Understanding Food Pleasure Response, Your Metabolism, and How Teas Can Help
"Food Addiction" and the Pleasure Response
The human body is designed to think hard, work hard, and then find a way to experience fun, happiness or pleasure. This is why you often feel hungry when you are happy and hungry when you are tired or under pressure.
With stresses and tight schedules being the norm, and less leisure time being accepted as a given, quick food pleasures are becoming the go to when it comes to finding pleasure or happiness.
The word 'food addiction" is not a clinically accurate term. Addiction is usually linked to specific substances that create a high pleasure response, coupled with physiological as well as psychological dependencies. The carbohydrates or fats in food are known to create high pleasure responses in people who consume them, but do not have the power to create the same physiological dependencies in your body to actually qualify as an addiction.
However, food does create a happiness or pleasure surge that often creates a psychological dependency that chronically impairs your body's ability to distinguish between needing real nourishment and needing a pleasure response.
Binge eating is your body frantically wanting hit after hit of the pleasure response derived from tasty food. It is also craving the sensation of "feeling full". That feeling signifies happiness to the body and releases endorphins that help you calm down.
In order to limit your desire to binge you have to learn to simulate this response using other triggers or stimuli available that have less of an impact on your health and weight.
Your Metabolism
A study by the Complex Disease Laboratory found that people who are obese or overweight and show signs of having a partial compulsion/addiction to food, had certain metabolic characteristics too.
If their metabolic rates were slowed down by any impairment, whether it was from hormonal changes, or from lack of sleep or other variables, they tend to crave pleasure derived from food.
You need to be aware of your metabolic levels to understand why you could crave a heightened sense of pleasure from food.
The slower your metabolism, the higher your need to reprogram your pleasure response.
How tea can help
Tea combines many characteristics that can help you combat both food related addictive dependencies and a slow metabolism.
The strong aroma and taste of various teas, whether sweet or strong and earthy, can be used to replace similar satisfying traits that carbohydrates and fats invoke in the body. It is simply a question of you experimenting with different tastes till you find something that speaks to your palate.
Adding healthy sweeteners to your favorite tea, such as raw honey or brown sugar, can be a lower calorie reward alternative to reaching for whatever dessert is within your reach.
Furthermore all teas that come from the plant Camellia Sinensis (Black, Green and White tea) have a type of Flavanoid called Catechins that may help boost your metabolism and improve your ability to break down fat.
Lipton teas that work best
Lipton has a wide range of Black and Green Tea picked from some of the finest tea farms in the world. They also source from sustainable farming practices, using ecologically responsible methods.
If you are looking for amazing taste, a healthy dose of Catechins, paired with the magic nutritional qualities of cardamom, you need to incorporate Lipton's Black Tea with Cardomom into your new "Feel Good" routine. Not only will its taste bring you the satisfaction and enjoyment of a sophisticated desert, it will add magnesium, calcium, potassium, iron and phosphorus to your intake.
Other varieties that are metabolism boosting and satisfying are; Lipton's Black Tea with Mint, Green Tea, Green Tea with Apple and Green Tea with Mint.