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JUST CAN’T STOP EATING
When I was feeling bad about myself for being overweight, I was bombarded by images of thin, sexy people living their flawless lives in magazines, on TV, in music videos, and in the movies, which made me feel worse. I hated myself for not looking and living the way they did. Almost everyone I saw seemed to be in better shape than I was. In comparison, I was so bulky and unhappy. I felt so isolated. Now I know I was far from alone. The fact is, there is an epidemic of overweight and obesity in the United States.
An estimated 160 million Americans are either overweight or obese. Let me clarify the difference between the two. If your weight is 10 to 20 percent more than what it should be, you are overweight. When your weight is 20 percent or more above what it should be, the label “obese” applies. There are charts and free calculators available online to give you an idea of the weight range you should be in.
The statistics about how widespread weight problems are in the United States are alarming:
More than two in three adults are overweight or obese.
Nearly three out of four men are overweight or obese.
Nearly three out of five women are overweight or obese.
More than one in three adults—78 million—have obesity.
One in three children under the age of twenty are overweight or obese, up from one in five children in 1980.
More than one in six children under the age twenty have obesity.
I was especially upset to learn from reports of the Centers for Disease Control that non-Hispanic blacks have the highest rates of obesity at 48.1 percent. Hispanics are at 42.5 percent, non-Hispanic whites at 34.5 percent, and non-Hispanic Asians at 11.7 percent. These numbers mean that roughly one out of two African Americans, two out of five Hispanics, one out of three whites, and one out of ten Asians are obese.
I have included these statistics to assure you that millions of people struggle with their weight just as you do. There are twice as many overweight people in this country as there are people of normal weight. Although there may be comfort in numbers, this doesn’t mean you should give up. Understanding the patterns of your eating behavior and the physical process that causes you to overeat will help you to take steps to put on the brakes.
FROM COMPULSIVE OVEREATING TO ADDICTION
Everyone eats too much now and then. Think about how stuffed you were after Thanksgiving dinner, yet you found room for another piece of pecan sweet potato pie, made with bourbon, of course. Or maybe you ate an entire pint of rich, salted caramel ice cream right out of the container after a bad day at work or for no reason at all. The issue is how often you overeat. If eating becomes your go-to way of coping, that occasional binge eating can evolve into food addiction.
You might be familiar with some of the feelings and behaviors I described in my own story of full-out food addiction. There is a continuum of behavior in people’s relation to food, from normal to addicted, with differences of degree ranging along the spectrum. You might be so worried about gaining weight that you hardly eat anything. You might simply stop eating when you are no longer hungry. If that is the case, you are one of the lucky ones and probably do not have much of a weight problem. You might allow yourself to binge occasionally in response to something upsetting, but eat normally most of the time. Maybe you binge and purge now and then. Or you might have a binge-eating disorder. You eat large amounts of food compulsively and feel guilty afterward. In order to be diagnosed with the disorder, you have to binge at least once a week over a period of at least three months. But not everyone who overeats is a binger. You might skip meals and pick at food all day long when you are feeling upset or lonely. You might make a habit of eating small meals all day rather than having three set meals. Grazing is an easy way to overeat. Or you could be totally out of control as I was. I could never eat enough to feel full.
This is a good time to evaluate the extent of your problems with food. When you read the following list of signs of compulsive eating and addiction, be honest with yourself about your eating habits and how you regard your weight:
You think about food and/or your weight all the time.
Your weight fluctuates. You try one diet after another, lose weight, and put it back on.
Sometimes you want to stop eating and find that you can’t. You keep going back for more.
You hold back when you eat with other people and tend to eat more when you are alone.
You eat large amounts of food at one time, often more rapidly than normal.
You eat when you are not hungry.
You eat to escape your feelings.
You eat in secret sometimes.
You have hidden food to make sure you have enough.
You often feel guilty and ashamed about what and how much you’ve eaten.
You are too self-conscious to participate in physical activities such as dancing or sports.
You believe your life will be better or your real life will begin when you lose the weight.
You think that food is your only friend.
You feel hopeless about changing your relationship with food.
If you can relate to some of these points, you may be a compulsive eater, a food addict, or on your way to becoming one. The label does not matter. What matters is that you recognize the issues and change your eating habits to healthy ones.
Cardamom
This exotic spice has been used to treat obesity in India for hundreds of years. Cardamom helps your body burn calories faster and boosts fat burning. It aids with digestion as well.
The spice is used in many Indian blends for curry, but its spicy-sweet flavor can be good in baked goods and fruit pies.
Mix a teaspoon of crushed cardamom with green tea for a refreshing weight loss tea.
Sugar, fat, salt, and flour affect your brain in the same way alcohol, nicotine, heroin, and cocaine do. Eating highly processed foods, which contain a large measure of sugar, salt, fat, and flour, can change your brain chemistry and create cravings. Eating too much highly refined food can also override your body’s appetite controls and lead you to overeat.
The manufacturers of junk food design their products to be as addicting as possible, just like cigarettes. Processed foods have a hidden power to make you feel hungrier. The more refined or processed food is, the more addictive it can become.
Sugar is especially addictive, and the average American is eating a lot more sugar today than in the past. In fact, the average person’s sugar consumption doubled in the United States during the twentieth century. In 1909, individuals consumed 80 pounds of added sugar a year. By 1999, sugar consumption per person was up to 152 pounds a year; 64 pounds of that total comes from high-fructose corn syrup found in processed foods and soda.
Our eating habits have changed. We are eating out more and saving time by eating prepared food. Refined flour, artificial sweeteners, and cereal products began to be heavily marketed in the 1960s. White flour affects blood sugar in the same way sugar does, because flour quickly breaks down to sugar in the body. A slice of white bread has the same effect on the body as five teaspoons of sugar, and two slices equal the sugar in a can of soda.
I Actually Love This Cooking Thing Now
I gave birth to my second child in the beginning of 2015 and found it more difficult to lose the baby weight this time around. I stayed exhausted and now had to manage a full household. The most convenient way to eat was via restaurants, takeout, and drive-thrus.
When I attended Judson’s cooking demo at the National Association of Health Services Executives conference in October of 2015, my idea of healthy eating changed forever. I left inspired to kick the habit of eating out five to six days a week and to focus instead on preparing fresh food at home using the right spices to make the food enjoyable. I even got my husband, who had also gained weight, to commit, which was like pulling teeth!
We came up with a routine to shop, cook, and take care of the kids. We started Phase 1 in January 2016. In the first two weeks of applying the Spice Diet, I lost five pounds. To date, I have lost a total of fifteen pounds in a little over two months. I credit a large part of this to omitting the fast food and bringing on the flavor to nourishing dishes. I actually love this cooking thing now! I am dedicated to continuing Phase 1 until I lose another ten pounds and then I am ready to keep it all off this time around.
—Tanya S.
The epidemic of rising weight in this country parallels the increased consumption of convenience food, which is highly processed. “Hyperpalatable food” is everywhere, easily accessible, and inexpensive. Frozen dinners, canned soups, and just about anything that comes in a bag or a box are chock-full of sugar, salt, and fat to make them taste better—and let’s not forget the preservatives and other chemicals that are added. The Spice Diet calls for you to replace processed food with healthy, natural food, which you make yourself with spices and herbs for flavor instead of sugar, salt, and unhealthy fat. Processed food is so overflavored that you will need to retrain your taste buds and restore your sensitivity to natural flavors. The Spice Diet will help you with that.
The Making of a Food Craving
I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much scientific information, but I think it is important for you to understand how you develop cravings. You will see how overeating actually changes your brain. When you eat processed food frequently, you eventually need more food to feel satisfied.
The junk food you eat triggers the reward circuit in your brain, which involves pleasure, memory, and motivation. The human brain registers all pleasures in the same way: A martini, addictive drugs, sex, winning a championship, or a sumptuous feast can all set off the same response. The brain first releases “feel good” chemicals, including serotonin and endorphins, from its pleasure center.
Highly processed food takes a shortcut to the brain’s reward center by flooding the nucleus accumbens, a cluster of nerve cells in the middle of the brain that lies underneath the cerebral cortex, with the neurotransmitter dopamine, an endorphin that causes you to experience pleasure. The hippocampus lays down memories of this rapid sense of satisfaction, and the amygdala creates a conditioned response to the food. Finally, the prefrontal cortex produces the craving by combining the memory of liking the food to wanting it.
An addictive substance like sugar can cause the reward center to produce two to ten times more dopamine than usual, which makes the experience very pleasurable, very quickly. Many types of processed foods are designed to flood your brain with dopamine.
The dopamine released in response to the treat you just ate interacts with another neurotransmitter, called glutamate, which controls the reward-learning center. The hippocampus creates a memory of this rush of satisfaction. This is an important function of your brain, because the system links activities needed for human survival, such as eating and sex, with pleasure and reward, causing a memory to be formed. It does the same for addictive substances.
Then the amygdala, which is involved with emotions, creates a conditioned response, which connects the emotional memory of feeling good with that treat.
And now cravings originate: Repeated exposure to an addictive substance causes nerve cells in the nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain involved in planning, to combine liking something with wanting it, driving you to go after it. This process motivates you to take action to seek the source of pleasure. With food cravings, you want to re-create the pleasurable sensation and relate the feeling to eating.
Over time, the experience of that food becomes less pleasurable, because your brain produces a reduced amount of dopamine or the dopamine receptors are not as responsive. When this happens, dopamine has less impact on the reward center. You have to consume more of the food, because your brain has adapted. You build a tolerance to what used to flood your brain with dopamine. The pleasurable impact of the substance is weaker, but the memory of the desired effect and the need to create that feeling continues unaltered. These memories produce a conditioned response—and you experience the intense craving known as addiction.
I have explained the process to you so you can see that willpower does not have a lot to do with succumbing to a craving. By eating junk food repeatedly, you can change the biology of your brain and set a vicious cycle in motion that is difficult to stop. The more processed food you eat, the more you will want.
To cut off your addiction to food that is bad for you, you have to eat fresh, whole food that is seasoned to excite your brain. The recipes and the spice blends I have created for The Spice Diet will do just that, because they provide a balance of flavors—sweet, salty, sour, savory, and bitter—that will satisfy all your taste buds.
I am not someone who has never experienced the tumultuous roller coaster of food addiction; I know what a vicious and debilitating cycle it can be. So, as the “architect of flavor,” I can assure you that these healthy recipes will ignite explosions in your mouth and brain. When what you cook is flavored and fired up with the right herbs and spices, your pleasure center will be busy when you eat the delectable food you make.
Pick Your Poison
Most of us crave a particular type of food or flavor most often. Would you call yourself a sweet, salty, or spicy person? Do you crave crispy or soft food? When you have an urge to eat something, what is it most likely to be? A box of chocolate truffles? A bag of BBQ chips? Pralines and cream ice cream with hot caramel sauce? A piece of deep-dish pepperoni pizza with extra cheese? Lemon bars or brownies? A juicy double bacon cheeseburger with all the trimmings, a side of chili cheese fries, and a large soda?
We all have food yearnings that possess us when we least expect it or when we are most vulnerable. I can remember sneaking out in the middle of the night to buy some candy bars at the twenty-four-hour convenience store at the gas station, which was not one of my better moments. If you analyze your most common cravings and the way you tend to eat, you can identify your diet personality. I’m reasonably confident that you will relate to at least one of the personalities described below. To keep it completely real, I was a split personality because I could identify with every type described below. My diet personality changes like the weather. The diet types, which I know all too well, are:
The Chocoholic
You dream about chocolate and wake up thinking about it. You’ll take it in any form—dark, milk, or white will do fine. Your goal is to sample chocolate from around the globe. Whether a luxury brand or mass produced from the candy aisle in the supermarket, it’s still chocolate to you. You never share your chocolate. You make sure you have a small stash in your desk and in the pantry, where you hide it behind the old “hand-me-down” appliances that simply don’t work but have a place on the shelf for sentimental reasons. That’s the secret place where no one can find it. You never gulp down your chocolate. You prefer to savor it and let it melt in your mouth. It makes you feel so much better when you’re sad. You read somewhere that chocolate is good for you.
The Deep-Fried Fanatic, aka the Drive-Thru Junkie
You have an encyclopedic knowledge of the menus at every place that serves food from a window. Everything you eat needs to come with a side of fries. You usually grab a bite when you are on the go. A slice of pizza, crispy chicken tenders, a couple of hot dogs, or a loaded burrito, washed down with a jumbo soda, and you are good to go. You hate to cook because it takes too long and never tastes quite as good as something that comes from a greasy bag.
The Fizzy-Drink Enthusiast
You could go through multiple two-liter bottles of sugary soda a day. You start the day by gulping down a cold can of soda to quench your thirst, followed by a coffee chaser to rev you up. As the day goes on, you wash down your food with super-sized sugary drinks. You rely on the kick you get from the caffeine in colas. Wherever you are, an open can of soda is nearby. The problem is that the more you drink, the thirstier you get. You’ve convinced yourself that drinking a lot of fluids fills you up. You reason that if drinking a lot of water makes you feel fuller, then bubbly soda should do even better.
When you read about all the added sugar in soda, you switched to diet soda, which has the same kick. Why waste calories on a beverage, right? You see no reason to put a limit on how much diet soda you drink, because it doesn’t have a single calorie. By eliminating all the calories soda used to add to your diet, you feel you have more leeway in what you eat. You are voracious all the time and reach for another can of soda in an attempt to kill your food cravings. You are sure that the pounds will soon melt away.
The Foodie
Nothing but the richest, creamiest, and most decadent foods will do for you. You like buttery or cream sauces on everything. If it does not come with a creamy sauce or laden with mayonnaise, you are not satisfied. You always have a pint of heavy cream in your refrigerator. Mac and cheese, creamy soups, lasagna, buttery grits, crème brûlee, smothered pork chops, cheesy enchiladas, custards, cheesecake, and fettuccine Alfredo are the foods you crave. You love good wine and exotic cocktails. Holidays are your favorite times, because the table groans with so many special dishes and the best of spectacular confections for dessert. Your picture of the perfect day is either cooking a multicourse meal for everyone you care about or eating one cooked for you.
The Grazer
You are afraid you will consume too many calories if you sit down to eat an entire meal. If you do need to have to a real meal, you take a couple of bites and push the food around your plate. You read somewhere that it’s healthier to eat many small meals throughout the day. From the time you get up until the time you go to bed, you are nibbling on something. You drink five Diet Cokes a day. You start with fruit for breakfast and are ravenous by the time you get to work. You keep individual bags of trail mix with chocolate chips in your desk. By lunchtime, you have gone through three bags, along with two string cheeses and a yogurt. You never finish a salad or a sandwich. Instead, you save the rest for later. You find yourself dipping into the cookie jar. M&M’s are your candy of choice because they are so small; sometimes you have gone through a big bag by the end of the day without realizing how much you were eating. You finish your sandwich with a bag of chips sometime before you leave the office. You chew on some licorice as you drive home. You have cheese and crackers as you open your mail and unwind. At dinnertime, you nuke a low-calorie pasta entrée. You’re still hungry so you help yourself to a scoop of tuna salad that was in the fridge with more crackers. You have a small dish of ice cream. You decide to make a big bowl of popcorn, because there is a movie streaming that you want to see. Then you need some hot chocolate with a few small cookies to nibble on as you read before you go to bed. Without having had one nutritious meal, you end up consuming more calories than you had intended.
The Gutbuster
Overeating is a way of life for you. You aren’t satisfied until you can’t eat another bite. You can’t remember when you last had a meal and left the table without feeling bloated and stuffed. You just can’t stop eating. You feel as if you need a nap after you eat. Although you had a big dinner, you can’t stop snacking as you watch TV at night. You’re trying to watch your portions, so you get up for something else every time there is a commercial. You tell yourself at least you’re moving. Your blood sugar levels spike and plummet like a roller coaster, setting you up to repeat this cycle over and over again. After your late-night eating, you sleep badly and wake up exhausted.
The Salty Snacker
Your cupboards are full of processed foods in bags, boxes, and cans. You could make a meal of the snacks served in the little bowls at a bar. You love salty nuts, crackers, and pretzels. The newest and coolest flavor of chips always ends up in your shopping cart. You’ve convinced yourself that sea salt or organic kettle-cooked chips are good for you. You nibble on crunchy things all day, which you eat absentmindedly, usually right out of a very big bag. You rarely crave sweets, because they’re not your thing. You wish you could put salt on the rim of everything you drink, margarita-style. You reach for the saltshaker out of habit before tasting the first bite of whatever you are eating. You’re so thirsty all the time that you gulp down gallons of sugar-filled juice and soda throughout the day.
The Starch Softie
When you eat out, you could devour the entire contents of the breadbasket before you order. You just can’t resist. A biscuit with gravy is your idea of heaven. You could eat pancakes or waffles for breakfast every day—maybe for lunch and dinner, too. Otherwise, a bagel with cream cheese or an English muffin with butter and jelly fill the bill. You love Asian noodle restaurants. A triple-decker sandwich on white toast followed by bread pudding is one of your favorite lunches at the diner. If you had your choice, you would always eat the white food on your plate first. You can’t eat a meal without potatoes (preferably mashed or deep-fried), rice, or pasta. Your favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner is the corn dressing or bread stuffing and candied sweet potatoes. If you could, you’d move to Paris so you could have croissants and baguettes every day.
The Sweet Tooth
You couldn’t start the day without a pecan Danish and a cup of coffee with three packs of sugar. You are incapable of passing up a candy bowl. You feel a meal is not complete without dessert. Celebrations of any kind mean you deserve another piece of cake. When times get tough, you drown your sorrows in a big bowl of ice cream with a side of cookies. You consider sugar a pick-me-up and just help yourself to more as soon as you crash from your previous sugar high.
Do you identify with any of these types? You might relate to one or more of these descriptions. I’ve known people, myself included, who bounce back and forth among all eight. It depends on how stressed out they are and their overall emotional state. As I’ve said, there’s something about each of the Diet Personalities that resonates with me, but The Foodie and The Salty Snacker ring most true.
But you don’t have to give up the flavors and textures you love. The recipes in The Spice Diet are designed to cure your food addictions. In fact, every diet personality and craving responds to my plan. I’m living proof, a total testament that the Spice Diet works.
I had an overweight client who had the same drive-thru obsession I used to have. I knew I couldn’t just tell her how her daily habit was harming her, but I found a way to show her. It was a lesson I had to learn when I was about to change my life.
The client and I went out for a meal, and she didn’t hold back. She ordered a double-thick burger with bacon, cheese, and extra mayonnaise. As she ordered, I sat there thinking that, back in the day, I would have ordered the exact same thing. She completed her order with a large order of fries and a super-sized orange soda. While she ate, I pulled up a calorie counter app on my phone. Her jaw dropped when she saw the numbers. She was halfway through eating a 2,500-calorie meal, which had 4,430 mg of sodium, 93 g of sugar, and 45 mg of saturated fat. The recommended daily calorie intake for an overweight woman is between 1,000 and 1,600 calories a day. My client routinely consumed over 4,000 calories a day. Her reaction was quite similar to my own lightbulb moment—“Well, I’ll be damned,” followed by, “but it’s so freaking good,” and ending with the classic, “So now what?”
I was glad I could give her some answers
I will show you how to create a balance of flavors that will satisfy whatever cravings you have by stimulating the reward center in your brain big time. It won’t be long until you are addicted to food that is good for you, which will enable you to regain control over your weight. You will learn firsthand the power of integrating spices and ingredients to create healthier dishes—leaving you completely satisfied and no longer craving the old junk.