What’s the connection between what you cook up in your kitchen and what you cook up in your bedroom? Keep listening!

Welcome to The Done Bingeing Podcast. This is the place to hear about how you can pair the emerging brain science about why you binge with powerful life coaching to help you stop. If you want to explore a non-clinical approach to end binge eating, you’re in the right place. It’s time to free yourself. You have more power than you know. And now, your host, Life and Weight-Loss Coach Martha Ayim.

Welcome to Episode 52 of The Done Bingeing Podcast and to part 18 of this special series, 12 Keys to End Binge Eating. This is the final episode of the seventh key: Reduce the Desire to Overeat. In the last few episodes, we’ve been focusing on hormonal hunger by looking at how ghrelin, leptin, and insulin regulate hunger and fullness signals.

We discovered that the ability of these hormones to signal clearly is influenced by the food we eat. Why? Because too much high sugary, highly concentrated foods spike insulin, which scrambles ghrelin and leptin’s ability to clearly signal hunger and fullness.

Remember, when you have a lot of insulin in your blood, it blocks leptin at the brain. Since leptin is the hormone telling you you’re full, a blocked leptin signal means you don’t get the message that it’s okay to stop eating. But there’s more. The more concentrated your food, the less pressure you’re going to feel on the inside of your stomach wall, the more ghrelin you’re going to have signally that you’re still hungry.

So, the more insulin you have in your blood, the harder it will be for you to know whether you’re genuinely hungry or full, and the harder it will be for you to lose weight if that’s what you want to do. Learning to eat in a way that allows your hormones to signal clearly will make it so much easier for you to stop overeating. And managing your insulin levels is essential to tapping into your own fat stores on board so that you can use them for fuel.

That’s one of the reasons why allotting daily calories is so ineffective as a weight loss tool—it only takes into account external calories eaten and rarely considers internal fat that’s available to fuel your body.

So many of my clients ask me, “What do I need to eat to lose weight?” And my answer is, “Your own fat.” My teacher, Brooke Castillo, calls this dining in . . . on yourself.

So, how much external food you need to eat depends in part on the amount of fat on your body that can be burned for fuel.

We usually define overeating as meaning eating more food than our body needs for fuel. But, now, we have a more precise definition of what overeating means. It means to eat more external food than your body needs for fuel.

Now . . . having excess fat on your body that you want to burn for fuel is one thing. But being able to access that fuel is another thing altogether. You can’t access that fuel if your insulin levels are too high. Remember, insulin is “the fat-storage hormone.” It’s the main hormone determining whether you gain, maintain, or lose weight. When insulin is elevated in the blood, your body can’t burn fat for fuel—in fact, the opposite happens and you go into fat-storage mode.

Your body needs to be trained or adapted to burn its own fat. That’s called being “fat adapted.” When your body has adapted to using its own fat for fuel, you’ll likely find yourself less hungry for external food. And if you want to lose weight, this is a beautiful thing.

So, if having high levels of insulin in your blood hijacks your hunger and fullness signaling system and blocks your ability to burn your own fat stores for fuel, it’s helpful to understand what raises insulin in the first place. So let’s explore that more fully.

Insulin is raised every time we eat and it’s raised the most by high-sugar and highly refined foods.

Because insulin goes up every time you eat, it makes sense that eating less often gives your insulin levels a chance to go down. Mind you, it’s hard to eat less often if your hunger and fullness signals are whacked. Do you see how this all fits together?

Because insulin spikes the most with sugary and refined foods, it also makes sense that eating less of these kinds of foods will allow your insulin levels to go down.

Refined food is food that’s taken out of its natural form and concentrated. For example, sugar in its natural form of sugarcane or sugar beets obviously contains sugar, but these natural forms also have a lot of fiber that would slow digestion and thus the release of sugar into the bloodstream, compared to sugar in its concentrated, processed form of sugar granules.

The same goes for flour. Flour is a fine powder made by taking a naturally occurring grain or other starchy plant and grinding it down into a more concentrated form. The refining process strips flours of natural, high-fiber content and nutrients. Grains become processed into simple carbohydrates. Simple carbohydrates include foods like breads, white rice, soda, sugar, and candy. They’re foods that are easily digested and spike blood sugar and insulin quickly.

Complex carbohydrates include foods like vegetables, fruits, lentil, nuts, quinoa, brown rice, and oatmeal. They are foods in their natural form or at least closer to their natural form that contain fiber and other nutrients. Since complex carbohydrates are less easily digested, they spike blood sugar less and raise insulin more slowly.

So, refined foods or simple carbohydrates like sugar and flour spike insulin the most. Complex carbohydrates spike insulin too, but not to same extent. The more refined and concentrated the carbohydrate, the more insulin goes up. The more fiber you have in those carbohydrates and the closer the carb is to its natural form, the less insulin goes up. Adequate amounts of protein raise insulin to some degree. And in general, fat doesn’t make your insulin go up very much.

So, to sum up, the more concentrated and refined your food is, the more it spikes your blood sugar, the more insulin has to flood in to bring your blood sugar back down, the more hunger you’ll have, and the harder it will be for you to stop overeating and lose weight.

Eating fewer sugary, concentrated foods allow insulin to drop, so it’s easier for you to know when you’re truly hungry and when you’re truly full, which makes it easier for you to eat less often and eat less food. Why? Because teaching your body to become more sensitive to insulin again allows leptin and ghrelin to start signaling clearly again.

Now, if you stop eating high-sugar and highly processed foods suddenly, you’ll likely go through an adjustment period for a couple of reasons.

First, eating predominantly concentrated foods too often teaches our bodies to become sugar burners instead of fat burners. And our bodies prefer to burn sugar, but it’s easier. Dr. Fung, the author of The Obesity Code, likens it to our preference to go for easily accessible food in our fridge versus going to the deep-freeze for food, which we’ll then have to thaw before we can even begin to cook and eat it.

Second, you may experience withdrawal. Remember, many scientists argue that sugar impacts our reward pathways in the brain very much that way narcotics do, though to a lesser degree. So cutting back or eliminating sugary concentrated foods may lead to a temporary period of headaches, fatigue, bloating, cravings, and other symptoms before you start to feel better.

Remember, you’re still eating plenty of complex carbohydrates, healthy fats (such as like avocados, nuts, seeds, olive oil, and coconut oil), and adequate amounts of protein. Fruits will still allow the taste of sweetness, as will sweeteners like stevia and xylitol. Staying well hydrated with water will also help during these days or weeks of adaptation.

One of the reasons it took 52 episodes before I mentioned the impact of flour and sugar in such detail is because so many of my clients come to me after signing up for a no-sugar, no-flour diet that left them feeling deprived and desperate and returning to bingeing once again. I wanted to share a solid foundation of other tools and concepts first, including self-regard and mind management. This is where having a coach in your kitchen is an ace in your pocket.

If food is your friend or if food is your life, if food has taken you out of the game or taken you out of your life, you need a coach to help you find better friends and get you back in the game, you need a coach to help you live your best life.

Because what if your life was so amazing, you didn’t need a Twinkie to make it sparkle?

This is the work, my friend. It’s about the food, but not just about the food.

When you unlearn to desire foods that don’t serve you, you learn to desire things that do serve you.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Just between you and me, how steamy are your bedroom windows? Are things smokin’ in there? Do you want them to be?

How lush is your garden?

How deep are your friendships?

How profitable is your business?

How cozy is your home?

What moves you? What stirs you? What’s beautiful for you?

When you can answer these questions, bagels and biscuits will be a bunch of molecules on a plate. Nothing less and not much more. You can walk on by because you’ll have so much more that worthy of your true desire.

That’s it for Episode 52. Thank you for listening! If you’re ready to apply the concepts in this podcast at a deeper level, get on the waitlist for the next Done Bingeing group experience. Go to https://www.holdingthespace.co/group-programs/ and sign up for updates.

Thanks for listening to The Done Bingeing Podcast. Martha is a certified life and weight loss coach who’s available to help you stop bingeing. Book a free session with her at www.holdingthespace.co/book. And stay tuned for next week’s episode on freeing yourself from binge eating and creating the life you want.

References

Hultin, G. (2017, October 3). A Complete Guide to Complex Carbohydrates. Retrieved from https://www.livestrong.com/article/27398-list-complex-carbohydrates-foods/

Link, R. (2018). Sugar Withdrawal Symptoms and How to Reduce Sugar Cravings. Retrieved from https://draxe.com/sugar-withdrawal/