by Rich Weil, M.Ed., CDE
Founder and Director
Transformation Weight Control

In my blog, “Your Brain on Food!” I describe how the brain lights up at the sight of fatty food (Just like the image below). Well, there’s another factor in the process of food addiction that cannot be overlooked if you want the complete picture. At TWC, we think understanding the full picture is essential for empowering you to gain control over food addiction, so we teach it in a way you can understand! Knowledge is power!

The Role of Dopamine
Dopamine is known as the feel-good, pleasure neurotransmitter (neurotransmitters are messengers in the brain searching for receptors to bind to and activate to do what the receptors are programmed to do). Dopamine is produced and secreted into the brain in response to stimuli from the brain region known as the ventral tegmental area. The stimuli could be substances such as food, alcohol, or cocaine, or activities such as listening to music, watching a movie, looking at art, or sex. If you overconsume a substance, such as food, alcohol, or cocaine, then the substance becomes known as a “substance of abuse”.

Dopamine and The Classic Addiction Model
After years of overconsumption or overuse of your substance of choice, dopamine receptors become over-saturated and down-regulate (receptor burnout, they don’t function properly), and then dopamine at normal levels can’t do its thing and give you the pleasure you desire. When this happens, you need more of the substance of abuse to recruit extra dopamine to get your bang for the buck. If we’re talking about food, then all those extra calories to stimulate more dopamine release to activate damaged receptors leads to weight gain. Overuse of drugs may take only months to downregulate the receptors, whereas receptor down-regulation from food overconsumption might take years.

What are you looking at in this panel?
Scientists injected a radioactive tracer that is programmed to stain dopamine receptors in red so they can be visualized and counted in scans such as a PET scan. They then showed individuals addicted to alcohol, food, or cocaine, pictures of their substance of abuse, and compared them with individuals without addiction. What you see are stained dopamine receptors in red in two groups of individuals; one group addicted to alcohol, food, or cocaine, and the other group not addicted for comparison.

The Results
The result is that the group of individuals with addiction in the upper panel have more down-regulated dopamine receptors compared to the group without addiction in the lower panel. You can tell because there are fewer dopamine receptors lit up in red in the individuals with addiction compared to the group without addiction in the lower panel. It means that individuals with addiction and down-regulated dopamine receptors need more substance to get their fix, and in the case of food, excess calorie intake, which inevitably leads to weight gain. And then the cycle continues, because as your receptors continue to get damaged with more overconsumption, you need even more food, which causes even more weight gain.

How We Help
My favorite quote about addiction was written by David Linden. It captures everything we at TWC believe about food addiction and guides us in our efforts to help you manage the condition. “Any one of us could be an addict at any time.  Addiction is not fundamentally a moral failing — it’s not a disease of weak-willed losers. When you look at the biology, the only model of addiction that makes sense is a disease-based model, and the only attitude towards addicts that makes sense is one of compassion.”

At TWC, you will learn how to control the overuse of food and subsequent downregulation of dopamine receptors so that you repair the addiction and do not surrender to it. People manage addictions all the time. Join us. We will show you how. We’ve been running our program for 24 years and know how to do that. We’ll be with you every step of the way. You won’t find anywhere more group support, from peers who “get it”, and an experienced, educated and empathetic staff, all motivated to help. Your success is our success.  Let us help you transform you.

One Final Point – Just in Case You Didn’t Know
Sight has the most potent effect on food cravings, whether the food is in front of you, or in your mind’s eye. Sight is a stronger trigger for a food craving than eating, smelling, or even thinking about food. For more detail, read my blogs, 1) “Your Five Senses and Triggers for Food Cravings”; 2)“Taking Control Over Food Craving Triggers: Rich’s Tapping Experiment for Better Control” and 3) “How to Manage Food Addiction”.

We hope to see you!

© Richard Weil, M.Ed., CDE, 2024 All Rights Reserved