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A New York Times article this week confirmed my worst fears – stress is sending Americans to candy stores in droves.¹

While at first glance this little headline, “When Economy Sours, Tootsie Rolls Soothe Souls” seems amusing, from my perspective it unwittingly brings up two important issues in healthcare today:

1. The simplistic assertion that to manage our weight, all we have to do is control calories in and calories out.

There are many factors that influence our ability to lose weight and keep it off, and this headline is an example of an important one – stress. Stress from economic crisis is doing what we see over and over again in patients at LMI — reducing serotonin and inducing carbohydrate cravings.

So what’s the harm in eating a little candy if you’re stressed? Nothing if you can stop at “a little,” but if you make that stop at the candy bowl too much of a habit, you can quickly undo weight loss and start to increase health risks.

Stress management is such an important factor for long term weight control, I have made it one of the key components of my approach to weight loss.

What do you do when stress is causing candy cravings — give in? Not in my book. You take steps to better manage your body’s response to that stress. What we do is choose from a variety of supplements that we have found to be very effective in combating stress – Relora for example for carb-related cravings. If you can enhance Relora’s effect with stress reducing mind-body exercises like Missy discussed in her February 24 article – all the better.

2. The belief that sugar and sweets are relatively benign foods.

For example, many diets allow the intake of refined sugars in candies and desserts as long as the overall caloric intake is controlled. The rationale is that by allowing yourself to eat a small amount of sweets, you won’t feel deprived. It seems reasonable, but in my experience, this approach will not work for many people for a number of reasons.

One reason is because once some people start eating the sweets they just can’t stop; instead of eating one of those little 100-calorie snack packets, they end up eating the whole box.

A study published in a journal called Eating Behavior looked at people with low mood who crave sweets, just like we are seeing now with people who are stressed and trying to lift their mood with candy. The study found that those people who get the biggest mood boost from sweets also have the worst control over their intake of sweets.² So, it gets to be a vicious cycle. And according to this study, the better the sugar makes you feel, the more likely you are to over eat sweets.

Unfortunately, eating too much sugar is indeed harmful. For one, studies show it raises triglycerides, blood fats that increase heart disease risk and that are deposited as fat in our fat cells. A very recent study found that while all sugars consumed in excess of our caloric needs are quickly converted to triglycerides, when the proportion was 50% or more of the sugar as fructose, the production of body fat increased significantly — and it even increased the production of fat from foods eaten later at lunch.³

Sugar also depletes chromium⁴ and magnesium,⁵ two minerals that are needed to properly process glucose. For example, insulin receptors need 4 molecules of chromium for them to become active; if you don’t have the chromium, the receptors simply don’t work. In fact, chromium depletion is a hugely under-recognized cause of insulin resistance, in my opinion.

Interestingly, a study from 2004 found that depressed individuals who had the highest level of carbohydrate cravings had significantly reduced carb cravings and improved mood and energy when given 400 mcg and then 600 mcg of chromium.⁶ (Instead of reaching for the candy bowl, try some chromium instead.)

Magnesium is also important for insulin to function properly; a recent study found that magnesium intake was one of only two dietary factors that can significantly increase our production of adiponectin, a hormone that improves insulin receptor function and helps control weight. ⁷ (The other factor that increased adiponectin was high intake of non-starchy vegetables, in my opinion another important part of any good weight management program.)

So, the more sweets you eat, the more you deplete the very nutrients that are needed to help your cells metabolize the sugar in them. It is via depletion of minerals that consuming too many sweets could indirectly be leading to insulin resistance.

Here’s my point. You could constantly be regaining weight because you don’t recognize that stress chemistry keeps leading you back to over intake of sugars. Or perhaps a history of high sugar intake has depleted your chromium and magnesium and contributed to insulin resistance and reduced adiponectin.

Perhaps you have just never learned how to eat more of those non-starchy vegetables that are so advantageous for your health and weight. If this sounds like you, maybe it’s time to stop putting your hope in over simplistic approaches to diet and start looking for more comprehensive solutions. If that is the case I strongly encourage you to consider the approach in my Metabolic Code Diet, which will reduce your stress and help you attain permanent weight loss the healthy way.

References

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/nyregion/24candy.html?th&emc=th.
2. Kampov-Polevoy AB, et al. Eat Behav. 2006 Aug;7(3):181-7.
3. UT Southwestern Medical Center (2008, July 28). Limiting Fructose May Boost Weight Loss, Researcher Reports. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 30, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/07/080724064824.htm.
4. Kozlovsky AS, et al. Metabolism. 1986 Jun;35(6):515-18.
5. Paolisso G. et al. Diabetologia. Sep 1990. 33(9):511-14.
6. Docherty JP, et al. J Psychiatr Pract. 2005 Sep;11(5):302-14.
7. Cassidy A, et al. J of Nutr. Feb 2009. 139(2):353-358.

[Ed. Note: James LaValle is the founding Director of the LaValle Metabolic Institute, one of the largest integrative medicine practices in the country. Dr. LaValle is Executive Editor of THB’s The Healing Prescription and the author of The Metabolic Code Diet: Unleashing the Power of Your Metabolism for Lasting Weight Loss and Vitality. To learn more, click here.]