Do Da Food Do Da Foods

by Kathleen DesMaisons, PhD

    I have been seeing an interesting theme in the community over the past few weeks. A number of people have been asking how they can raise beta endorphin, raise serotonin, activate dopamine. Some of these folks are fairly new to the program and some are old timers who are on step seven and thinking about deepening.

    For those of you early in the program, the trick is not to think about BE, serotonin and DA, but to think about the FOOD. If you try to tweak what you do for a given effect, you will derail yourself. It is like going back to taking this for that, and something else for another symptom. All of what we are trying to do is move you away from fixing into healing.

    The miracle is very simple. Your body will adjust and balance things if it has what it needs to do that. Your body has a cellular memory of things being balanced and if you help it with what you eat, it will go, 'oh, yes!!!' And move in into change. Honestly, your body is smarter than you have thought. Your body has really worked to serve you in spite of your meanderings and addiction. Given half a chance, it will be your ally and guide. Your task is to do the food.

    Doing the food is our code for doing the steps, carefully and with attention. It means breakfast on time with enough protein for your body, a complex carbohydrate. Lunch on time with the right foods. Dinner on time with the right foods. It means eating salad and vegetables and whole grains. It means going off sugar. It means journaling. The amazing part is that the core program works on healing. You do the food, and things change.

    It gets interesting when step 7 people say, "OK, now I am ready to raise BE or to stop spiking DA." And they try to start 'doing' all sorts of extras. And then they feel flat and out of sorts. Some of that comes post detox. Life without sugar takes some getting used to. So the ole addict brain says, "OK, I need to take something, I need to do something."

    But...they don't remember that they forgot to journal every day, or that they are eating 'program' food but having cheese with every meal, and skin off French fries twice a day as a brown. They don't remember that lunch is late and dinner is later. The food is OK, so they think they are 'doing the food' so it must be BE or dopamine.

    And it sounds so boring, so stubborn if I say, "Go back with a beginner's mind. Refine your food, work with your journal. And when that is all steady, exercise every day in a consistent manner. NO spiking, no big bursts of exercise and then collapse. Just every day, consistent. And learn to sit quietly, I would call this meditation, just sitting quietly for 20 minutes morning and night. Do not worry about BE and dopamine. Just do life."

    But here is the kicker. If you do this, when you do this, some miracle continues. It is not dramatic and all at once, but one day you turn around and realize that NOTHING of your old life is the same. You haven't had to fix it all. It just happened. Now, I totally get it that this idea seems outrageous. It seems way too simple. But I have been listening. I have read maybe 500,000 postings, that would be a half a million comments. And you know what, the miracle comes. It comes in the same way, over and over and over again. It doesn't matter if you have a PhD or have not graduated from high school. It doesn't matter how old you are, or what sex you are or whether you are a Christian or not, or a Jew or not. It doesn't matter whether you are happily married, have a gay or lesbian relationship, live alone, love dogs, or cats or birds. It doesn't matter where you live or what you do. If you do the food, and exercise and meditate, you get the same miracle.

    So this is an invitation to fuss less about your brain and more about your journal. We can do the brain stuff for fun (and I love it as much as you do), but the brain stuff is not the program. Breakfast is.