Two Weeks In

Most of us made some resolutions two weeks ago. And, if history is any indicator, it’s likely a majority of us have given up swimming against the current and are back to our old ways. (Hey, there’s always next year!)

But not us, right? We’re the Cool Kids. We’re going to hang in there. Sure we ate a bit more during December than we wanted to. Maybe we didn’t get on the scale for a month. But we’re still bound and determined to make 2009 the year we see our toes again.

Have you had trouble though? I know I have. You already saw what happened that first week. Fully expecting to drop that weight I put on that last week of 2008, I instead did nothing but crave carbs all the live long day. I’m used to having a “hungry day” once in a while but an entire week was too much.

Do you feel it too?

Well, guess what I found out. Overeating makes you gain weight. And I don’t mean it in the obvious way. Sure, there’s the very direct result of taking in more calories than you burn getting stored. The part we don’t realize is that the act of overeating actually causes you to want to eat even more. In some ways, it’s like building up a tolerance to a drug. The cycle feeds itself.

According to a story run on NPR, mice on different diets were studied:

“If mice eat a high-fat diet, they actually wake up during what is nighttime for them and eat,” says Dr. Joe Bass, a Northwestern University endocrinologist and molecular biologist who has published numerous studies about the body clock and mice. […] Bass found that among the mice who got fat, the weight gain resulted directly from food consumed during what would normally be their sleeping time. This suggests that people who eat less fat will sleep better, and they are not likely to engage in nighttime bingeing, he says.

Why are these mice waking up, sneaking down to their refrigerators, and eating tubs and tubs of Ben & Jerry’s Cake Batter Original Ice Cream? If you think the answer is “free will” think again. The holiday eating we do causes our metabolism to go into a state that doctors call “crazy bonkers.” Basically your body doesn’t know what to do with all this extra energy. Worried you might spontaneously combust, it immediately converts everything you eat into cottage cheese and sends it down to your thighs for long term storage. It really wanted to put it all on eBay first, but you ate so much you just didn’t give it time.

This then triggers the Evil Cycle. Blood sugars never get the chance to even out, insulin floods the body, false-hunger signals are sent to your eyeballs, which scan every square inch of your surroundings for potato chips and monkeyball sandwiches. Anything to satisfy your body’s near-permanent hormonal imbalance. Now wasn’t all that Chex Mix worth it?

Fortunately there’s a way out of this. Unfortunately, I’m going to keep it to myself until next Monday. I need to finish this experiment and see if it really works or not. In the meantime, I sure could go for some potato chips and a monkeyball sandwich…