Eating and addiction

I am in Ft. Lauderdale for the weekend and last night we wandered into the Seminole Hard Rock Casino. Despite the recession, the place seemed packed with eager people willing to throw hundreds onto the blackjack tables, roulette, slot machines etc. The place was really smoky...at the end of the night, my clothes smelled like I took a tour of the Winston tobacco company.

Gambling is one of those things wheree going into it, you know the odds are strongly in favor that you are going to lose money to the casino. You may win a hand, hit a good slot machine, ot throw the dice well for awhile, but if you stay there long enough, you will give back every dime, and more to the casino. They will win and you will lose. So, why do we do it?

I was thinking about this last night also in terms of all the major addictions...drugs, alcohol, gambling and eating. These are activities that can be quite detrimental, but we still persist. Obviously, for each individual, not every addiction occurs and a number of people have no addictions at all. For others, they can partake of these activities in small amounts without being "addicted" at all.

The "thrill" of a winning streak in the casino, the thrill of feeling high. the thrill of feeling a good piece of chocolate go into our mouths: all of these share some chemical basis. The neurochemical dopamine has been impicated as one of the chemicals involved in the addictive pattern. I am certain there are many other brain and body chemcials involved as well. As individuals, we are all subject to a unique admixture of these chemcials and that is why, aside from the environmental component, why some of us are more prone to addictive behaviors than others.

As this relates to your weight loss efforts, try to identify when you make the "wrong" food choices and under what circumstances this action occurs. Perhaps by identifying this, you can avoid the behavior pattern.

Oh, by the way, I was really hot at the tables!!! My dopamine levels were raging!!!

Understanding weight issues

Over the past week I have had several patients lament to me that they have friends and relatives who do not understand why it is so difficult to gain control of weight. Clearly, there are some people whose metabolisms are such that they pretty much eat what they want and have no difficulty controlling their weight. These people have no comprehension of what it is like to basically look at food and gain weight. I will provide the following examples: When you hear about someone who goes incessantly to casinos and gambles their life savings away, lose their marriages because of this, etc., is it easy to understand how they can let that addiction ruin their lives? Or, how about the alcoholic who has a great family, job, etc., but yet continues to drink alcohol excessively, winds up with a DUI and has other issues severly impact his/her life? The point here is that "addictive" behaviors are difficult to understand unless you are the one with that addiction. To some extent, overeating and the use of food as a "treatment" is an addiction as well. It is very difficult to break addictions on your own. In my medical practice, when I have an alcoholic asking for my help in discontiuing drinking, I ALWAYS advise a program because on one's own, the failure rate is about 99.999%. Overeating and the development of obesity similarly is an addictive process and obtaining help for this, either via our program, Weight Watchers or other is important and should not be looked at as some "weakness".