We are born with miraculously integrated bodies and minds. Our lungs draw in vital oxygen, essential for producing energy. Our hearts ceaselessly pump blood through vast networks of vessels to all of our tissues and organs. Raw materials are transformed into fuel by our digestive systems. Our muscles and bones propel us through the world, allowing us first to stand, then walk, then play and work.

Each day our brains take in a barrage of new information, filtering it, selectively storing it, and adapting their way of working accordingly. At the end of each day, we recharge and reset our systems by sleeping. All of us come equipped with a self-contained set of tools that, properly used, may allow us to live 100 years, or maybe even longer.

Beginning early in our lives, though, our genes, our environment, our culture, and our own free will conspire to test this marvelous organism—sometimes to the breaking point. There are people who maintain their health and live long, fruitful lives, sustaining minimal wear and tear. But others—perhaps most of us—push our bodies to the limit. Instead of eating the way our bodies were designed to eat, we indulge in foods filled with sugars and other refined carbohydrates, trans fats, and unhealthy food additives. Instead of walking to nearby destinations, we drive our cars. We sit most of the day. Some of us smoke. Some of us drink too much. Many of us allow negative feelings and stress to rule our thoughts. Not many of us get adequate sleep. The wrong choices trap us in a lifestyle that actually endangers our lives.

The effects of these poor choices compromise every system that keeps us well, and the damage is not pretty. After years of a diet high in refined carbohydrates, arteries become narrow and clogged with plaque, raising the risk of cardiovascular disease and heart attack. We find ourselves on the unhealthy path to metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and cancer. Eating too much of the wrong foods and getting too little exercise allows fat to build up around our organs and beneath our skin. Smoking fills our lungs with toxins, damaging our health in myriad ways. Not getting enough sleep worsens our memories and disrupts an important hormone cycle that prevents us from overeating. And too much stress compromises our body's natural immune system, the very tool that would help us combat much of the other damage.

Return to the Path of Good Health

Fortunately, we have the ability to choose.

That’s where our series of HealthJournals on Wellness come in. Our Wellness series will show you how to completely change your lifestyle to a healthy and sustainable one that will restore your vitality and reverse chronic medical conditions. It will provide you with innumerable health benefits. It will lessen dangerous abdominal fat, lower chronic inflammation, and reduce the threat of other chronic diseases. Your risk of getting heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases will be greatly reduced. You will be likely to live longer, too. What’s more, your systems and organs will be provided with all the nutrients they require, so that your hunger will be satisfied, and your body brought into homeostatic balance.

This wellness information is based on real science that refutes current mainstream medical notions of what we should be eating. In this series, we explain the most natural way to eat—so that fat melts away and the body’s hormonal systems rebalance themselves. In doing so, we turn popular notions of a “healthy diet” on their head. Moreover, we give you all the leading science on other aspects of wellness in your life—including how to break your bad habits, the benefits of sleep, how to de-stress, and the real benefits of exercising.

It’s rarely too late to make changes that can reverse damage to your abused organs and tissues. Even people who are sensitive to carbohydrates, and therefore genetically predisposed to putting on weight, can get back on the path to good health. By eating the right foods, exercising, modifying your negative habits, quitting smoking, sleeping well, and celebrating life, you can reverse many chronic conditions—and increase your enjoyment of life immeasurably.

We hope that you will continue to explore the miracle that is your body, knowing that the good choices you are making will enable you to enjoy a life full of activity and fulfillment. You have the power to keep your body and mind healthy, strong, and alive. You can live longer and live better.

To life!

Wellness and Habits – Rewire Your Brain to Create Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

To change your life, you have to change your mind—and you can! Your brain cells have the power to build new pathways that will reinforce what you learn, including better health habits. This power is called neuroplasticity. Over time, repeated actions become automatic as your brain forms shortcuts. Old habits do die hard, but if you don’t change them, you’ll reinforce them and further damage your body. Before you can make lasting changes to your health and weight, you need to identify the poor habits that caused weight gain in the first place.

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” Oscar Wilde’s advice for living a balanced life is great in theory. In practice, however, too many of us overeat, have too many drinks, or otherwise overindulge on a regular basis. There is a constant battle between our knowledge of what is good for our health and our all-too-human pleasure-seeking tendencies.

All living things, including us humans, strive for balance—a state called homeostasis. When homeostasis is achieved, everything is functioning as it should be. You are born with many natural mechanisms to help you maintain this balance within your body. The processes that regulate your body temperature, blood pressure, and immune response are all great examples. These processes may be controlled without your conscious thought, but they, along with all the other processes in your body, can be affected by the decisions you make and the habits you acquire.

How can you stop yourself from making unhealthy decisions or acquiring bad habits? In a world of increased portion sizes and highly processed convenience foods, it isn't as simple as knowing what is and isn't good for you. The parts of your brain that handle logic and decision-making can be at odds with the parts of your brain that propel you to seek instant pleasure and happiness. Knowing how your brain does this can help you figure out how to switch from excessive behaviors to (mostly) healthful choices.

No two brains are exactly alike. It may be more challenging for you to change your unhealthy behaviors than it is for some other people. But be aware that your brain is capable of rewiring itself and learning better habits. Your balance within can be restored.

Your brain knows how full or hungry you are because it receives signals from all over your body, especially from your digestive system. Your brain and digestive system communicate with each other through a system of nerves and hormones. In fact, your entire digestive system is connected to your brain by a large, complex network of nerves that operates without your conscious control. This means that you don’t even need to actively think about digesting food: Your brain just does it for you.

One of the nerves in this network, the vagus nerve, extends from your brainstem to many of the organs in your chest and belly, including your stomach. One of the vagus nerve’s many jobs is to convey information about your digestive system to your brain.

You can imagine, then, that the vagus nerve is intimately involved in controlling hunger. When you have a meal, your stomach enlarges. The stretching triggers the vagus nerve to signal the brain that you are full. Your brain then sends signals back through your vagus nerve to tell your body to stop producing digestive juices and that you’ve had enough to eat.

The other way that your brain knows that you are full or hungry is through the release of two principle hormones—leptin and ghrelin. There are other hormones that have a role in appetite control, but leptin and ghrelin are known to have a greater influence on appetite.

Leptin is the body’s natural appetite suppressor and is made by your fat tissue. When you're body senses that you've received enough nutrients, it signals to the brain to let it know that you're no longer hungry. Ghrelin, on the other hand, is an appetite-stimulating hormone produced by the stomach. When you are hungry, it sends a message to the brain that it’s time to eat.

When these systems are working correctly and everything is in balance, your brain is receiving and giving the proper signals, and you are less likely to overeat. However, people who are overweight or obese from overeating may have malfunctioning appetite control. Their bad habits have short-circuited the system and their brains do not respond to the leptin, ghrelin, or vagus nerve signals. As a result, these people may continue to feel hungry, and to eat, well after they have had enough.

When it comes to appetite, the deck is stacked against us. Eating energy-dense foods is pleasurable to us because of our genetic inheritance: Our ancestors evolved in times when food was often scarce and starvation was a real possibility. For that reason, our brains reward the consumption of energy-dense foods, such as refined carbohydrates, by releasing a brain chemical called dopamine. Even though food is now abundant in most of the developed world, many of us still overeat. The fact that this makes us feel good temporarily adds to the difficulty of controlling our appetites.

Remember the appetite-controlling hormone leptin, which we mentioned earlier? If you constantly overeat, your brain misses or ignores the cues given to you by leptin. When everything is functioning as it should be, leptin signals the brain that you should stop taking in food when an adequate amount has been eaten. Because of this, when leptin was first discovered, scientists came up with a theory that the more leptin a person had, the easier it would be for that person to stop overeating. “We thought, at first, we could cure obesity by giving people more leptin,” says Philipp Scherer, PhD, director of the Touchstone Diabetes Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

The idea was simply to inject leptin into people. This would, in theory, stop them from overeating, and weight loss would follow. Of course, that didn’t turn out to be the case. It has been found that obese people tend to become leptin resistant: the brain no longer listens to what leptin is telling it. The interruption of this signaling system means that even if obese people tend to have higher blood levels of leptin, it does not have the effect of “turning off” their intake of more food.

But what about the other cues that tell your brain you’re full? What about the vagus nerve? That, too, is affected when you overeat and gain weight. As you can see in the following image, the average adult’s stomach can hold up to 1 liter of food and drink. But because the stomach is elastic, this volume can increase. The stomach of a binge eater can hold up to 2 liters! When your stomach is stretched beyond its usual capacity by overeating, the vagus nerve loses its ability to communicate properly with the brain. Your brain never gets the message that you are full.

We have become a fast-food nation: High-calorie, low-nutrition food is cheap, tasty, and easily available. Adding to the damage, average portion sizes have increased dramatically over the last two decades. As restaurants have steadily increased portion sizes, we’ve done the same thing at home. This all adds up to the obesity epidemic that is upon us today. As you’ve seen, being obese and overeating can affect your brain’s ability to receive the signals that communicate you’re full and don’t need to eat any more food. When your appetite-control system is damaged, you can’t rely on internal cues to tell you to stop eating. You continue to overeat, and this perpetuates the cycle. Because their internal cues aren’t functioning, people have conditioned themselves to rely on visual cues to tell them when they’re full.

That’s a real problem, because today the size of a typical serving has increased so much that it is about three times larger than it was 20 years ago.

IMAGE: Fast food portions have increased dramatically since 1960. Here’s how they stack up, then and now.

The amazing thing is, no one seems to have noticed. People have, in fact, lost the ability to determine what an appropriate serving size is. In one well-known experiment, volunteer study subjects were asked to eat a bowl of soup. Some were given a normal bowl, but others ate from an ordinary-looking soup bowl that actually had a hidden tube, connected to a vat of soup, at the bottom. The researchers found that the volunteers who ate from “the endless soup bowl” ate 73% more soup than the volunteers who ate from the normal bowl. But the people who ate from the endless bowl didn’t report they felt any fuller than those who ate from the normal bowl!

The experiment demonstrates that we tend to ignore the signals of fullness our body sends us, even if those signals are functioning properly. Instead, we rely on visual cues to tell us what makes up a single serving. So if someone gets a 20-oz bottle of soda or a supersized order of fries, they’re likely to drink or eat the whole thing, regardless of how full they feel.

A Sea of Soda

It’s probably not a coincidence that the rise in soda consumption has paralleled the surge in obesity. Soda has now become the beverage of choice. Kids drink, on average, about 24 oz of soda a day. As soda consumption has increased, so has the size of a typical soda serving. The original size of a soda bottle was 8 oz. Today, the smallest bottle many stores carry is 20 oz. That’s the size many people consider to be a single serving.

Many researchers think that soda is especially harmful because it’s sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup Fructose doesn’t turn off your appetite because it doesn’t prompt the hormone ghrelin to stop signaling to your brain. In other words, you might have a full stomach, but your brain is still being told by ghrelin that you’re hungry. With your hunger not satisfied, you can easily consume huge amounts of soda without even noticing it.

By now you know that highly processed, refined foods are bad for your health because they starve your body of the vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients it needs, while piling on the pounds. However, by continually reaching for these foods, you’ve hardwired your brain to accept them as an energy source. You can break that vicious cycle by eating nutrient-dense foods that keep you feeling full while maintaining steady insulin and blood sugar levels. Foods high in healthy fats, fiber, and protein. Because these foods take more time to digest, they leave your stomach fuller for longer. Gradually, the internal cues that tell you when you’ve had enough to eat will return. By being consistent with these changes, you can retrain your brain to think differently, stop relying on visual cues, and bring your body back into balance.

Your brain is always changing. The neurons that make up the bulk of this 3-pound marvel are constantly altering, growing, making new connections, and eventually dying. This activity continues throughout your lifetime. A neuron is the hub for all of the processes that occur in the brain, and the connections between neurons create a living, dynamic framework for everything that you see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and experience. Neurons are what makes you YOU! Your thoughts, memories, habits, and traits are all created and stored in neurons.

The brain’s neuron network is at its prime during your adult life, passing messages along well-established networks to ensure an accurate and efficient flow of activity. Familiar connections hum with practiced efficiency, while new circuits are also formed as the brain continues to adapt and learn from the environment. Even the adult brain, which contains 100 billion neurons, isn’t finished growing yet: New neurons continue to grow. Learn how you can change the way you think about food and dieting by establishing new neural networks that will optimize your lifetime health and wellness.

Repetition Is Key

In the early stages of your new diet, you may well experience cravings for the fast energy, nutrition-deficient foods your brain has become wired to expect. But it’s possible to rewire your brain so that it craves healthy food instead.

Not so long ago, it was thought that the brain’s neuron networks become fixed as we get older and cease to change. But in the past two decades, researchers have discovered that your brain continues to change throughout your lifetime in response to repeated stimulation. In other words, when you do something over and over again, that pattern of behavior becomes “wired” in your brain’s neurons. You’ve formed a habit.

That’s very good news when it comes to making a big change in your lifestyle, like altering your daily diet. Yes, bad habits like eating a pastry for breakfast every day may have gotten wired into your brain. But when you consistently practice a new behavior—say, by having eggs with salsa and cheese in the morning instead—that habit gets wired in, too, eventually replacing the old wiring.

How Habits Are Formed

The human brain is great at finding shortcuts. Every choice or action is processed along a certain pathway of neurons within your brain. Every time you repeat a choice or action, your neuronal pathway for that action becomes stronger and the communication between each neuron becomes faster. Over time, the choice or action becomes a habit: something that you do in response to environmental cues without giving it much conscious thought. This saves your brain time and energy. However, when you have to change those long-held habits to improve your health, your brain has to find a new pathway. Resisting the old shortcuts is difficult and can be frustrating. But it is possible. What it does require is your conscious attention—and your willingness to make different choices.

You can help to rewire your brain by consciously forming positive associations with your new diet and negative associations with unhealthy, highly refined-carb foods. When you eat a whole, naturally low-carb meal or snack, focus on the freshness and tastiness of the food you eat. Instead of mindlessly munching, notice the crispness of fresh vegetables, the delicious flavors of nuts, the rich smoothness of olive oil and butter. Experiment with fresh herbs and other seasonings and try combining foods in new and interesting ways. Once you start experimenting, you’ll be amazed at the new and delicious combinations you come up with.

After you’ve eaten, pay attention to how good your body feels. As you become lighter and have more energy, consciously associate these pleasurable feelings with your new diet. If you should crave unhealthy foods, help your brain to form negative associations with that food by thinking about the emotional letdown you experience when you miss your goals and how bloated you feel after eating too many refined carbs and highly processed foods. Before you know it, you’ll be craving the good stuff.

Some habits might be harder to break than others. It may turn out that what you think is a habit, like putting too much sugar in your coffee, is actually an addiction.

Use of alcohol, caffeine—or any other substance that alters your mood or perception or negatively affects your health—must be carefully managed. When out-of-control cravings for the substance cause you to use it even after its effects begin to cause damage in your life, that's addiction.

Can You Be Addicted to Sugar?

It’s been found that eating sugar prompts the release of the brain chemical dopamine, which creates a feeling of well-being. To find out more about this, and to investigate whether sugar has addictive properties, researchers at Princeton University designed a study similar to those used to gauge the effects of illicit drugs on the human brain. When subjects were given a sugary solution, the researchers found that dopamine was released into the same part of the brain that lies at the root of drug addiction. In other words, the same thing was happening as when a person takes heroin!

What’s more, when sugar is withdrawn from the diet of an individual who has been consuming large amounts, it triggers a chain of events in the body very similar to those of heroin withdrawal.

Sugar can be a mood booster, because it prompts the body to release “happy hormones” into the blood stream. The instant lift we get from sugar is one of the reasons we turn to it at times of celebration or when we crave comfort and reward. However, the pleasant sugar rush triggers an increase in insulin as the body strives to bring blood glucose levels back to normal. This has the knock-on effect of causing a 'sugar crash' and makes you crave yet more sugar, which can lead to a cycle of binge-eating and addiction.

How to Overcome Sugar Addiction

The best way to overcome an addiction to sugar is to avoid it completely. This may be easier said than done, and it won’t happen overnight—especially if you’ve been consuming large amounts.

Following are tips that can help you avoid unnecessary sugars in the foods you eat, along with some recommendations to help you manage sugar cravings.

Cut out soda and juice

Did you know that a small glass of orange juice has 24 g of carbs? That’s the amount found in 6 sugar cubes, and it’s more carbohydrates than someone on a ketogenic diet would eat in a day. A 20-oz soda can have 65 g of carbs, which is the equivalent of 16 sugar cubes. Besides being addictive, sugars in soda and other sweetened beverages are associated with type 2 diabetes, obesity, and tooth decay. Your best bet: Drink water, seltzer, and tea or coffee without sugar.

Know where sugar hides

Scan nutrition labels on any foods you buy for ingredients ending in the suffix “ose,” such as glucose, sucrose, fructose, maltose, and dextrose. If you also want to avoid sugar alcohols, look for ingredients ending in “ol”, like sorbitol and xylitol. Make sure you always check the carbohydrate and sugar count on any product your buy. You may be surprised at some of the products that have sugar added to them, such as mayonnaise, peanut butter, and tomato sauce.

Carefully control intake of sugar substitutes

There has been a great deal of debate about whether calorie-free artificial sweeteners have negative side effects. Now, it appears that they can interfere with your body’s normal metabolism. All artificial sweeteners should be used in moderation, with the goal of eventually cutting them out of your diet completely. While you’re adjusting to your new way of eating, think about using more natural calorie-free sweeteners, for instance stevia, if you have a powerful craving.

Get enough sleep

Lack of sleep triggers the body to crave more sugar. Aim to get 7-9 hours every night.

De-stress

Stress can make you run to unhealthy “comfort” foods. Stress also raises your blood glucose levels. From an evolutionary perspective, this physiological reaction makes sense. In the distant past, stress was generally caused by some type of immediate danger—being attacked by a predator, for instance. In this kind of situation, it’s helpful to have quick energy available for flight or fight. But chronic (long-term) stress, which is more common in modern society, creates chronically elevated glucose levels as well. Keep your blood glucose levels down and your cravings at bay by managing your stress.

The power of cravings shouldn’t be underestimated. Brain imaging studies have shown that food cravings activate the same areas of the brain that drug and alcohol cravings do. This circuit is driven by the reward-giving brain chemical dopamine.

Response to cravings is individual. Some people can manage cravings well, while others find them harder to cope with. Women are reported to have more cravings than men, and younger people crave sweets more than older people do.

Cravings demand action—and here you have a choice. You can respond by giving in to the craving, or you can find a substitute action to distract you or eliminate the craving in a healthier way.

“Distraction” seems to be the keyword among those who successfully beat their cravings. In one study, subjects who were craving certain foods were helped by imagining nonfood sensory experiences—the appearance of a rainbow, for instance, or the scent of eucalyptus. Such exercises may seem unlikely to take your mind off of chocolate chip cookies but giving your brain something else to do can really work. Remember, you’re rewiring your brain to think differently.

Recognizing You Have a Problem

“Our motivation to control ourselves requires recognizing that we have a problem or are at risk of having a problem, which is not easy to do,” says Michael Stein, MD, Professor of Medicine and Community Health at Brown University. “There's a constant interplay between appetite and self-regulation, and we're often not motivated to change unless we experience problems. By then, change is often more difficult.” Be honest with yourself. Acknowledge that you have a problem—but acknowledge, too, that you are capable of dealing with it and that you are taking positive steps to changing your actions and your life.

How to Deal with Setbacks

Don’t feel too bad when you give in to temptation. Some life events have the power to trigger a junk-food binge or land you on the sofa watching TV instead of working out. An emotionally charged conversation with a loved one, a schedule full of big deadlines at work, celebrations that revolve around food—all may set you back on your journey to wellness.

Make plans now for how you’ll stick to your new habits when life pitches you one of these curveballs. If there’s a busy time coming up at work, make healthful meals in advance so you won’t rely on fast-food and packaged junk. The same goes for holidays. And when unexpected events send you into an emotional tailspin, take yourself to the movies, meditate, or (even better) catch an extra exercise class. Visualize how you will handle a crisis now, and you’ll be less likely to abandon your good work in the future.

According to a 2009 study from University College London, it takes an average of 66 days to form a new habit. In a group of subjects who set out to form healthy diet and exercise habits, researchers tracked the amount of time it took for the new behaviors to become automatic. Although 66 days was the average amount of time, depending on the habit and the subject's diligence in repeating it, new habits could be “set” in as few as 18 days or as many as 254 days.

Repetition and giving yourself time to adjust are the main factors in forming a new behavior pattern. It’s perilously easy to fall back into old, bad behavior patterns, however. That’s because the trace of the shortcut your brain had for the old, unhealthy behaviors remains lurking fairly close to the surface.

“We knew that neurons can change their firing patterns when habits are learned,” says MIT's Ann Graybiel, professor of neuroscience in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. In 2005, her lab conducted a study in which animals learned their way through a maze to a reward. When the conditions were changed and the reward removed, the animals “unlearned” the behavior. As soon as the original conditions and reward were back, the animals had no learning curve whatsoever. They regained their previously learned habit effortlessly.

“It is as though somehow the brain retains a memory of the habit context, and this pattern can be triggered if the right habit cues come back,” Graybiel adds. “This situation is familiar to anyone who is trying to lose weight or to control a well-engrained habit.”

Achieving your long-term health and well-being goals requires you to change long-held negative habits. Be sure you’ve prepared yourself to take on the work. What long-term goals did you identify when thinking through your health priorities? These will keep you on track as you build a strategy to change your behavior patterns. It’s crucial that you embrace change for reasons that are truly significant to you: your longevity, your happiness, your pride, your family life, your day-to-day comfort. Your wellness mission may benefit others in your life, but the motivation must come from within.