The Straight Dope on Dopamine and How It Signals You to Overeat

Food is amazing. We eat it, and bam! We’re moving, thinking, dreaming, and... making more humans. Struggling to find food for 3 billion years in an environment defined by scarcity transformed a simple, single celled organism into the ridiculously complex organism known as you. That is the miracle of life!

You are an incredibly sophisticated organism that eats pizza, pulls protein from the pepperoni to build muscle; takes cholesterol from the cheese to build cell membranes; converts carbs from the crust to glucose, then ATP to move your muscles; stores extra glucose as fat for future use; and numerous other processes that make life possible. That is fucking crazy!

So much is written about food as calories, whether calories are good or bad, if a calorie in equals a calorie out, etc. All the shouting, pontificating, and misinformation leads people to pick whichever argument reinforces their current beliefs so they don’t have to change (myself included).

So instead, let’s think about food as signal, actually a host of signals, that tell your body what to do and not do. Depending on what you eat, these signals motivate you to eat, encourage you to eat more, and signal you to stop. They also kick off a whole host of processes that use what you eat to create energy, build muscle, increase fat, impact your mood, etc. It all starts with Dopamine.

Dopamine is the first critical signal because it comes into play before you eat. Dopamine is the motivation drug your brain uses to encourage you to do what it remembers as pleasurable and rewarding, including food (and sex, drugs, video games, social media, and anything addictive). The more highly palatable (delicious) and calorie-dense the food, the larger dose of dopamine you get the next time you think of, see, or smell it. All of this takes place in an ancient part of your subconscious brain that developed millions of years before your rational, prefrontal cortex emerged.

What is happening is your ventral tegmental area (VTA) sends dopamine bids for various dinner options — pizza, grilled salmon, left overs, skip dinner, etc. — to your nucleus accumbent in your ventral striatum for consideration. Before humans developed the prefrontal cortex, organisms ate the dinner option with the largest dopamine bid (The Hubgry Brain by Stephan J. Guyenet, Ph.D. is a great further read on this.)

Today, pizza sends a large dopamine bid because it is delicious and calorie-dense. The dopamine bid for grilled salmon is modest because while it comes with a good amount of protein and Omega 3 fats, it is less calorie dense. When you see a pizza ad, dopamine hit. Smell pizza wafting out from the pizza joint, dopamine hit. Your kid suggests pizza for dinner, dopamine hit. Your rational brain fights back with “that’s not healthy, your on a diet, you had pizza last night, etc.” But the more dopamine your VTA pumps out to your nucleus accumbens, the more will power you need to overcome the urge to give in and say “Fuck it, let’s get pizza.” If you’re well rested, it’s earlier in the day, and you give yourself space and time to make the decision, your rational brain may win. If it’s dinner time after a long day of work, a fight with your partner, and you’re walking past your local pizza joint with your kid nagging you… good luck.

Here’s the rub — your subconscious mind never gives up — it runs its survival code the same way, every day, all day. But your rational decision making varies greatly, depending on your energy level, mood, environment, how much sleep you had, etc. If you could bet on the long-term fight between your subconscious brain vs. your rational brain, your subconscious brain is going to win over the long run, unless you stack the deck in your rational brain’s favor.

So let’s stack the deck, because in a highly-palatable, calorie-dense world, controlling your dopamine signaling is critical for health. Your task is to design a routine and environment that protects you from your subconscious brain that is hell bent on highly palatable, calorie-dense food. But fuck, it’s hard! All the advertising. All the fast food joints you pass on the street. Soooo many sensory signals invading your brain, trying to trigger a dopamine hit in hopes you’re rational brain is too weak to resist. Knowing this, here are theee things you can do:

1. Don’t store highly-palatable, calorie-dense food in the your home, car, work area, purse, etc. so there is nothing to reach for when you are triggered. In evolutionary terms, having packaged food accessible at all times is a very recent phenomenon, so design it out of your life. Surround yourself with the food your rational brain wants you to eat.

2. Plan your meals. That can be as easy as setting a menu for the week so you have the intention of eating well (not dopamine proof but better than nothing) or as involved as meal prep so you intentionally cook what you are going to eat and it is right there for you (not perfect but much more dopamine proof).

3. Cheat! Please fucking cheat, but schedule and plan it. Have pizza night, get some ice cream, binge on chips, but do it on your terms, not at the whim of all the dopamine triggers that surround you every day, all day. Once you’re done, you’re done and you get back to your regularly scheduled eating program.

Space and time are your greatest assets. While dopamine hits come often in our culture, they aren’t constant so you can ride out the storm. The more you ride them out, the more you can mute their effect. If pizza is right in front of you when you get a hit and feel the urge, it takes a really disciplined person to walk away. Testing yourself by keeping pizza in the fridge to see if you can say “No” is just dumb. Get it out of the house, and that means no frozen pizzas in the freezer.

That’s the straight dope on Dopamine. Next up, Insulin…

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