There are so many components involved in our relationship
with food, and this becomes all too apparent when we decide that it’s time to
better manage our eating habits. Often, we realize just how out of control are
our urges and habits, whether physiological or psychological, which only adds
to our anxiety about our new undertaking. How then does this anxiety affect the
process? Is this the making of some vicious cycle of impulsive eating, or is it
actually more of a biological issue? These are the questions that loop in the
minds of people suffering with obesity and struggling to overcome it. The
answer is that both hormonal and
thinking processes govern how, what, and why we eat, and that reigning-in any
unruly routines is something that must be approached from many angles.
Hunger is, in fact, a very linear bodily function that is
initiated from the stomach itself, signaling to the brain that it has been
empty for some time and needs to be refilled to ensure the prevention of
physical starvation. The hormone whose release is triggered by the empty
stomach is called ghrelin, and it then
stimulates the release of neuropeptide Y from the hypothalamus of the brain, thereby stimulating the body’s hunger
response. When the body begins to receive its nourishment from the intake of
food, the fat tissues of the body then release another hormone called leptin, which initiates the brain’s
release of its hunger suppressant, proopiomelanocortin
(Wright). These hormonal feedback loops, along with the brain’s monitoring of
blood-sugar and insulin levels, are meant to guarantee that the body is neither
starved nor stuffed.
Cravings, on the other hand, are much more complicated in
nature. As we move through life, we collect so many psychological memories and
associations, both positive and negative. These memories and associations play
a big role in the evolution of our personality and how we relate to our
environment. We unconsciously gravitate to those things that remind us of
pleasurable experiences while doing our best to avoid or eliminate things that
bring painful memories, often unresolved traumas, to the forefront of our minds
and feelings. In an attempt to keep the body and mind flooded with a sense of
feeling not even necessarily good, but simply okay and well enough to cope with life’s compounding stresses, food
cravings develop as a means to distract us from what is uncomfortable and to
pacify our negative feelings.
While psychological in its onset, this phenomenon is only
possible because of how it affects the body on a chemical level. When we give
in to our cravings for fatty or sugary foods, our brain chemistry is affected
in much the same way as that of a drug abuser or internet-porn addict. Opioids from the hippocampus of the
brain are unleashed, which stimulates a general sense of release and euphoria,
and this then affects the brain’s internal reward circuitry in such a way that
our relationship to the world around us and our sense of reality in general may
become distorted (ScienceDaily). Our artificial, temporary feelings of pleasure
suggest that everything is suddenly fine, and that we don’t need to face
whatever it is that may remain unresolved or insufficiently dealt with.
Over time, this way of coping with the world by regulating
our internal feelings with food as a drug can result in confusing what was once
a rather cut and dry hunger response, skewing the body’s ability to communicate
its nutritional needs with itself in a functional way. Combined with the fact
that typical restrictive dieting has proven to be associated with a lowering of
serotonin levels, common to people
dealing with depression or women in their premenstrual cycle, it’s no wonder
that people have difficulty establishing and maintaining healthy ways of
relating to food once these unhealthy neural pathways have been laid.
One extremely powerful benefit of gastric surgery for people
who have tried dieting without a desirable outcome is that the portion of the
stomach that releases the hunger stimulating hormone, ghrelin, is removed in both the Gastric Sleeve and Gastric
Bypass surgeries (but not the Lap Band), which thereby decreases the impulse
to eat (Langer). Otherwise, due to how we’ve conditioned ourselves to crave the
wrong kinds of food in order to get that false rush of pleasure, the body’s
natural hunger response could initiate a cascade of food craving impulses
making it all the more difficult to maintain a healthy intake of what the body
can actually use. 
Needless to say, the mental and emotional issues
underpinning food cravings and other addictions should still be dealt with in
order to clear out whatever traumatic debris may be in the way of our ability
to be fully present and functional to whatever we may experience in our
day-to-day lives. As needed, this can be facilitated by a myriad of approaches
in the mental-health world, a field whose stigma has been considerably lifted
in recent decades due to a deepening understanding of the mind-body connection
and the undeniably high-stress society in which we live. That withstanding,
gastric surgery recipients invariably report that their hunger and
preoccupation with food decreases significantly after the procedure, leading to
an increase in self-esteem and genuine feelings of well-being that primarily stem from having shed the pounds that have kept them weighed down for so long.
Sources:
· "Images Of Desire: Brain Regions Activated
By Food Craving Overlap With Areas Implicated In Drug Craving." Monell
Chemical Senses Center. ScienceDaily. Nov. 11, 2004. (Aug. 7, 2008)
· Langer, F., Reza Hoda, M., Bohdjalian, A.,
Felberbauer, F., Zacherl, J., Wenzl, E., ... Prager, G. (n.d.). Sleeve
Gastrectomy And Gastric Banding: Effects On Plasma Ghrelin Levels.Obesity
Surgery, 1024- 1029.
Wright, Karen. "Consuming Passions."
Psychology Today. March/April 2008. (Aug. 7, 2008)
