The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter

Author:Michael Easter [Easter, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2021-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

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Understanding a true portion—not the diabetic-coma-inducing ones we in the modern world have become accustomed to—was a critical and enlightening first step for Kashey’s clients. Then it was time to peel back more layers and dive into the other data they’d tracked: those lifestyle factors such as sleep, stress, and activity levels.

Kashey knew that even though weight gain or loss is mainly driven by how much food a person eats, how much food a person eats is driven by everything that is happening in his or her life. Consider: People eat 550 more calories—a whole extra meal—after nights where they sleep just five hours versus eight, according to research conducted at the Mayo Clinic.

Another experiment found that 40 percent of people eat significantly more food when they’re stressed. And they’re not bingeing on wheatgrass shots. Stressed people were more likely to snack on M&Ms rather than grapes. That’s thanks to another life-saving evolutionary mechanism.

Kashey explained that humans essentially have two reasons for eating. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call them real hunger and reward hunger. The first is set off when the body requires food to function. It fills a physiological need. It’s like the body has an empty gas tank.

The second is spurred by a psychological or environmental cue. Reward hunger turns on when the body actually needs food and is experiencing real hunger, or else we wouldn’t eat. (This is like sex. If sex weren’t pleasurable, we wouldn’t be as driven to procreate.) But reward hunger also and more frequently pops up by itself, in the absence of real hunger. Because a clock says so, because food eases stress, because we’re celebrating, or because food is simply there and why not eat it? It fills a psychological want.

Real hunger is an honest dialogue between the brain and the stomach. Our stomachs are lined with mechanoreceptors, which communicate with our brain to signal fullness. When the mechanoreceptors register that the stomach is running low on food, the stomach produces a hunger-inciting hormone called ghrelin. Meanwhile, another hormone called leptin, which plays the opposite role of ghrelin and signals that we’re full, drops. Our body and mind then hammer us with discomfort—our stomach feels empty and we often become irritable, foggy, and hangry. Our body also releases the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which trigger a fight-or-flight response and focus our brain on finding food.

Once we eat, our brain releases dopamine, rewarding us for the behavior. This creates a circuit in the brain that associates food with dopamine.

But many times that complex dialogue isn’t so honest. Grehlin, the hunger chemical, also has a habit of spurting out when our stomach is full. Particularly when delicious, calorie-dense foods are around. This is reward hunger without real hunger: a drive to eat when we don’t actually need food. This hunger is why we can have a big dinner, feel full, but then see dessert and suddenly have room for more.

Reward hunger played an integral part in human evolution by compelling us to eat past fullness.

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