The Pleasure Trap – Sugar Cravings and Addiction

Sugar and I are like two peas in a pod and there is no question in my mind that I am a bonafide sugar addict. I call it the pleasure trap.  Sugar once had the power to easily and without warning spin me out of control in a moments notice leaving me in a puddle of self-loathing  and guilt.  It wasn’t until I was given a diagnosis of breast cancer did I come clean with my run away cravings, confront my addiction and started to make empowered choices for taking back my life, health and wellness.  Are sugar and junk food urges really simply a matter of willpower and self control? Or could they have to do with something more instinctual?

Dr. Douglas Lisle’s and Dr. Alan Goldhamer, authors of “The Pleasure Trap”, have come up with a theory of why we are so obsessed with eating sugar and junk food even when we know it’s not good for us.

It all starts with our basic instincts, like all other animals, that we must eat to survive in order for us to reproduce. Consuming food becomes our first order of business in the survival line up. You’re hard-wired, like all other animals, to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. When you eat food you trigger a pleasure pathway in your nervous system that causes dopamine to be released in your brain, giving you a pleasurable feeling you interpret as beneficial for your survival. You’re also designed to receive stimulus that lets you know when something in your environment is not supporting your best interest. You receive this signal as pain. You’re also designed to seek pleasure and avoid pain with the least amount of energy expenditure.

You move through the ups and downs of your day, receiving dopamine hits on the ups, and the pain avoidance signals on the downs. This all works well and in your best interest for healthy survival, until you figure out how to short circuit the pleasure system so you can continually partake in only dopamine-producing activities.

Processed foods, alcohol, drugs, gambling and sex are some of the ways to short cut right to pleasure and stimulate dopamine production. Pain blocking medications allow you to circumnavigate around the avoidance trap. The combination of the pleasure trap, pain-avoidance trap, and the energy conservation trap make up the triad know as the “Pleasure Trap”. The Pleasure Trap occurs when you face environmental conditions for which you were not designed, and you begin to make poor choices that can disrupt or destroy your health and happiness. Food manufacturers know this pleasure trap triad all too well and continually create products to lure you in.

Our internal pleasure-seeking mechanism is tuned in to getting the higher-caloric density foods with the least amount of energy expenditure. Sugar and fats, which are the basic make up of processed foods, will hit your pleasure centers pretty hard. When you eat these foods you get a super blast of dopamine charging through your wiring, and it convinces your nervous system that this is for your highest possible good. Before you know it your stuck in the pleasure trap, overeating or consuming foods that are not good for you, even when you want to avoid doing so. To maintain that same dopamine high, you have to to keep eating larger quantities of them to get the same pleasure center hit.

You can give up the the notion that junk food junkies are self indulgent, undisciplined, lazy or just plain unlucky in the gene pool. We’re actually the result of the Pleasure Trap. When you do eat the right food, it feels wrong, and when you eat the wrong foods it feels right. This dilemma keeps you stuck in the trap.

Recovering from the Pleasure Trap may not be an easy road. It can take up to 8 to 12 weeks to recover, and the nervous system goes through the same recovery process as with drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. But this can be done and the 21 Day Wellness Cleanse is an excellent program to kick the habit and move you toward experiencing a spectrum of health you may have never have known existed.  By following this simple but effective program you’ll learn how to make healthy sugar and junk free choices that are enjoyable and consistently sustainable over the long term.