Fat and Sugar Changes Brain Activity

"I think we've all been there. You have a crumby day at work, tear open a bag of snacks, and by the time you reach the bottom you're happy as a clam."

Happy as a clam until you realize how much you have eaten, what it will take to work it off & how crappy you now feel... then you get depressed & start all over!

Balance & moderation are the keys... Move more, eat better & enjoy every so often.....

So I wonder if they've studied the effects of bingeing on high-calorie foods and then purging on mood. I've heard bulimics say that they feel sort of "high" after a binge/purge session. It'd be interesting to see how this all pans out in future studies.

as a recovering bulimic, i would say that it does give me the 'high' and sudden rush when i eat food with too much of butter, salt, sugar... i could go through loads of food packages until i felt too bloated or full to go on. i'd feel guilty soon after and purged them all out. if i do it often enough, it takes more and more food to get them back up.

and when i eat sugary food, i find myself feeling sick if i don't vomit them out. after the purge is over, i get so exhausted and swollen in the face that all i wanna do, is to be in my bed and sleep. it's a bad cycle, but i'm trying to get over it.

I really wish they'd let go of the "high-fat" appellation and start acknowledging it's the sugar that's messing most with people. If I eat high-fat without the sugar, I don't want to binge. If I eat fat and sugar together, I do. They could try testing that with people instead of pretending the fat by itself is in any way a problem.

It's an endocrine thing. What gets released when you eat sugar? Insulin. Now, you always release insulin when you smell food and you're about to eat. It clears your bloodstream of excess glucose and all circulating fatty acids to make room for what's coming. But if you don't eat sugar-forming foods, that's the one release you get and it goes away. If you do eat them, however, you get another insulin surge. Next thing you know the sugar you eat has been dealt with and you get hungry again.

There's another mechanism involved here too if you have hyperinsulinism--which most fat people do, to some degree, if not all of us. If your insulin is almost always elevated, well, most of the food you eat is converted to fatty acids--carbs, fat, it doesn't matter--and it's immediately stored in your fat tissue before the rest of your body has a chance to use it. Now, normally the adipose tissue is supposed to release those fatty acids for use in between meals, so your lean tissues can burn it for fuel. When insulin is constantly elevated, that can't happen. So fat people stay hungry because we never got enough out of the last meal we ate in the first place.

This stuff was all observed back in the 1960s, 1950s and before, but for some reason very few experts want to talk about it now and I'm not sure why. The impression they give everybody is that as soon as you eat a food you are burning it for fuel, like your stomach is a gas tank or something, and that just isn't true. But believing it to be true is a lot of what trips us up about weight-loss efforts.

Oh I forgot to mention--past that initial insulin release, if what you've eaten is mostly fat with little to no sugar, you get almost no secondary insulin release. So eating high fat and moderate protein, as with the Atkins diet and certain indigenous tradtional diets, doesn't pack on the pudge much if at all.

Think about it another way. Think about type 1 diabetics. They don't make insulin at all. How many fat type 1s do you know? Maybe if they are overdosing on their prescription insulin injections... but not if they don't.

Actually eating too many starches or sugar i get really sick, i get lightheaded and very tired. So that's why I need to try to avoid these things more than anything.