By understanding dopamine’s critical role in human desire and survival, you can understand the powerful effect it has on your habits around food which can help you in your desire to lose weight.

Dopamine gives us the will and desire to get up and pursue activities that keep us alive, like drinking water and eating food, by urging us to get up and get them. Without dopamine, we lose the will to survive. Other modern-day pursuits also elicit a powerful effect on dopamine response like gambling, pornography, alcohol, and concentrated forms of food like sugar, fat, and flour. 

Dopamine is a liar because it can’t deliver the pleasure it promises in its urging us to consume. Dopamine only gives us pleasure in the pursuit of consumption, not from the consuming itself.  

Your brain just wants a steady diet of dopamine and it will urge you to get all kinds of things in order to get it. That's why I say you 'think' you want the cookies, but the brain just wants the dopamine that getting the cookies gives it. Dopamine rewards human brains with pleasure in exchange for the pursuit of consumption. Your brain doesn't give a shit if the fallout from dopamine-driven overeating is making you miserable, it just wants you to keep pursuing your desires.   

So now that you understand the limitations of dopamine and the hard wiring in your brain for it, you can understand that it can be challenging to change these habits, but that doesn't mean you can't.  Tune in to learn exactly how to override your dopamine desires to help you lose weight.

Homework: Write down as many ways as you can think of to give yourself new forms of dopamine. Try one this week and experiment moving forward.

Visit me @thriveinmidlife on Instagram on the episode post and comment with your ah-has, takeaways, homework, and/or questions from this episode, and let’s keep the conversation going. 

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