comes to losing weight you must raise the level to which you care and be mindful about your food intake. This effort does not stop with just a meal or when life gets busy, but throughout every part of one’s life. If you stop being mindful, body weight will accumulate. The battlefield of weight management includes dealing with our mental/emotional relationship with food, controlling our body physiology, and understanding why we are constantly pursuing this state of happiness.
Intermittent Fasting
One of the most trendy examples of mindful eating is intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding. This application of mindful eating places a restriction on feeding times to an 8 or 6 hour window of the day. This is often helpful to the patient because the mental focus of not eating for several hours of the day will frequently cause a 1000 calorie/day deficit than someone who is feeding in the normal 12 to 14 hour window. However, if the patient has not learned to fast away from pro-inflammatory foods their return to the normal feeding window will cause a return of the weight they lost.
Low Carbohydrate Diets
Another example of mindful eating is following a low carbohydrate diet. A low carbohydrate diet shifts our body’s energy production down two different pathways known as the Kreb’s Cycle and the electron transport chain. These two pathways utilize more fat calories for energy production than the carbohydrate energy pathway called glycolysis. Studies have shown that a diet with less than 100 grams of carbohydrates per day is effective in reducing body weight. However, when that carbohydrate drops to under 50 grams per day, as in most ketogenic plans, the weight loss is slightly better.
A side benefit of a low carbohydrate diet is that the mindful reduction of carbohydrate calories also reduces inflammation. Being that most pro-inflammatory foods are carbohydrates, reducing their intake has a benefit for the whole body. If one is truly trying to improve their health and maintain weight loss, then a normalization of inflammatory markers should be the highest priority.
More To Come
In our next newsletter we will expand upon these topics with more practical ways to detox and lose weight. The goal of our office is to use the powerful tools of chiropractic, rehabilitative exercise, and nutrition to see you become healthier than you have ever been in 2023.
Daryl C. Rich, D.C., C.S.C.S.
