All In The Mind

I'm amazed at some of the changes that have taken place mentally over the last few weeks.  I'm eating much smaller portions than I was a couple months ago, but the portions "look" big to me.  I'm constantly wondering if I wasn't paying close enough attention while eating--to the point that I might could have accidentally overeaten.  Then I take a mental step back and examine what was on my plate (and how much of it I actually ate) through my "old" eyes and find I did just fine.  So weird.

The other aspect is how much I'm enjoying food now.  To give a hypothetical example, I absolutely LOVE a good cheeseburger.  I used to get the urge for one, find myself salivating over it, excited when ordering and/or cooking it, and happy to sit down to start eating it. The actual amount of pleasure I felt from eating it usually varied (on a 100 point scale) from 60-80%.  Well of course, I'm after a 100, so I'd eat the entire cheeseburger, followed by a bunch of fries, followed by a coke (sometimes 2), followed by a dessert (sometimes 2 *gulp*). At the end of all that, my sense of "happiness" or pleasure might fall somewhere around a 90, meaning I might continue to snack after the meal because of how much I inherently still desired that 100. But often I'd notice it dropping back into the 80s or even the 70s--now out of guilt because I knew I'd overeaten and would pay for it over the next day or two.

Amazingly, almost every meal now lands me somewhere in the upper 90s. And there are times that I find it inching closer and closer to 100 because I know I'm still moving foward and haven't eaten in such a way that I'll regret it later. What this ironically means is that eating LESS of this thing which has the capacity to bring me pleasure is actually giving me MORE pleasure than if I'd eaten more of it. I couldn't figure this out for the life of me--until I watched an episode of The Biggest Loser the other nite. They were showing where the brain's pleasure center is located, as well as its size in relation to food. People who have weight problems tend to have a larger pleasure center in connection to food--meaning they WANT the food more than thin people who have smaller food pleasure centers. But when the overweight person eats something, they actually get LESS pleasure out of the food than does that thin person. The result? The overweight person feels the need to eat more of the food so as to gain the dopamine release, whereas the thin person can eat much less of the same food and actually experience MORE pleasure than the overweight person. How bizarre is this? Furthermore, is it actually possible that my dopamine levels are adjusting as though my food pleasure center is smaller? I'm honestly not sure how all this works, but I know that part of my interaction with food has changed drastically, so I'm trying to figure it out. I've always felt like my brain was working against me in regard to weight loss...but for the 1st time, I actually feel like it's on my side.