Have you ever woken up in the morning and just knew that was the day “it” was going down?  I mean everything, not just food.  So if your co-worker was going to try to throw you under the bus again, she was getting an earful; if your man wanted to voice his opinion on what you were wearing that day, he was in for a beat down; if your kids thought that they were going to sass you that morning, they were in for the longest punishment given this side of the Mississippi; and when you went out to lunch that day with the office, you were having a piece of bread AND you were splitting a dessert.  Have you ever had one of those days?  Did you ever wonder where it came from in the first place?  What made you all “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” at 6:30 in the morning before you even got dressed? Serotonin.

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that regulates our mood, increases our pain tolerance, helps us sleep and curbs our food cravings.  When this little guy is in line, all is well.  When he isn’t, you start at one end of the kitchen and don’t stop until you make it to the other side eating anything with starch, fat and salt.  I’m sure your first question is going to be, “What makes him fall out of line?”  And my answer, plain and simple, for us is dieting.  Food restriction wears him down until he is at such low levels that he demands to be raised again by any means necessary and that means carbohydrate, lots and lots of carbohydrate.   When these cravings kick in, the only thing that is keeping you from blowing through a big bag of lays potato chips by yourself is the fact that they are not yours.  You just happen to be at your girlfriend’s house and those are her kids’ chips.  You don’t want her to think you really eat that stuff so you’re going to behave, but as soon as you get home it is on.

Here are some things to think about serotonin:

Symptoms when low: insomnia, depression, strong food cravings, aggressive behavior (pushing your cart into the woman in front of you at the grocery store was not cool), and poor body temp regulation.

Three things raise the level: carbohydrates, vitamins and estrogen.

When our period comes around: estrogen begins to drop dramatically which in turn drops serotonin.  Suddenly, we have the desire to eat 4 pounds of chocolate as a midmorning snack with a tablespoon of nuts to make sure it’s healthy.

At the end of a dieting phase: we are the lowest in terms of estrogen, carbs and vitamins.  It’s no wonder we walked into the neighborhood bakery with a can of pepper spray demanding that all half moons be placed in a brown paper bag while we slipped out the back.

How do we keep in check? High protein, vitamin B6 and fish oil.

Who Are Serotonin’s Aiders and Abettors?

Dopamine

You can thank dopamine any time you want a coffee first thing in the morning or a sweet after dinner.  Dopamine drives our desire for familiar foods that seem like rewards to us.  If we did all the right things in a given day by eating all of our veggies and not nibbling on foods in between, we want to be rewarded.  This means we want something sweet or yummy that feels naughty on our palette.  Or if we had a bad day and want to be comforted, hot chocolate or warm chocolate chip cookies seem to fill the gap.  What we desire on these bad days or at the end of the week when we feel like we’ve worked hard and deserve something good, is guided primarily by dopamine.

Galanin

This dude is no joke.  He has a bad attitude and the only thing that makes him happy is fat.  High levels of galanin make us crave fatty foods and desserts.  Why is he an aider and abettor?   Galanin increases with our estrogen levels just like serotonin does.  So once a month when our inhibitions are low (i.e. high serotonin means good mood all around) due to high estrogen therefore high serotonin and galanin, we feel like we can indulge ourselves with some high fat yummy food.  When we do that, though, our levels then drop with our blood sugar and carbohydrate cravings are there to lift our spirits once again.  This is a horrible see saw ride to be on and we do it all the time!

Endorphins

Ahhh…yes, endorphins.  We love these guys because they tell us that the beat down workout we just did earlier in the day was A-Ok.  They give us a natural high or what most folks know as a runner’s high.  They also like to make tasty food seem more fun than normal.  They literally encourage us to eat junk.  This means if you accidently listen to galanin or serotonin and eat something sinful, endorphins tell you to keep on going!  This is why you can’t stop eating the box of chocolates until they are gone.  WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS?  Jeez louise!

If you have ever wondered why you cannot stop eating chocolate, why you want a sweet right after dinner or why you can be a beast every so often for no apparent reason, there you go.  These guys are out to get us and it’s not nice.

Oh there’s more self sabotage on the way!  Wait til we talk about sodium, sugar and fat.  Honestly, it’s a wonder we all don’t weigh 1000 pounds knowing all this stuff.  Hang tight!  Woop woop!

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Women are natural sadists—well, while dieting at least, because I swear we diet just to beat the living tar out of ourselves.  Although, most of us will tell you we diet for a specific reason:  vacation, wedding, event and so on.  Our girl is no different.  She was going on vacation.

It looked so peaceful.  Too bad it had 14 pounds lurking in the tide.

After 12 weeks of dieting, endless hours of cardio and more poundage moved in the gym than on a shipping dock, our girl is looking darn good (if I don’t say so myself) and traveling through the airport with confidence and ease.  She made goal and she is pretty darn pleased with her results.  She couldn’t wait for this day and has been having dreams of drinks on the beach with all inclusive meals and treats while lying pool side in Aruba.  This has been what all the suffering was about and she cannot wait until she is on the beach in her new bathing suit feeling comfortable in it for the first time ever.

I don’t know if any fitness professional has ever told you this so I am going on record saying it now:  do not ever diet into a vacation.  Do not do a 12 week countdown into drinking, merriment and revelry.  The only thing worse than dieting into vacation is going into an all you can eat buffet with someone getting off a 40 day fast.  Don’t do it. Not to mention metabolism-wise, it is the biggest mistake ever.  Lots of damage done with this one.

The resort is gorgeous and the weather is surreal.  She thinks this is going to be the most amazing week she’s had in a long time.  Her journal entries are as follows:

Day 1: I am exhausted.  Had to beat the front desk down because they messed up my room but when they saw the look on my face that said, “I’m about to blow a gasket.”  They suddenly found a solution.  I need a drink but I want to be good.  I told myself that I was only going to have a treat a few times this week and I really want to save it more for the end of the week.  I want chocolate bad but I am waiting for the midnight chocolate buffet on Wednesday night before having any.   Time to check the menu for healthy options.

As newbies we all start out with good intentions.  But then it soon goes to hell in a hand basket.

Here is where we begin to fail: unrealistic expectations of ourselves.  First, vacation is meant to have fun–not spend a week dieting in a different country.  This isn’t her lifestyle, yet.  She is working on making it so, but it’s still so fresh in her system that to expect her to go into an eating and drinking smorgasbord and not lose her mind borders on being irresponsible.  Second, she forgot to factor in the fact that she will have no will after the first drink.  At that point, all bets are off.

Day 2: Who knew that I was gonna be that much of a lightweight now?  Hope no one got a picture of me dancing topless on the fondue bar.  I am so bloated and feel like crap.  I swear I just killed all the work I did to get here in one night.  I could not stop eating the bread they brought to the table.  Ugh!

At some point in our dieting we all end up being humbled by the Carb Demon.  This guy is no joke when he shows up.  Whatever control you may have thought you had, goes right out the window whenever he makes an appearance.  Some of us have been known to defy physics with some of the things we can eat on a “bender”, our girl was lucky enough to stop at 2 bread baskets and 3 martinis.

Nothing on here said anything about it causing grown women to eat entire back rooms of restaurants.  They should have warning labels.

Day 6: Obviously I blew this week on Sunday so the rest of the week has been a wash.  I’m glad I was smart enough to pack another bathing suit just in case.  The only thing I can fit in right now is a moo-moo.  I don’t know why I can’t stop eating like this.  I will never get my act together.  I knew it was too good to be true.  I’m meant to be heavy for the rest of my life.  Those chics in the magazine are just gifted.  Why bother.

I get it when we feel like this because at the time we are so low emotionally that it is sad to even think about sometimes.  But this has to be the ultimate in inaccurate statements.  The girls are not gifted and you can stop eating like that.  What we didn’t know before we began to diet was what our bodies were going to go through at the pinnacle of our dieting:  low estrogen levels, high cortisol levels and a mind ready for a fresh game of “highs and lows”.  Alcohol after dieting is a no-no.  Carbs after dieting without being interrupted by fat first is a no-no, as well.

Plane ride home: I can’t let anyone see me.  I am so embarrassed.  All that hard work out the window and for what?  A bunch of drinks?  I can’t wait to get back and just clean up the diet and feel good again.  I just want to ring myself out dry and empty my stomach of everything.  Oh man I feel like death.

Little does our girl know that this is just the beginning of her drama.  Just having her girlfriend pick her up at the airport put her in a frenzy because she didn’t want to have to explain why she looks so different.  The emotion brought on from a sense of failure and the difficulty she is about to have thinking she can just “lose that weight again” may be more than she bargained for…

Tomorrow I walk you through all the ways she could have failed forward on her vacation and saved the amount of damage that was done in this one week.  Once this whole vacation week and the following week are all said and done, our girl will have gained 14 pounds in 2 weeks.   Much to talk about…

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Honestly, you women are crazy.  Last night I was on the phone with Kas (former Tuesday blogger) chatting away just catching up when I casually mentioned that I was blogging again.  Well she nearly flipped her lid and yelled at me saying that I never told her and why was I holding out.  But wait it gets better…  She’s on the phone with me, clearly agitated that she is now strapped in by this call that we’re on because she wants to…yes, wait for it…hang up to go read what I wrote.  WHAT?  Why not just ask me while you have me on the phone?  Hahahaha!!  Needless to say, we got a good laugh over that but she still hung up on me to read my blogs.  Ummm…whatever.

I am not sure if it’s me or what but this just makes no sense!

But this is our life, ladies.  We do things that do not make a lot of sense a lot of the times thereby wasting precious time.  But what if there were some things out there that do not make a lot of sense but somehow are beneficial for us?  Would you do them then?  Probably not but it’s worth a try:

1. Eat more to break a plateau: No matter how much I try to convince people this works, they still treat me like a dude with a big poster on himself that claims the world is ending tomorrow.  If you find yourself lifting 3 to 5 days per week, doing cardio even more than that and eating next to nothing and your body fat loss has come to a hault—consider eating more before eating less.  See most of you start off dieting and training with parameters that you should have at the *end* of your dieting and training season—not at the beginning.  If your goal date is 12 weeks away and you are already starving to death doing endless cardio and lifting like a fool, you’ve got a long, wasteful road ahead of you.  There is no doubt that somewhere in there you will hit a plateau.  When that happens  EAT MORE…not less!  Let me explain what this looks like:  all clean food, over a set amount of time, at least 50% more of your present intake and then go back to your original diet.  You’ll drop right away and be shocked.
2. Go on vacation to lose weight: Say you are the girl above and not only are you stuck in a rut, you are also exhausted.  Here is a little known secret:  you lose weight when you sleep, not when you move.  So if you never sleep, you never lose.  This is for the girl right now who is reading this and is getting 4 to 6 hours of sleep/night and can’t figure out what is wrong.  A surefire way of knowing if this is you is if you decide to go on vacation and you come back 5 pounds lighter after fully enjoying yourself for the week—this was you.  Ladies, give your adrenals a break and go to bed.
3. Can’t stop cheating?  EAT THE TREAT!: Deprivation causes madness.  Hands down.  ‘The more you deny, the more you will try’ and it can become all consuming if you allow it to be.  What’s the answer?  Take the temptation out by scheduling the treat in the diet.  And don’t just schedule it.  BE OK WITH IT.  *KNOW* that it’s fine.  Know that you are allowed to have this thing and it’s not going to do any damage.  If you don’t know it on the heart level not just the mind level, you will continue to snack uncontrollably.  TAKE THE TEMPTATION OUT and you will knock it off!

I know it seems outrageous and sometimes even gloomy.  But hang in there…it really does work!

We will do just about anything over here to help you ladies see how destructive your behaviors can become if you are not careful.  Maintaining a great body with definition and tightness takes a healthy balance between workout, nutrition and emotional health.  Many talk about it but very few have it.  We have been where you are and know all of what you are going through—trust us.  It seems so simple but it really isn’t.

Keep checking in as we go through all the things that you need to do to make it through eating clean and clean dieting the healthy way.  THAT’s the difference here.  Ciao for now!  Woop woop!