Have you found yourself feeling like in your journey to weight loss, you simply don’t have enough willpower? That one cookie turns into a complete pack of Oreos disappearing or an empty bag of chips when your intention was to only eat a handful?
It turns out this battle between will and consumption has nothing to do with “sucking it up and eating less”. The food that surrounds you in the grocery store is designed to keep you coming back for more.
Within the food industry, discovering and utilizing the “bliss point” of a food item has been pervasive across packaged and processed foods alike. So what is this “bliss point”?
It turns out our food can have an optimal level of sugar, fat, and salt to leave you craving more. Similar to a goldilocks effect, you don’t want too much – and not too little – and in the middle you will find the perfect formula to cultivate endless cravings, aka the “bliss point”.
This concept has become so common in our foods that we now find items we wouldn’t consider naturally sweet now sweetened to please our tastebuds. Bread, pasta sauce, spreads and dips are now all inundated with sugar, sometimes more so than cookies or pastries in neighboring isles. Now 75% of the food in our grocery stores contain sugar!
This use of the “bliss point” takes advantage of our ancestral proclivity to seek out high caloric and sweet foods that would sustain us before our next meals. These items were far between and from nature in the form of fruits, nuts and seed, and certain veg, not the highly processed, artificial, and extracted versions of sugar we see today.
Now we have packaged food tapping into this primal desire. Consuming these sugars releases dopamine and activates the reward centers in your brain leaving you searching for your next hit of sugar. This constant consumption of sugar also dampens your body’s satiety cues, thus not telling you when you’ve had enough. And now with all this sugar coming in from numerous directions, you are left with a heightened desire for the ultra sweet with naturally sweet foods – blueberries, mango, carrots, and almonds – not able to satisfy.
So that willpower the food industry states you “do not have enough of”, not even slightly true. You’re fighting an uphill battle!
BUT there is good news. Succumbing to the “bliss point” is not a forgone conclusion, it is simply a matter of breaking the sugar addiction and reprograming your brain and tastebuds to no longer crave another hit of dopamine.
Sign up to my mailing list to get started on a sugar detox to break this pesky cycle. We could all use a little less processed and sugary foods in our lives.
* These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The product mentioned in this article are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The information in this article is not intended to replace any recommendations or relationship with your physician. Please review references sited at end of article for scientific support of any claims made.