What Are You Hungry For? (21 page)

Adrenaline

Cortisol

Endorphins

Thyroid hormones

The two stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, were never linked to weight until it was discovered that they increase deposits of
belly fat. Endorphins, the natural opiates manufactured in the brain, function as painkillers. They increase with exercise, falling in love, having an orgasm, and eating spicy foods. There’s no single message there, until you stand back and realize that endorphins are one ingredient in the body’s “satisfaction cocktail.” As such, their rise and fall clearly meshes with the whole picture of how fulfilled you are and what you do to find more fulfillment.

I’m not asking you to memorize the functions of every hormone—exactly the opposite. Your hormones are orchestrated and intertwined. They translate your feelings into chemical messages that your cells can understand. It’s amazing that this can happen, and no one knows how it really works. Why should a chemical, adrenaline, make you have the feeling of fear or the desire to run away? Science cannot say, but the crucial point is that hormones allow you to maintain a state of inner balance and peace while also giving you the possibility of quick response to any change in your life.

What this means for your weight is that you must look beyond a single “hunger hormone” or “fat hormone” to take in the whole picture. The textbook description of hormones is too narrow, being totally disconnected from the human situation. The thyroid always comes up in any discussion on metabolism and obesity. To an endocrinologist the connection among thyroid activity, emotions, and metabolism is not clear-cut. But it makes sense that a low thyroid level linked to depression or stress will influence your metabolism. That’s a simple example of looking at the whole picture, considering why someone in a negative emotional state will be sending hormonal signals to the body that have a widespread effect. (In the chapter on emotional well-being, three more hormones are added to the chemical symphony.)

Hormones give us a label for how totally interconnected the mind and body are. Change one important biorhythm, and the effects will be felt everywhere. This is most important with sleep, which is the master biorhythm that sets everything else for the day. As you probably know, the reason we sleep remains a mystery. Almost all the discoveries made in sleep research come from sleep deprivation. Force someone to stay awake, and shortly the first symptoms—dullness, decreased coordination, mental fog, and physical fatigue—appear. If a person is forced to stay awake beyond twenty-four hours, which is hard to induce even in the laboratory, symptoms become severe, leading to hallucinations and chaotic physical processes in the body.

Because sleep research is conducted through deprivation, we find ourselves in much the same position as the study of vitamins, which is done through vitamin deficiencies. Taking away vitamin C leads to scurvy, among other disorders, but this doesn’t tell you how to optimize vitamin C, which is the other half of the story, and certainly the more important half for everyday life.

As far as sleep goes, the sad truth is that we have to begin with deprivation, given that half of American adults report problems getting a good night’s sleep during the past week, and two-thirds say that they should be getting more sleep. What defeats good sleep? To begin with:

All of these factors can easily be connected to overeating. But just by itself, lack of sleep throws off hormone balance, and one result is that you get hungry and also can’t control what you eat (because your decision-making ability is decreased). Leptin, ghrelin, and cortisol are thrown off their normal rhythms. There are secondary effects, too. Lack of sleep can make you irritable or depressed, and this in turns leads you to eat in order to feel better.

It may be scientifically valid that some people are programmed to be night owls, not feeling sleepy until after midnight and needing to sleep in late, while others are programmed to go to bed early and wake up early. Anyone who has lived with someone who falls into the opposite category knows firsthand how hard this programming is to change. No real research has been done to verify whether change is even possible with such a basic biorhythm.

But two things are beyond dispute. Sleep is cyclical. Sleep is chemical. Because it’s cyclical, you should do your best to respect your body’s attunement to the rhythm of the seasons and the changes from light to dark. Because sleep is chemical, realize that your brain must secrete certain substances to get you to sleep and wake you up again. Interfering with these chemicals by using alcohol, tobacco, or drugs is a major don’t. But even to throw your sleep time off by wide variances in your routine is like volunteering for jet lag or the night shift, two things that sleep doesn’t like.

The guidelines for getting a good night’s sleep are well known and should be tried before you consider whether you have anything close to a sleep disorder.

1. Observe routine hours for going to bed.

2. Have the bedroom as dark as possible. Even low light levels activate the pineal gland, a small region in the brain that regulates daily rhythms according to light and dark.

3. Have the room as quiet as possible. As you sleep, you rise into periods that are almost awake, and even minor sounds (a ticking clock or dripping bathroom faucet) can wake you up prematurely.

4. Set the temperature on the cool side, since your body warms up in bed, and too much warmth may wake you up.

5. Eliminate minor aches and pains. These become more noticeable when you go to bed. Half an aspirin before bedtime may be all you need.

6. Don’t be mentally active for an hour before going to bed.

7. Don’t go to bed angry or upset.

8. Resist tossing and turning. Lie still and wait for sleep to come naturally.

9. Arrange your bedtime so that you get a comfortable 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

10. If you are prone to getting up to urinate, don’t drink liquids for 2 hours before going to bed.

11. Wake up without an alarm, allowing the natural wake-sleep cycle to reset itself.

If you have tried all of these measures—not once but for at least two weeks—and you still have problems getting to sleep, a multitude of advice can be found on the Internet. Yet current research seems somewhat contradictory. It used to be thought that if you didn’t get a good night’s sleep during the workweek, you couldn’t make up for it by sleeping in on the weekend. It was also thought that the stages of deep sleep and REM sleep (REM stands for rapid eye movements,
observed when someone is dreaming) were achieved only in 7 to 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Now it seems that deep sleep and REM can be reached much more quickly, so researchers support the value of taking a catnap and catching up with extra hours of sleep if there is a deficit. But I’d make the point that sleep research can’t be separated from the whole business of living. Nothing interrupts sleep worse than grief, stress, loss, failure, anxiety, depression, and everyday worries. In bad cases of insomnia, you must often look to other areas of your life. That’s what we’ve been doing with eating and awareness; sleeping and awareness call for the same perspective. Most of the same answers also apply:

You will sleep well if you are happy.

The more contented you are, the better you will sleep.

Too much inertia and stagnation hurt your sleep; being active and engaged helps your sleep.

Being sluggish and tired leads to bad sleep, and in turn bad sleep makes you more sluggish and tired.

Toxins and reliance on medications, including sleep aids, throw off biorhythms and often cause sleep problems.

I’m not saying that when you go through a spell of insomnia, you need to look at your whole life. Be familiar with stress—covered in the “Making It Personal” section that follows—and become more aware of what is throwing your body off. Taking proactive steps is much better than turning into a victim and thrashing around randomly for quick fixes.

A small survey that friends and I came up with includes some sleep aids that are harmless—and at least one person swears by each of them:

Making It Personal:
Dealing with Stress, without Eating

If you want to break the habit of eating when you feel stressed, you need a better way to handle stress. It’s helpful to first learn a bit more about stress itself, especially the so-called normal stress of daily life. It’s considered normal for two reasons. No traumatic event triggers the stress, and the kind of pressure we all feel is generally low-level. It tends to fly beneath the radar. But if you find yourself eating without being able to put your finger on why you suddenly wanted food, it’s likely that you are trying to cope with stress.

Food, even though comforting, shouldn’t be your main way to cope, and certainly not the first one you reach for. Three factors make stress worse in daily life (see
this page
).

Ineffectual Coping

How many of the following behaviors do you fall into when you find yourself feeling stressed?:

___ I reach for food if I feel stressed.

___ I react emotionally and sometimes blow up.

___ I feel panicky and suffocated. I have to shut the stress out or run away.

___ I ignore the stress and look for a distraction like watching TV, going online, or playing a video game.

___ I complain about the pressure I’m under, mostly to people who aren’t causing it.

___ I pass the stress down the line, unloading it on someone else.

___ I turn my back on the people who cause me the most stress, blocking them out as much as I can.

___ I put up with stress until I get a chance to unwind hours later (e.g., going to the gym, having a cocktail).

___ I create even more pressure on myself and others, on the theory that it makes me stronger and more competitive.

These behaviors don’t achieve what they set out to do—decrease the harmful effects of stress. Stress is a feedback loop. The input is the stressor (e.g., a tight deadline, an obnoxious boss, an unreachable sales goal); the output is your response. You have a choice to intervene anywhere along the loop. The more consciously you intervene, the higher your chances of reducing the bad effects of stress.

Having seen what doesn’t work, what does?

Thanks to self-regulation, your body returns to balance after a stress occurs. You might jump because you hear a car backfire close by, but a few minutes later there will be no hint that your heart beat faster and your blood pressure rose. However, three factors can mount over time to prevent rebalancing, pushing you gradually into chronic imbalance:

Repetition

Unpredictability

Lack of control

Look upon these as the Big Three when it comes to chronic stress, because they can make the difference, literally, between life and death. In one classic laboratory experiment in animal behavior, mice were placed on a metal grid that administered a mild shock, not enough to harm them but enough to jolt them. The shocks were administered at random, and the mice could not run away. Thus the three worst factors—repetition, unpredictability, and lack of control—were all present.

Even though the shocks, considered one at a time, were harmless, the mice quickly declined and died. Their bodies’ ability to return to homeostasis had been exhausted. Unable to adapt, they shut down completely. The lesson seems clear: Low-level stress appears to be harmless, but under the wrong conditions it leads to a breakdown of your ability to adapt.