Why does eating one sugary item e.g choc bar lead to more and more?

RebeccaChick

Like for instance today, I got a selection box and I had a Wispa bar, then I was like 'oh screw it i'll have another' and I ended up eating 3 other bars:mad:
I REALLY wish I could just have the one bar and keep the others, even now I want to reach for some sort of junk but I'm resisting (only coz i've eaten so much already!)

Anyone have any idea what's up with me? Why can't I stop myself?
I know about the mental aspects that is predictable with this but no matter what I would have said to myself or where I put the others bars it wouldn't have stopped me!?!

Even if I didn't buy the selection box I would have gone for something else in the house i.e cereal or bread or something. Frustration!!!

RobAMerc

1 word...sugar
when you eat a bar your blood sugar levels shoot up - shortly after as your blood sugar drops you start craving it again.

its the reason why ( in my opinion ) having a diet low in sugar is easy once you stay almost totally away from it - soon as you have something sugary - you start off the cycle of sugar highs and lows again and go completely off the rails.

if you really want to avoid doing it again, do some research as to what food to avoid in order to avoid rushes ( fruit for instance )

all this is my barely informed opinion btw - nothing concrete.

RebeccaChick

Ok, thanks for the reply!
Eating sugar is such a vicious circle :rolleyes:

I'm going to start working out tomorrow, this normally gets me in the right zone and more willing to reach for the healthy foods.

Thanks:)!!!

Immaculata

Like RobAMerc says, it's a blood sugar thing.

And probably partly a mental thing, too. If you think of eating chocolate as a bad thing, then you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, you know?

So, I suggest that if you decide you want to avoid the same thing in future, eat the Wispa, then stick the rest in the freezer and go for a walk to burn off the excess sugar.

Or, a better way might be: just tell yourself that all food will nourish you and you can eat anything you want. Over time, that attitude will guide you to the stuff that suits your body best in the amounts that suit your body best, IMHO. Such as types of chocolate that are relatively low in sugar and fat, such as high cocoa content dark chocolate.

Mellor

While the blood sugar thing is true,
It's likely more due to the fact that junk food tastes nice, and people who struggle to say no, in general, have poor willpower.

Blatter

Mellor wrote: »

While the blood sugar thing is true,
It's likely more due to the fact that junk food tastes nice, and people who struggle to say no, in general, have poor willpower.

Is it willpower though? I don't think it is.

I say that because I have friends who are a similar weight/height to me and we actually have had competitions on who could eat the most. In the summer on holidays we were at an all-inclusive hotel, eat as much as you like. So we all eat at the same time and we always eat as much as we could. It was very obvious that me and another friend, ate way more than the others. I don't think it is any coincidence that we were the ones with the tendancy to put on weight. From my observations, the others just couldn't eat after a point because their bodies obviously told them that they've had enough, that they don't need anymore food, whereas me and my mates bodies told us no such thing and we just kept eating. They didn't tell themselves ''I better stop eating now'', it wasn't willpower. We actually asked them, why aren't you eating anymore and they just said they couldn't handle anymore. It is also no coincidence that those who stopped eating have never had weight problems.

There are several theories about why this happens, none of them proven.

I subscribe to the one about leptin, the chemical in your body that tells your brain when you are full.

It seems that some peoples' bodies are told very quickly/immediately when they are full, so you could say that that leptin in their body is exteremly efficient. The peoples' bodies who don't tell them they are full at the correct time, have less efficient leptin.

This would definetely explain the genetics link to weight gain. From my own experinence I can, without question, see that there are some families with weight problems, and others who have never been fat.

It would make sense that our bodies' efficient use of leptin is weakened by eating foods that the human body was simply never designed to eat.
Maybe it has been weakened over generations, and the ancestors of some families have had healthier diets than others.

Sorry for the long post, its just something I've been thinking about for quite a while now..

Mellor

I do agree that there may be a chemical trigger that tells you when you are full, but that's nothing to do with what I was talking about.
Ditto for different people suffering from cravings worse than others.

These are all factors, but at the end of the day, most of the time, people just don't want to skip that chocolate bar 9or other junk). They know they shouldn't eat it, but can't force themselves to skip it.

El_Dangeroso

I think the same way there are people who have trouble having just one drink, there are people who have trouble eating just one biscuit.

Willpower comes into it sure, but when you ask people who can take or leave sugary treats whether they need to white-knuckle it every time they eat a chocolate bar, they'll more than likely say no, even if they do use willpower it's not that much. Plus, doesn't going out to the shop in the driving rain to get more chocolate require willpower? And I've done that before for sure

People who get a nice big dopamine hit off a chocolate bar find it so much harder to resist another. Everyone has their poison, and if you examine the brain of a binge eater you'll find that a binge triggers the exact same reward chemicals in the brain as a drug addict or alcoholic getting their fix. And like both of those situations, the brain becomes dulled to the chemicals over time and more and more are needed to achieve the same effect.

One think that convinced me of the addictive effects of junk food was a small rat study that fed one group of rats nothing but junk food from birth. When the rats reached maturity, they were switched to a normal rat food diet which was way healthier than the junk. The rats starved to death instead of eating healthy food that was provided to them. Humans are obviously different but it gives you an idea of the powerful effect that hyper-palatable food has on the brain.

Sapsorrow

It'd be cool to do a study on animals or people addicted to sugar to see if they continue to self-medicate with sugar even if it was altered to taste awful. I know serious drug addicts and alcoholics will endure almost anything to get their hit, I wonder how would severe sugar addiction compare. That would shed some light on the willpower/sensory pleasure elements relative to the endorphine effects etc too.

El_Dangeroso

Sapsorrow wrote: »

It'd be cool to do a study on animals or people addicted to sugar to see if they continue to self-medicate with sugar even if it was altered to taste awful. I know serious drug addicts and alcoholics will endure almost anything to get their hit, I wonder how would severe sugar addiction compare. That would shed some light on the willpower/sensory pleasure elements relative to the endorphine effects etc too.

That would be a cool study, I don't know if you'd get the same intensity as a drug addict though, so far I don't think anyone has been mugged for the price of a mars bar

RebeccaChick

Thanks for all the replies guys, very interesting points!
I am naturally slim and all my life i've had no problem with weight so I think that has something to do with it, I've never had to stop myself eating junk to loose weight but now I want to stop because internally my body is probably like a jungle!!
I should go cold turkey for a few months and try get my body adjusted to a normal way and lose the cravings for sugary things!

rocky

I don't buy into the whole 'leptin response is genetically determined'. You can train your leptin , even if after a period of overeating you can have leptin insensitivity, the fact is that you 'decided' to overeat for long periods of time. This decision may have been influenced by other factors, but genetic leptin insensitivity, if it exists, could only be a minor part. Other pleasure signals in the brain could be responsible, and the way we react to these as individuals, the life stage we're at and so on, are more important in determining overeating or not.

Anecdotally, I was an overweight person for most of my life, I was eating not because I felt hunger, but mostly because of boredom. I just couldn't find anything more interesting to do (or I was doing something else while eating). So I trained my leptin and other hormones to be the hormones of an overweight person. In the last year or so, after reading a lot on nutrition, I started a diet that lead me to a healthy BMI (not that it's a great measure of much), and now I'm finding it terribly difficult to eat over 2600 kcals a day (on training days). Granted, if I felt bored again and started overfeeding, I can bet that in a couple of weeks I can retrain my hormones to those of an overweight person again.

El_Dangeroso

rocky wrote: »

I don't buy into the whole 'leptin response is genetically determined'. You can train your leptin , even if after a period of overeating you can have leptin insensitivity, the fact is that you 'decided' to overeat for long periods of time. This decision may have been influenced by other factors, but genetic leptin insensitivity, if it exists, could only be a minor part. Other pleasure signals in the brain could be responsible, and the way we react to these as individuals, the life stage we're at and so on, are more important in determining overeating or not.

Anecdotally, I was an overweight person for most of my life, I was eating not because I felt hunger, but mostly because of boredom. I just couldn't find anything more interesting to do (or I was doing something else while eating). So I trained my leptin and other hormones to be the hormones of an overweight person. In the last year or so, after reading a lot on nutrition, I started a diet that lead me to a healthy BMI (not that it's a great measure of much), and now I'm finding it terribly difficult to eat over 2600 kcals a day (on training days). Granted, if I felt bored again and started overfeeding, I can bet that in a couple of weeks I can retrain my hormones to those of an overweight person again.

Oh god if only it were that simple! Fact remains that there is a HUGE genetic component in weight. Can you deliberately overeat to gain fat? Yes, you can. Is this what happens every person who is overweight? More than likely, no.

There's a really cool study on the grandchildren of people who suffered through the Dutch famine in WW2. Some areas suffered a worse shortage of food than others. Lo and behold two generations later, the grandchildren of the people worst affected by famine are fatter, more prone to all sorts of diabetes etc. What your grandmother ate (or didn't) probably affects how you will handle various foods.

If all that was required to reset leptin sensitivity (fat people have loads of leptin, just not enough of it gets into the hypothalmus) to that of a slim person was calorie restriction, then calorie restriction wouldn't fail to cause permanent weight loss like it fails in 99.99999% of obese people.

rocky

El_Dangeroso wrote: »

Oh god if only it were that simple! Fact remains that there is a HUGE genetic component in weight. Can you deliberately overeat to gain fat? Yes, you can. Is this what happens every person who is overweight? More than likely, no.

There's a really cool study on the grandchildren of people who suffered through the Dutch famine in WW2. Some areas suffered a worse shortage of food than others. Lo and behold two generations later, the grandchildren of the people worst affected by famine are fatter, more prone to all sorts of diabetes etc. What your grandmother ate (or didn't) probably affects how you will handle various foods.

So you're saying that genetic factors are modified over such a short period of time as 40-50 years? Are you also saying that people can affect their genetic makeup due to environment pressures? If the grandmother would not have suffered a famine, the kids will have slightly different genes that would not cause them to be fat? Interesting, if true. My understanding is that genes are what you're born with, and cannot modify them, unless you're exposed to mutations like powerful rays for example. So how did the grandma update her genes?

If all that was required to reset leptin sensitivity (fat people have loads of leptin, just not enough of it gets into the hypothalmus) to that of a slim person was calorie restriction, then calorie restriction wouldn't fail to cause permanent weight loss like it fails in 99.99999% of obese people.

There are plenty reasons diets fail, I wouldn't class leptin insensitivity in the top 10.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/how-dieters-fail-diets.html

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/back-to-the-dieting-series-psychology-versus-physiology.html

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/all-diets-work-the-importance-of-calories.html


'Blaming it on the genes', however, can be up there though

rubadub

Immaculata wrote: »

eat the Wispa, then stick the rest in the freezer ..... as high cocoa content dark chocolate.

The freezer is a good trick, these days the difference between a single bar and 5 pack is huge, so I always end up getting 5 packs and inevitably scoffing the lot. Mars & snickers freeze rock solid so if they are frozen you cannot physically scoff them, you could leave one or a half one out to defrost, by the time it has you might not be hungry anymore.

The other trick is to eat something before hand, I eat bulky stuff like kidney beans in curry sauce, or a load of eggs, and after eat my bar -if I still even want it.

rocky

@El_D,

I was going to post something about Lamarckian inheritance being false, but it turns out there are some mechanisms by which it can manifest.

Wikipedia, whadya know

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism

The evolution of acquired characteristics has also been shown in human populations who have experienced starvation, resulting in altered gene function in both the starved population and their offspring [10]. The process of DNA methylation is thought to be behind such changes.

In October 2010, further evidence linking food intake to traits inherited by the offspring were shown in a study of rats conducted by several Australian universities[11]. The study strongly suggested that fathers can transfer a propensity for obesity to their daughters as a result of the fathers' food intake, and not their genetics (or specific genes), prior to the conception of the daughter. A "paternal high-fat diet" was shown to cause cell dysfunction in the daughter, which in turn led to obesity for the daughter.

Is this the study you were talking about?

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=3596539

Conclusions : A substantial (200 g or more) impact of severe in utero maternal undernutrition on OBW can be ruled out. There may, however, be parity specific, moderate (50-100 g) effects of maternal undernutrition early in pregnancy on OBW. This suggestion requires confirmation in other populations.

El_Dangeroso

rocky wrote: »

@El_D,

I was going to post something about Lamarckian inheritance being false, but it turns out there are some mechanisms by which it can manifest.

Wikipedia, whadya know

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism

Is this the study you were talking about?

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=3596539

I'm only vaguely aware of Lamarckism but I *think* epigenetics is a different thing, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

That's the study alright. Crazy isn't it? There was also a case of twins separated at birth that grew up in totally different socio-economic situations that met up 40 years later only to find out they were the exact same weight, give or take a kilo.

That's not to say the fight to be a healthy weight is pointless, but some people get away with an awful lot more than others, food-quality wise.

rocky

El_Dangeroso wrote: »

That's not to say the fight to be a healthy weight is pointless, but some people get away with an awful lot more than others, food-quality wise.

Nobody said it was going to be easy, that's what makes it worth while :cool:

edit: oh wait, I said that in my food log

Sapsorrow

Nutrigenomics (how what we eat alters the expression of our DNA) is seriously interesting. I wanted to do a research master or Phd in it but the lecturer specialising in it never responded to any of my many emails

Torakx

Hmm interesting topic.
Is there some gland that is partly responsible near the top of the stomach?
I have suffered with candida for a good few years and at the worst stage iwas eating tons of sugar.But it didnt effect my bloodsugar levels as all the sugar was feeding yeasts at the time.
I still had extreme cravings for sugar or carbs.I would eat a big plate of healthy food and still have hunger pangs at the top of my stomach which only went away with sugar or carbs.
I still have sugar cravings as it returns when i eat too much carbs.But as the doctor said my blood sugar levels were perfect at my worst stage.
Thought that might be relevant anyway.If anything im curious about how exactly this hunger pang works to make me need more sugar.I think its a gland but not sure.

RebeccaChick

Torakx wrote: »

Hmm interesting topic.
Is there some gland that is partly responsible near the top of the stomach?
I have suffered with candida for a good few years and at the worst stage iwas eating tons of sugar.But it didnt effect my bloodsugar levels as all the sugar was feeding yeasts at the time.
I still had extreme cravings for sugar or carbs.I would eat a big plate of healthy food and still have hunger pangs at the top of my stomach which only went away with sugar or carbs.
I still have sugar cravings as it returns when i eat too much carbs.But as the doctor said my blood sugar levels were perfect at my worst stage.
Thought that might be relevant anyway.If anything im curious about how exactly this hunger pang works to make me need more sugar.I think its a gland but not sure.

Very interesting Torakx, how did you get rid of the Candida, maybe I have that???
I notice if i eat a bowl of porridge in the morning for breakfast it leads into a downwards spiral for the rest of the day resulting in lots of sugary and carby foods, now I try have protein based breakfasts!

Torakx

Getting rid of the yeast overload is easy in theory
You just have to starve it off by not feeding it with anythng that turns to sugar.Although this causes the yeast to die off which releases toxins into the body as you flush them out.So it can be exteemely uncomfortable.Like you are starving yourself.But after the first week or two without sugar or carbs you will feel way better if t was candida and maybe will anyway because you would be eating healthy.
The paleo or primal diet sounds pretty much similar to a restricted diet for candida.Basically meat and veg(lots of greens for folic acid).Nothing refined and everything as fresh as possible.
Firstly you would need to check symptoms, using a few online searches can be enough.There is also a spit test for candida you can try at home.might show up on youtube too.
Doctors in ireland from my experience either dont know it exists or blatantly ignore the symptoms in favour of medicating patients as i had been through several doctors without any help except to throw more meds at it.After all the fix is a normal diet and no profit to be had in making sure doctors diagnose that illness(i blame pharma companies).Sugar is a toxin as far as i know so it doesnt belong in our diet apart from the normal amounts of natural sugars in vegetables and fruit.

Im alot like yourself now with my diet.I am still in recovery after killing off the yeast overload and fungus that comes along with candida.So while i can now eat some carbs or sugary things if i dont exercise to burn it off yeast will start to grow again.So i have a yoyo effect sometimes.
I try to have protein and veg 3 times a day but recently been using porridge in between and adding too much honey.

Its hard to resist that sugar temptation though.If i dont keep active with my mind and body i will get bored and hungry and fall off the wagon.The snow isnt helping,i cant really go out for long walks without putting my foot straight through a pool of ice. lol

RebeccaChick

Excellent, I've been reading up on it and it seems really good, strange how the body works!!

Thanks.