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The importance of Controlling Appetite
Old systems in our brain regulate appetite, eating behaviors, and manage body weight. We call this brain device the Appetite Control System (ACS).
The ACS integrates information about body weight, temperature, activity
level, season, reproductive cycle (in women), food availability, and
expected energy needs to decide how much food is needed today.
If you are in the weight
management business you have the deepest respect for ACS. You can
compare ACS programs to the programs built into computers as read-only
memory (ROM). When you turn the computer on, programs are read from ROM
to initiate basic computer operations. You are never of aware of ROM
contents, but you experience the results. ACS programs operate
spontaneously and establish your basic eating behaviors and responses
to food. ACS deals in the basic patterns of life, and has a vocabulary
of states such as hunger, thirst, sleep, wakefulness, flight, fight,
fear, and anger to let you know why you are doing what you are doing.
You cannot access ACS through your conscious mind, but ACS can access
you! The way it seems to work is that you get regular messages from ACS
in the form of urges, needs, desires, wants, appetites, and sometimes
discomforts - "Your bladder is full now. Rush to the toilet." "You are
hungry, now go and eat food." You cannot override these old programs
with conscious control.
ACS establishes a weight and temperature "set-point"
and tries to maintain these values even when the food supply varies a
great deal. This is a complex system that is based on the oldest of
life-programs. You are born with these programs in read-only-memory.
ACS works at three levels:
- Changes eating behavior
- Changes metabolism
- Changes physical activity
When ACS wants you to do
something, you feel hungry and are driven to find food. ACS fools
consciousness most of the time to think that you have some
decision-making ability, but really most of your behavior is
preprogrammed and run on auto pilot. When this system says go, you are
running to the refrigerator to get ice cream. You may think as your
feet move you towards the goal, it would be better to have celery, but
you do eat the ice cream. If ASC says "Stop!", there is no delicious
morsel on earth that would tempt you enough to eat.
The appetite system is
based on programs in the old reptilian brain. This system is designed
to establish the most efficient path to reliably available food, then
to lock in the behavior and repeat it without further modification. Our
appetite system tends to run automatically at this primitive level and
defies conscious attempts to alter the program. Any insightful person
will be able to track the importance of food searches in their own
behavior. If you watch the people around you, you will readily confirm
the primacy of feeding behaviors in human social existence.
It is possible to
construct a rather elaborate model of brain function in terms of the
brain's attempt to regulate the molecular flow of food materials.
Feeding behaviors are highly automated and seem to be designed around
recursive loops, already discussed under addictive behavior. If we
think of our brains as chemical processors whose first job is to steer
us through a chemical soup so that we get the right stuff to function
normally, a lot of human behavior makes sense or is more understandable
nonsense.
If you assume the task
of inventing a simple brain that self-regulates by controlling eating
behavior, you might get some insight into how we and other animals
operate. You would have to assume that the basic system built into old
brain ROM is not very smart and could not read this book for clues as
to how to modify its own behavior. You would have to start with
chemical sensors (tongue and nose) and simple programs that direct food
searching, eating, stopping-eating, and switching to other programs
which do something else when you have had enough to eat, and so on.
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