Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat Read Online Free PDF Page A

eat. Animal studies have shown that if you radically restrict energy intake—as with a very low-calorie diet—the body’s cells go into “starvation mode,” trying to conserve all the energy they can. Then, when you begin eating normally again, your metabolism goes haywire and hangs on to the calories for dear life. Your poor body thinks it’s starving and won’t give up a single ounce of fat.
    So many of us have experienced this effect firsthand. Our bodies learn to conserve weight by going into storage mode. Suddenly we’re slipping into a painful downward spiral:
     
    Even after you’re had some success on a particular diet—even if that diet offers you healthy choices and a sustainable number of calories—you probably found yourself slipping after a few months. Why?
    Again, it’s not that you lack willpower. It’s that you never focused on feeding your brain. Without the physical and emotional support you need, your brain is starving for the serotonin you got from carbs and sugar and desperate for the dopamine in your fatty snacks.
    If your life is stressful or if you feel chronically anxious and unsafe, your serotonin levels probably have been low for a while, making you all the more vulnerable to the power of sugar and carbs. Likewise, if your life feels boring and restricted, if you chronically feel blue and lethargic, your dopamine levels have likely dropped even before you started worrying about your weight.
    So what’s the solution? It’s actually simple. You need healthy, feel-good foods and satisfying life activities to balance your brain chemistry. Once your brain is fed, you won’t need sweet, starchy, high-fat foods to feel good, because you’ll be getting all the “boost” you need from other sources. Your cravings will be satisfied and your addictions will vanish. You’ll naturally be drawn to healthy foods, and your weight will automatically readjust.
     
    How Diet Rehab Will Help
    As part of your Diet Rehab treatment I’m going to do something that might seem a little strange at first: I’m going to start by having you eat more food. My approach to addiction is based on “gradual detox,” in which you begin by adding foods that will boost your serotonin and dopamine levels before you ever cut back on anything. It’s vital that we come from a psychological place of plenty . We need to start out knowing that there is nothing we cannot have if we really want it.
    Here’s how forcing ourselves to diet cold turkey creates a weight- gain cycle:
     
    If I’m treating patients who want to quit smoking, I tell them they should continue to smoke for a month after making the decision to quit. I realize that might sound odd, but I’ll explain. A habit is fully formed in twenty-eight days. So we spend twenty-eight days adding to their life before we take the smoking away. We add activities such as running, yoga, and improving relationships. We start to explore the replacement options we’ll have on hand once the smoking stops, such as the medication Zyban, which is yet another way to increase dopamine levels to counteract the effects of nicotine withdrawal. We’ll also consider nicotine replacement in the form of gums or patches.
    Can you see what we’ve used that month to do? Nicotine addicts have now formed new habits that boost the same neurochemicals they have gotten from smoking. After raising these levels, then—and only then—should we remove the nicotine from their system. At that point, the smokers will hardly notice the loss, because they’ll be getting so much dopamine from so many other sources.
    The same principle applies to food. Even when you perform weight loss surgery, if you don’t address patients’ brain chemistry, they’ll continue to feel miserable and deprived. They’ll still crave the foods that made them feel good—that did, actually, generate the brain chemicals that we all need to feel good—and then, as happens to most people who have weight loss