Is Success With a Sugar Addiction About Willpower
It’s easy to ask or think - Isn’t Obesity and Being Over Weight a Personal Responsibility? Just eat less. Move more. Have some willpower.
It's so easy to default to blame and judgement when we struggle with kicking the sugar habit.
"Just quit, already!"
We begin to think that there is something wrong with us; with our discipline and willpower.
Here is the thing about willpower:
Willpower is using conscious mental energy for change. To start or stop something.
But, it’s a defined amount and exhaustible.
Willpower is not the answer. Studies prove that we only have so much will power; limited energetic determination - so it takes energy and conscious effort. If we BELIEVE something is bad for us, we have less of a problem turning it down. Except food seems to be a little different.
A study done on judges shows that prisoners up for parole who had hearings earlier in the day had a better likelihood of a favorable ruling.
What the researchers found was that at the beginning of the day, a judge was likely to give a favorable ruling about 65 percent of the time. However, as the morning wore on and the judge became drained from making more and more decisions, the likelihood of a criminal getting a favorable ruling steadily dropped to zero.
Why?
Decision Fatigue. Your willpower is like a muscle.
Your Conscious mind knows you want to stop. Yet, your Subconscious mind has built in beliefs from conditioning and it is telling you different things.
Cognitive dissonance - a disagreement in your thinking. Conscious vs subconscious mind.
We can get caught up in emotional eating. It helps us relax; takes off the anxiety
Subconscious beliefs are often not true.
When the subconscious and conscious beliefs meet and become the same; then there is conflict.
Willpower runs out so if you’re used in in one area of the day, it is lessened for the rest of the day.
Our brain tries to restore internal harmony by justifying; or making promises to ourselves; or doing something to make up for it; or we can just ignore it.
What do they eat at AA meetings? Donuts or sugar. Why? Gives a similar dopamine hit as alcohol. And, it is easier to associate pleasant feelings with attending meetings.
Rats who have previously been addicted cocaine will then go for sugar. Rats respond to excess sugar by bingeing, showing less tolerance, withdrawal (chattering teeth, shivering, drop in body temperature and depression)
When placed in water, these sugar addicted rats are less likely to swim or crawl out - they have lost their willpower.
Fat cells act like cancer and want more, they grow, and feed themselves first.
Insulin is the fat storage hormone, the hunger hormone. The Wrong type of carbs jack up insulin, eat wrong food, make insulin, cells reject insulin, sugar stores as fat, feel tired and makes us more hungry.
Quite simply, you need more sugar now to get those same euphoric feelings (dopamine) than before.
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