Amy Nicholson
speaker
471 appearances
63 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Amy Nicholson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And then before you know it, you're having a extra large jumbo size frappuccino when you're craving hits.
No, this is a modern life problem. Actually, gambling is the best example of very, very strong craveability. So what happens is when you gamble, you lose, you lose, you lose. And then all of a sudden, without you anticipating it, you win and you create this huge dopamine explosion.
And it creates this pathway in your brain because now once that dissipates, you're like, oh my God, I got to do that again. Because wow, that feeling was just so delightful, right? So that's what the cravings pathways does.
I would love to give you an example, easy, lazy. I call it the lazy example because people love this example. Getting sunlight into your eyes activates a hormone called alpha MSH. That hormone makes you feel satiated. And when you get adequate sunlight during the day, you increase your chances of feeling full after meals. It calms the cravings and it makes you feel fuller.
And if you think about it, some people will say, oh yeah, if I go for a nice sunny walk, not only is my mood better, but I'm not craving the bad foods or bad things in my life as much.
Uh, eating foods with protein. So when you start to replace the right foods in back into your body, you reset your hunger hormones and your neurologic pathways. And most importantly, your gut bacteria, the gut bacteria will sense amino acids from proteins in your gut. And it will tell your brain that, Hey, you're getting nutrition. Um, there is a very interesting hypothesis.
called the protein threshold hypothesis that says when you get enough protein in your GI tract, your brain starts to create satiation hormones. the neuropeptide YY, the CCK, the leptin, to say to your body, all right, we got what we need, time to stop.
But if you're eating foods that are really low in protein, which is ultra processed foods, snacks, you will keep eating because your body hasn't hit that threshold yet of protein. And so this might makes it so usable to me. I said, oh, well, okay. If I want to have better control of my cravings, I need to increase the level of protein in my meals, especially early in my meal.
So that by the time I start to digest the protein, I start to get the fullness signals. And so I'm not diving into the cake or the dessert at the end of the meal.
Say you ate a meal. This happens to me all the time. Say you ate a meal and you did order dessert, but it took forever for the waiter to put in the dessert order and for it to come back. And by that time, your satiation hormones have kicked in, right? You were like, oh, I don't want it anymore. I'm done.
That is a very common way to kind of get over cravings is after a meal, just go for a walk or maybe you do something else before you reach for that dessert. And often your hunger hormones have kicked in and you are fine with not having that craving at the end of the meal. It's much harder, as you know. when your cravings are very strong. Cravings are the strongest pathways in our body.
They motivate us to move, to get up out of our seat, to get in the car, to drive across town and have that thing that we're craving. So it's often not as easy as just saying, oh, well just take a walk or distract yourself for 15 minutes. It just depends on how strong and how deeply rooted that craving might be for you.
Oh, I love the peppermint one. So peppermint oil or a dark chocolate with peppermint. Peppermint works to calm the craving centers in our brain. So what they did is they actually experimented on people who sniffed peppermint every two to three hours. And then they actually looked at their brain waves through MRI. And they found that those people who had sniffed the peppermint were much less likely
to have cravings for food than the people who didn't. So that's a really easy one. And you can allude that that would be true for, even though they use peppermint oil in the study, you can imagine that it could be like, you know, drinking a peppermint tea or having a peppermint dark chocolate. Like it could help you with those. There was another study,
where they use walnuts, walnuts in a smoothie. And the interesting thing, Mike, is that they gave two groups smoothies. One group had walnuts in their smoothie and the other group had something that had a texture of walnuts, but not walnuts, a placebo. And they found that over two weeks time, the group that drank the walnut smoothie had craving centers in their brain that were calmer.
and less likely to light up at the visual cues of cravings as compared to the group that just had the shake with the placebo.
Yes, absolutely. We are in control. Our brain is plastic, much more so when we're young, you know, zero to five, they're super plastic. But then even as adults, if you recognize you have a craving for something unhealthy, you can anticipate and change that. So I'll give you an example.
When I know for me, for example, that baked cookies like freshly baked chocolate chip cookies is something I often crave. And I know that if I keep it in the house, all I think about is when I can have that cookie, when I can have the next cookie, when I'm allowed to have that again. And I recognize that that was a craving pathway signal. And I recognize that I wanted to change that.
So what I did is instead of having chocolate chip cookies in the house, freshly baked, I had just some really high quality dark chocolate. And what I would do is When I would crave the chocolate chip cookie freshly baked, I would say to myself, well, you know what? I'm going to do a better thing.
I'm going to give my body a reward, a dopamine explosion, but something that's positive, something that I could like live with and be happy with. So I gave myself the dark chocolate and I call it the intermittent reward schedule. So what you want to do is the best way to create a pathway for new craving
Showing 281–300 of 471 · page 15 of 24
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