The Croissant Pathway

Our review of the Hack Your Hormones chapter ‘Why Can’t I Stop Eating’ explains how our hunger hormones work together to sometimes totally trip us, repeatedly kick us when we’re down and trap us in a never ending cycle of biscuit tin games.  Secret or unconscious eating anyone?  You will find a plethora of information about how you wrangle these hormones and get them under control once and for all in the ‘Why Can’t I Stop Eating’ review, but here’s a little food for thought to wet your appetite, a concept that might prompt you to do a bit of further reading.

In Hack Your Hormones, Davinia explains that carb heavy foods could be the reason why you have been feeling so meh, why your hormones are in overdrive and why you’re struggling to rid yourself of those pesky pounds. 

For the sake of this explanation, I want you to imagine that a ’croissant’ is the Devil and also a symbol for all carbs, and the ‘pathway’ is a path to weight gain, hormone imbalance and feeling hopeless. Got it!? 

Here we go… Our appetite hormones all work together as they are all part of the endocrine system.  Now, when we think of hormones, we usually think of Oestrogen, Progesterone, Testosterone etc… We don’t usually consider Ghrelin, Leptin and Dopamine.  If you are a Hack Your Hormones aficionado, you will know that Gherlin is the hormone that tells our brain that we are hungry;  Leptin is the hormone that tells our brain that we are full, and Dopamine is the hormone that tells our brain that we like something. When we feed our bodies willy nilly, with little thought of the impact the food is going to have on our bodies, these hormones can play havoc with our appetite and satiety. 

In Hack Your Hormones, DT uses what happens to our bodies when we eat a croissant to fully illustrate this impact, so buckle down because she’s about to totally change your brain chemistry. 

Imagine it’s Monday morning and the alarm hasn’t gone off.  You realise that you won’t have time to eat your regular breakfast at 7.30am because you will hit traffic or miss the train to work. What are you going to do?  You know you’ll be starving, will struggle to concentrate, will become hangry and unable to tolerate your boss, so you decide it’s okay because you can grab a croissant en route.  As soon as the thought enters your head, it’s all you can think about, rationalising it as a treat to help you get through the Monday blues.  By this point, Gherlin is raging because it’s 7.30am, it’s when you normally eat and it begins to feel as though your hunger hormone is literally gnawing through your gut lining.  You now need that croissant, that croissant is life and your brain starts to rule the roost. 

You reach the cafe, corner shop or food van, buy the croissant, shove it in your face as you run for the train or back to the car and your dopamine tells you that you liked it.  All is well again. Or is it? 

Your satisfaction is short-lived as those croissant carbs convert to sugar, triggering an insulin response which in turn inhibits your Leptin hormone, the hormone that tells your brain and gut that you are full.  All of a sudden, the image of the office biscuit tin appears in your mind’s eye and now biscuits are life. Your brain has taken hold and you’re left trapped in a cycle of snacking. Now, you may resist eating again, for a short while at least, but you can guarantee that by 10am, you’ll be chewing your tongue, probably thinking ‘Whatever! I had a croissant this morning so I’m just going to have a treat day!’ 

Now, I realise this is such an extreme and you may well eat the croissant and make better decisions for the rest of the day.  DT is not suggesting that you never eat croissants, but the point is, the brain is so powerful and it has the ability to completely control us and consequently, our hormone balance.  What starts off as a little treat can turn into an ingrained behaviour.  By feeding our brains the good stuff, you are less likely to exist in a constant state of ‘whatever’ and you are more likely to make better decisions for your hormones and your mental and physical health.