Hunger & Cravings...a difference?

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)