When I used to have wires that made me overeat, I didn’t understand why I could be so sensible about food at times, yet at other times, I was completely out of control. I even felt guilty because I “knew” what I should eat, but couldn’t eat that way.
Neuroscience has an answer: nerve hopping.
All behavior is the tail end of a neural circuit, which is a series of activations of neurons. For example, the woman eating the chocolate bar in the image above is doing so because a stimulus entered her brain and activated a neural pathway that then biochemically drove her to eat it.
The circuit is the problem
If the circuit were encoded during low-stress times, the wire would be homeostatic and self-correcting. It would not activate strong biochemical drives to overeat. Her thinking would be sharp, and she would have plenty of time to figure out strategies to avoid overeating.
However, like my Food Circuit, if it were encoding during high-stress times, it would be allostatic and cause her to “careen out of control,” with that drive becoming “stuck on” rather than fading. That’s the nature of these allostatic wires.
Although that explanation is adequate for me in making sense of why I could not control my eating before I erased my Food Circuit, a deeper dive into the neuroscience brings to mind a more compelling understanding of why, for 20 years, I was completely out of control of my eating.
Wires that neuron hop
The wires that activate the behavioral responses that are hardest for us to change were encoded during a momentary experience of stress overload when our best intentions vanished and we did whatever we had to do to feel safe and rewarded.
The problem is that these stress wires are typically myelinated, which means they have a sheath around them that insulates the wires from electrical transmission. The electical impulse then jumps from one space between the sheaths (nodes of Ranvier). The electricity runs faster through the neuron, taking the message (e.g., let’s eat) because it is hopping rather than having to run continuously.
This speeds up the process, which would be health-promoting if the circuit’s message were sensible. However, most trauma circuits do not encode effective ways of coping. When they were encoded, we were in “fight or flight” mode! We are in fear of annihilation, and will eat, drink, say, or do whatever is needed to find a semblance of safety and reward.
These myelinated axons transport electricity at speeds of up to 150 miles per second, whereas the speed of unmyelinated axons is typically in the 0.5 to 10 miles per second. That timing can make a huge difference, particularly when stress causes other factors to sabotage our healthy eating attempts, such as a thinking brain that is negatively impacted by stress and the emotional blockade caused by stress that fills us with extreme moods, such as depression, shame, panic, hostility, and numbness.
Knowledge leads to new strategies
Our current non-drug treatments for obesity are based on the assumption that we are running a very tame homeostatic wire when we eat. The strategies all reflect that. We are told to be mindfully aware, which nobody can pull off when one of those lightning-fast wires is controlling us. They say to write down what we eat. Who has time to write it down (until afterwards), once that wire is activated?
It’s time to take obesity, which was always considered to be a problem of poor willpower or an emotional issue, into the world of neuroscience. If the wire is the problem and it is that powerful, it makes sense to rewire that circuit. I was never at peace with food until I erased my Food Circuit. Only by rewiring it did I become sensible about food.
EBT is based on rewiring these circuits. If your circuit was encoded in stress, then consider rethinking all this “failure” that you’ve experienced. The problem is not you. It’s a wire. Once you rewire it, all those other strategies can help. Likely, you will not need weight loss drugs, and all that energy you’ve used to control your eating? Now you can use it to create more joy in your life and fulfill your purpose.
That’s the point of EBT. Rewire your brain so that you can have the freedom you have always wanted and make more of your dreams come true.
