Sugar Cravings and Your Brain

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Full Episode Transcript:

Sugar Cravings and Your Brain

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. I’m so glad you’re able to join me today to talk about sugar. I’m not sure about you, but I feel like sugar can be seen as both “good” and “bad,” depending on the short or long-term effects, plus your own personal thoughts about it of course.

And although sugar can be seen as both good and bad, sugar cravings are typically only seen as “bad.” That’s because of a few different things, one of which being the thought that cravings are uncontrollable. As career women, we like having control, so something out of our control doesn’t feel too good.

I want you to know that sugar cravings are neither “good” nor “bad” though, they just are. I’ll explain what I mean by that in this episode. You’re really going to learn some important things about sugar cravings in a short period of time, so get ready.

First, just a quick announcement having to do with sugar. I’ll be diving into sugar cravings today and of course how it can become a habit, but if you really want to learn how to break a sugar habit, then come to the free virtual workshop I’m hosting on September 22^nd at 7pm ET. You can watch or just listen in if that’s easier for you.

The workshop goes for about an hour and in the workshop, I’m teaching you how exactly to break a sugar habit and I’ll also be sending you a worksheet that will help you.

After I teach, I’ll be answering some questions that were already pre-submitted and then answering any others that you ask during the workshop itself. I’ll also tell you a little about Food Freedom, my new program that is in membership form. You’re going to love it.

The purpose of the program is to help you break any bad eating habits, and form any new eating habits, using behavioral science plus some mindset or thought-work to help.

This is not a program that tells you what foods to eat and what foods to avoid. This program helps you to get control of your pre-existing eating habits and form any new ones you’d like, so that you’re in control of food and don’t feel like food controls you.

There are lots of different features inside the program and because it’s in membership form, you can stay for as little or as long as you’d like.

If you come to the virtual workshop on the 22^nd, and become a member, even if it’s just for a month, I’ll send a gift to your home. So fun. There will be a replay available to you if you sign up, but you have to watch or listen in live and become a member to be sent the gift.

So be sure to sign up at katemjohnston.com/workshop. The link will also be on the episode page.

Doors open to Food Freedom on the 22^nd as well, and are only open until the 30^th. If you can’t make the workshop, and want to become a member of Food Freedom, then make sure you receive my weekly emails or join the waitlist for Food Freedom. That way, you’ll get notified when doors are open, so you don’t miss the window to join.

You can get on the waitlist or get on my weekly email list with the links on the episode page under the ‘For You’ section.

Alright, let’s get back to the sugar. So, just to start out with some basics first, there are different types of sugar and for the purpose of keeping it simple, we’re going to break them into two categories. Natural sugars and refined sugars. Natural sugars are found in foods like fruit, honey, and even dairy. Refined sugars are found in unnatural foods like candy, cookies, ketchup, and beverages like soda.

You may have heard refined sugars also be called “added sugars”. That’s because these foods don’t naturally contain those sugars, they were added to make the food taste more sweet.

I’m not going to get into the difference in these sugars from a nutritionist standpoint, because I’m an Eating Habit Coach and not a nutritionist. However, the one thing that I do want to mention because it plays a part in sugar cravings, is that when you have added sugars or a food with refined sugars (same thing), the sugar is typically much greater than the sugar found naturally in say a piece of fruit. Because of that, it has more of an effect on sugar cravings. I’ll explain why shortly.  

First, I just want to tell you exactly what a craving is, and when you can get them. A craving is just a feeling or emotion that is experienced in your body. You can have thoughts associated with that craving, but the craving itself is a feeling or emotion. I use those terms interchangeably. It’s just literally something that is felt physically in your body, just like relaxation or irritation. Just like fatigue, happiness, anger, or stress.

Just like these emotions are experienced, but then pass, cravings do too.

Now it’s been suggested that sugar cravings can be made worse with several things such as vitamin and mineral deficiencies, not eating enough protein and fiber, lack of sleep, dehydration, stress, but these things will occur, right? You’re not a robot, and at certain times you will have a lack of sleep, you’ll be dehydrated and you’ll be stressed, right? So you have to learn how to manage sugar cravings, because they will occur.

You can certainly try to manage the amount of cravings you get by trying to optimize sleep, staying well-hydrated, managing your stress, eating nutritious foods, etc. In fact, I of course recommend trying to do some of these things. However, sugar cravings will still most likely come up for you because you can’t necessarily control ALL of these things, every day, right?

So, the key to getting control of sugar cravings at home and work, basically any place you might be when you feel a craving come on, is to be aware that the craving isn’t bad, it just is. When you realize that it’s just there for the ride, and you learn how to see it as that and manage it so it doesn’t bother you, the craving goes away and you’re on your merry way again.

Cravings can be mild or they can be intense. Just like any other emotion like happiness or anger. And just like other emotions, several different things cause them. Your thoughts for one, are one of the causes of emotions. For example, when you see a chocolate chip cookie, you might think, “Ooooh, that cookie looks really yummy, I want one.” That will help to generate that craving feeling.

Other things that can potentially contribute to cravings are those factors I mentioned previously like lack of sleep, nutritional deficiencies, dehydration. Yet another thing that contributes to the craving is the sugar itself and something called the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, also known as the dopamine reward pathway.

Your brain is made up of multiple pathways, where neurons, which are nerve cells, communicate with one another, along with other chemicals such as neurotransmitters, in order to form a system or pathway that has a certain function. Many of these, pretty much all of them, are of course to keep you alive in some way.

In fact, habits are formed via pathways involving neurons.

Now, one of those ways your brain keeps you alive is to have a reward pathway that serves as motivation to eat. This was way more necessary back in the day when food was more scarce and humans had to put a lot more effort into finding food. We have since evolved and food is much less scarce, however your brain still needs to motivate you to eat, in order to keep you alive.

You might just think that eating is something you’d do no matter what, but it’s not. You eat because of many different things going on in your body, one of which being the mesolimbic dopamine pathway.

This pathway gives you a little surge of dopamine when you either anticipate or eat food. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, also known as a hormone, that provides a bit of pleasure, to serve as a reward for eating the food that helps keep you alive. Certain foods release more dopamine and sugar is one of them, because sweet foods are typically higher in calories from the sugar. When food was more scarce, higher calorie food was more desirable.

So, what happens is when you eat broccoli and chicken breast, you get a release of dopamine via the mesolimbic dopamine pathway. This motivates your brain to want to eat again in the future, to survive. Great system, right? Same thing happens when you eat a piece of fruit.

Well, what happens when you eat a piece of cake something with a good amount of refined sugar, is you also get a release of dopamine via that same pathway, but it’s a much larger release. The mesolimbic dopamine pathway has also been linked with addictive substances like opioids and recreational drugs. Substances like these release a massive amount of dopamine.

So, what happens when all the dopamine is released and you get this spike? Well, with foods like broccoli and chicken breast, the spike is fairly small, so when it goes back down, it’s not like a steep rollercoaster ride. You get a little bit of a feeling of pleasure from eating when you’re hungry, but it’s not a massive amount, unless broccoli and chicken breast really excites you. It doesn’t do that for me.

The dopamine levels then go back down to baseline (actually I believe they dip just slightly below baseline, to create that motivation to eat again in the future).

What happens with the piece of cake though, is that because there was more of a release in dopamine, therefore more of a spike upwards, there is then more of a decline and the rollercoaster car dips below baseline quite a bit. This dip below baseline causes your brain to want to seek out the reward again. Basically, it causes a craving for sugar again.

With drugs like cocaine, the dopamine dips very far below baseline, causing a very strong desire to seek out that reward again, that release of dopamine. That’s why researchers believe drugs like these cause these massive cravings that are so difficult to manage.

Now, of course you can experience sugar cravings when you see or smell a sugar-y food like if a work colleague brings in donuts, or you walk by a bakery, or your significant other is eating a few cookies.

You can also get sugar cravings without the sight or smell. As I mentioned earlier, some other factors may come into play like lack of sleep, but also you can get sugar cravings at home and work without any obvious triggers.

When this occurs, a common less obvious trigger is a negative emotion. What I mean by a negative emotion is just any feeling or emotion that is uncomfortable to you, that you’d rather not experience. Examples would be agitation, anxiety, anger, boredom, insecurity, sadness, loneliness.

These can be less obvious causes of sugar cravings because you’re not actually seeing or smelling the sugar-y food or beverage and THEN having the craving.

Instead, what happens is you may experience a craving out of nowhere. Or what feels like out of nowhere. Oftentimes though, it is due to a negative emotion. What happens is, your brain likes to avoid pain and discomfort and negative emotions are uncomfortable, sometimes even painful in an emotional way, but also maybe in a physical way.

So, your brain wants to avoid this discomfort by counteracting it with some pleasure.

What can bring a big of pleasure? Said differently, what can bring about a release of dopamine, that reward hormone, also known as the pleasure hormone? Sugar.

You just learned that sugar can cause a fairly large release of dopamine, providing that pleasure or reward. So your brain will start to seek out ways to get more pleasure and sugar is a quick and easy way. You go and seek out something sugar-y, eat it, get the short-term pleasure, that release of dopamine, and the negative emotion dissipates for a bit.

Unfortunately, that dopamine goes back down, and as you learned with sugar-y foods, dips below baseline, causing you to want to seek it out again.

Your brain remembers that you got pleasure from the sugar, and so next time, it keeps this in mind, making it more likely to act upon that craving and eat the sugar again, hence forming a habit. A habit is essentially a behavior that is repeated and in order for it to be repeated, your brain needs to have something cuing or triggering it and there needs to be a reward right after the behavior. In the case of sugar, and many other foods, that reward is dopamine.

Because dopamine is an indicator to your brain that you’re doing something good, it is easy to repeat that behavior. Your brain interprets the sugar as “good” even though you might start interpreting the sugar as bad because of negative health effects you might be noticing.

Now, way earlier in the episode I mentioned that a sugar craving is neither “good” nor “bad.” It’s completely neutral. Same thing is true for sugar of course. Sugar is just sugar. It can have an immediate “good” effect because of the dopamine, but then it can have negative long-term effects on your health of course, which are considered to not be good.

A sugar craving is neutral though because it’s not harmful. It’s only harmful if you don’t know how to manage it. Which I will teach you how to start doing this in the upcoming workshop. And if you really want to get control of sugar cravings, the October course inside Food Freedom is on Managing Sugar Cravings.

You get this along with everything else inside Food Freedom, but it’s the only time I will be releasing this course, so to get that October course, join Food Freedom when doors open. It comes with worksheets to help you too, which make it easier to apply what you learn and become a pro at managing your sugar cravings.

Now, there are of course things that can make a sugar craving worse, as I mentioned earlier, but another thing is if you eat more and more sugar. When you do this, your brain just craves more and more of it. The reason for this is very involved and I won’t pretend I’m an expert in the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, because I definitely am not. What happens though is that less dopamine is released over time with the same amount of sugar and MORE of a craving occurs.

If you were to graph out what happens with the dopamine levels when you eat sugar (or use any other substance that releases dopamine through the mesolimbic dopamine pathway), the entire curve would shift downward. So less pleasure, but more craving to seek out the pleasure again. This stinks, right?

This is why sugar cravings can be such a pain point for people, because they feel that craving, they act on it, and then over time, experience more cravings and less reward. This can cause you to eat more of the sugar over time.

So you might start out with a cookie every night after dinner, and some people don’t necessarily eat any more than this, but many people over time, end up eating more each time or eating them more frequently to try to get that same level of pleasure. If this is you, you may not have even realized that this is why you were doing this. When it starts feeling out of control, that’s when you might start feeling like there’s no hope.

You might continue to fight these cravings, without knowing how to manage them the effective way. Or, you may just give in completely and think something like, “well, I can’t stop, so why bother caring anymore.” You can stop though. You can stop acting on the feeling of a craving. You can decondition your brain to stop acting on the craving.

You may have heard of the famous, Pavlov’s dogs. Ivan Pavlov demonstrated that his dogs got conditioned so they would salivate over just the ringing of a bell without food after they formed a link between the ringing of the bell and receiving the food. Just as they were conditioned to salivate though, they were also eventually deconditioned and after they rang the bell several times without giving the food to the dogs, the salivation lessened, until they no longer anticipated the reward with the ringing of the bell.

Thank you so much for listening in today. I know I threw a lot of information at you in the last 20 minutes, but I hope you found it interesting. And also, I think it’s really helpful understanding to some degree what happens in your brain when it comes to sugar and cravings, so you can see that it’s all just completely normal and that our brains were set up with these pathways and systems to help increase our likelihood of survival, which is an amazing thing, right?

Alright, take care my friend, and I’ll talk with you soon.