Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat by Mike Dow, Antonia Blyth
Authors: Mike Dow, Antonia Blyth
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because of their inherent biology or because they face social stressors and negative conditioning that men are spared, the result is the same: Most women are at a serotonin deficit that can easily become a serious problem if either new stress or a restrictive diet further depletes their stores.
Researchers in another study found clear evidence of women’s special difficulties with diets. After three weeks on a low-calorie diet, men and women had lost a similar amount of weight. However, the women were left more anxious and unhappy and far more vulnerable to mood swings than their male counterparts. Since women’s ability to produce and store serotonin may be lower than men’s, the restrictive diets were harder on them. If the diets had offered women alternative sources of serotonin, the women might have lost weight and felt better.
Do You Worry About What Others Think?
If so, you’re not alone. Those of us who feel anxious—and who are hungry for serotonin—often worry about the reactions of others. At our best, this makes us sensitive, caring, agreeable, and willing to go along with other people’s plans and wishes. Be careful, though, because scientists have found that being too agreeable may bring a heavy price—literally. A 2007 Japanese study discovered that agreeable personalities are more likely to gain weight, perhaps because they more easily succumb to other people’s pressure about where, when, and how much to eat.
Meet Your Mantra: A Powerful Tool for Self-Transformation
As we’ve seen, low serotonin levels produce anxiety. But it works the other way, too: Anxiety and other forms of stress deplete your serotonin.
Does the problem start with anxious thoughts or lowered brain chemistry? No doctor can pinpoint exactly how it started for you—and it doesn’t really matter. Once you start on that downward spiral, you’ll keep going unless you do something deliberate to interrupt it. You need to either change your thoughts or boost your serotonin levels—or both.
Serotonin booster foods can increase your serotonin levels, so if you’d like to start adding some to your diet right now, turn to page 204. As you’ll see in Part IV, your 28-day Diet Rehab plan will add serotonin boosters to your diet in a more systematic way.
But there is also quite a bit you can do to replace pitfall thoughts, which generate anxiety, pessimism, and low self-confidence with booster thoughts, which generate peace, optimism, and confidence. We already saw in Chapter 3 that there are seven pitfall thought patterns and seven booster attributes that can dramatically affect your brain chemistry. There’s an even more personal way to apply these insights to yourself, and that is by working with one of the most powerful thought-transforming tools I know: your mantra.
Your mantra is a brief but powerful statement of your core belief about yourself and the world. Booster mantras improve our brain chemistry by creating a positive, joyous, and confident approach to life. Pitfall mantras, which are negative, make us more likely to turn to addictive foods, alcohol, or drugs, thereby keeping us anxious, pessimistic, and discouraged. The more you avoid the pitfall styles of thinking you learned about in Chapter 3, and the more you add the booster attributes to your life, the easier it will be to move from a pitfall mantra to a booster one. Likewise, the more you work on transforming your mantra, the easier it will be to avoid pitfall thinking and bring booster attributes into your life.
As you saw in the Introduction, my mantra growing up was “I’ll never be a good enough son to keep my family safe, but I can’t stop trying”—a pitfall mantra born out of watching my family collapse in the wake of my brother’s illness. This mantra drove me to self-medicate with sweet, starchy foods that I hoped would silence the feelings of inadequacy. It also compelled me to constantly seek out how other people were
Researchers in another study found clear evidence of women’s special difficulties with diets. After three weeks on a low-calorie diet, men and women had lost a similar amount of weight. However, the women were left more anxious and unhappy and far more vulnerable to mood swings than their male counterparts. Since women’s ability to produce and store serotonin may be lower than men’s, the restrictive diets were harder on them. If the diets had offered women alternative sources of serotonin, the women might have lost weight and felt better.
Do You Worry About What Others Think?
If so, you’re not alone. Those of us who feel anxious—and who are hungry for serotonin—often worry about the reactions of others. At our best, this makes us sensitive, caring, agreeable, and willing to go along with other people’s plans and wishes. Be careful, though, because scientists have found that being too agreeable may bring a heavy price—literally. A 2007 Japanese study discovered that agreeable personalities are more likely to gain weight, perhaps because they more easily succumb to other people’s pressure about where, when, and how much to eat.
Meet Your Mantra: A Powerful Tool for Self-Transformation
As we’ve seen, low serotonin levels produce anxiety. But it works the other way, too: Anxiety and other forms of stress deplete your serotonin.
Does the problem start with anxious thoughts or lowered brain chemistry? No doctor can pinpoint exactly how it started for you—and it doesn’t really matter. Once you start on that downward spiral, you’ll keep going unless you do something deliberate to interrupt it. You need to either change your thoughts or boost your serotonin levels—or both.
Serotonin booster foods can increase your serotonin levels, so if you’d like to start adding some to your diet right now, turn to page 204. As you’ll see in Part IV, your 28-day Diet Rehab plan will add serotonin boosters to your diet in a more systematic way.
But there is also quite a bit you can do to replace pitfall thoughts, which generate anxiety, pessimism, and low self-confidence with booster thoughts, which generate peace, optimism, and confidence. We already saw in Chapter 3 that there are seven pitfall thought patterns and seven booster attributes that can dramatically affect your brain chemistry. There’s an even more personal way to apply these insights to yourself, and that is by working with one of the most powerful thought-transforming tools I know: your mantra.
Your mantra is a brief but powerful statement of your core belief about yourself and the world. Booster mantras improve our brain chemistry by creating a positive, joyous, and confident approach to life. Pitfall mantras, which are negative, make us more likely to turn to addictive foods, alcohol, or drugs, thereby keeping us anxious, pessimistic, and discouraged. The more you avoid the pitfall styles of thinking you learned about in Chapter 3, and the more you add the booster attributes to your life, the easier it will be to move from a pitfall mantra to a booster one. Likewise, the more you work on transforming your mantra, the easier it will be to avoid pitfall thinking and bring booster attributes into your life.
As you saw in the Introduction, my mantra growing up was “I’ll never be a good enough son to keep my family safe, but I can’t stop trying”—a pitfall mantra born out of watching my family collapse in the wake of my brother’s illness. This mantra drove me to self-medicate with sweet, starchy foods that I hoped would silence the feelings of inadequacy. It also compelled me to constantly seek out how other people were
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