S2E50 – ADHD, Dopamine & Emotional Eating + guest Kamy Moussavi

Season 2

Julie Legg is joined by Kamy Moussavi, former engineer and founder of Step Together, who brings a powerful and personal perspective to the conversation around ADHD, emotional eating, and the brain’s relationship with food. Kamy shares his own childhood experience with obesity, restrictive dieting, and undiagnosed ADHD, revealing how traditional approaches like calorie counting failed to address the real drivers behind his behaviour. 

Together, they unpack the critical link between dopamine, emotional regulation, and eating habits, particularly in ADHD brains. This conversation shifts the narrative away from willpower and discipline, and toward curiosity, compassion, and understanding the root causes behind behaviour. It’s an eye-opening episode for parents navigating food struggles with their children and for anyone who has ever felt stuck in cycles of guilt, shame, or emotional eating.

KEY POINTS FROM THE EPISODE:

  • Emotional eating as a dopamine-driven behaviour in ADHD
  • Why calorie counting and restriction often fail long-term
  • The connection between ADHD, dopamine deficiency, and food
  • Bulimia, binge eating, sneaky eating, and shame cycles
  • Why weight is a symptom, not the root problem
  • The role of anxiety, loneliness, and boredom in eating habits
  • How shame drives secrecy and worsens behaviours
  • The impact of environment vs relying on willpower
  • Dopamine regulation and over-stimulation from food and technology
  • Why removing food too quickly can backfire
  • Family dynamics and parental influence on eating behaviours
  • Redefining “healthy” beyond diet culture

LINKS:

TRANSCRIPT

KAMY: At the very core is to see the excess weight as a symptom, not the problem itself and to become curious. What is all the conditions that are leading to this? Is it simply the fact that we have too much of the bad stuff in the house and our child has ADHD and they go eat it incessantly? Is it because us as parents we still have mindsets or beliefs about food or relationship with food or relationship with each other that is affecting the kids? Is it something else? Is it anxiety? Is it loneliness? It could be many things but look at the weight as the symptom not the thing itself.

JULIE: Welcome to Season 2 of ADHDifference. I’m your host, Julie Legg, ADHD advocate, author of The Missing Piece (a woman’s guide to understanding, diagnosing, and living with ADHD), and an unapologetic doer of many things. This season, we’re turning up the volume with a global lineup of brilliant guests, bringing their lived experiences, insights, research, strategies, and resources. And of course, along with a healthy dose of humour and humility. Whether you’re neurodivergent yourself or just curious, there’s something here for every curious brain. Let’s dive in. My guest is Kamy Moussavi, a former engineer who stepped away from a traditional career after recognizing how little real guidance parents receive about emotional regulation, dopamine, and eating behaviours. As a child, Kamy struggled with obesity despite doing everything he was told – calorie counting, restrictive diets, and multiple weight loss programs. But none of those approaches addressed the real drivers behind the behaviour. Kamy works with families to rebuild their relationship with food and health through education structure and sustainable habits designed for real life and ADHD challenges. Today we’re exploring the connection between ADHD, emotional eating, and the brain’s relationship with food. Thank you for coming on the show, Kamy. Welcome. [Thank you for having me, Julie. It’s a pleasure.] Great. Before we talk about the science behind emotional eating, I’d love to start with your story and what was your relationship with food like growing up?

KAMY: The first word that comes to mind is ‘complicated’ because on the surface it looked a lot like I was just a normal kid who liked to over-eat. And everyone from a young age kind of gave me that identity. It’s like, oh look, it’s Kamy. He’s like the chubby kid who loves to eat. Let’s give him more food. Right? All my friends in school would be always like pointing fingers at me and giving me the food that they had in excess. And I was like almost everyone’s kind of just garbage disposal. Right? So it was very interesting. I was when I was young, I thought I just I was just like greedy and I loved food. But looking back, I see that it wasn’t the case at all. Not at all. Looking back, I see that it was mainly just I was eating out of a lot of anxiety. I was eating because food was the only way that my mum knew how to make me feel good. To be honest, it was also celebrations. A lot of cultures have food as their main way of just celebrating and having joy. Birthday parties, big events, all those things. But mainly for me for what comes to mind is those days where I would be eating in pure solitude late into the night just trying to kind of suffocate everything. So that’s that was my relationship with food growing up. As a kid you were put onto a weight loss program or several and you were taught to count calories which is a common thing and restrict food from a young age. So again looking back what do you see that those approaches didn’t understand about your brain emotions and regulation. So to give just a little bit of context and this is a very common story. We have a lot of parents who come to our program at step together after they’ve tried everything. And just like that, my mum also tried everything when I was a kid. She brought me to dietitians, nutritionists, and eventually weight loss programs like Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, fat camps. And every time we tried these things, they would all be kind of the same method with different flavours, right? It would be restricting your calories. It would be going on a meal plan. It would be doing excessive exercise. And as an engineer, this is like it made sense to me. Calories in, calories out, right? You just need to solve this equation. Eat less than you burn. And that’s how you lose weight. And yeah, it made sense. And every time I did this, I lost a ton of weight. But very quickly, a couple months later, I would just gain everything back. So the main thing that these approaches didn’t really solve was the reason why I was over-eating. And as soon as those programs ended, I would go back to the same why. And the why for me and for many people, it’s different, right? We don’t have a there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Some people just like yourself, just like myself, boredom eating, ADHD, your brain’s just looking for dopamine and it’s the quickest hits of dopamine that it can find and it go just goes for it. For a lot of people, it’s deeper stuff, trauma. We have a lot of children in the program. They’re born with four different kinds of drugs in their bloodstream and just their way of coping with all of the emotions that they just pile on through life is food. And thankfully, it’s food. A lot of people grow into other kinds of addictions very quickly in life and we’ve seen that as well. Right. So, it’s a fine balance. It’s like looking at this lens of yeah, the child has excess weight, but why do they have excess weight? And it’s unfortunate, but most doctors, they don’t really have the time to go look deeper. All they can do is prescribe. Here’s a meal plan. Here’s what you should do. Go eat an apple, not the cookie. Right? Obvious stuff. But we never go deeper as to why we consistently choose the cookie over the apple. And many people don’t realize how closely ADHD and dopamine regulation can really influence our eating behaviours.

JULIE: And so, can you explain what’s actually happening in our brains when someone with ADHD turns to food for comfort or stimulation? What’s going on in our brains at that point?

KAMY: So this to me was extremely it was beautiful to find this because it was directly applicable to myself and as an engineer I was always looking for what is what was making me different as to all the other people who didn’t have the same issue and it was this ADHD. That I was undiagnosed until my mid20s because a lot of kids we see as well today they’re fine. They’re doing good in school. They’re people-pleasers. They don’t really have the problems that a typical ADHD kid with impulsivity and hyperactivity would have. So I kind of went under the radar. But later on, yeah, I had the same issues. I could, I was more the inattentive type, very much in my head. Whenever people would talk to me, I’d be just like gone. I’m thinking about 10 different things. And eventually, I got diagnosed for ADHD. I was even on stimulants for a short while. And when I went on stimulants, it’s like, okay, I kind of just feel normal for once. Wow. Right. And at the core of it, it’s that the stimulant is dopamine and norepinephrine. And it’s what your brain is missing when you have ADHD. You have a deficit in dopamine. And now the connection with food is also extremely simple. But I’m shocked to this day how little people talk about this. No one is really talking about the connection with food and dopamine and ADHD. But it’s exactly that. Food is one of the fastest ways for your brain to get dopamine. But the tricky thing is it’s not true for everybody. You know how some people, I think you had a guest who talked about how alcohol can be an issue for some but not for others if they have ADHD? That’s entirely based on their genetic predisposition. Some people have a gene that makes them get more dopamine from alcohol. So they get really trapped into it. They have a sip of alcohol, they become euphoric and they’re gone. Some people, like myself, alcohol does nothing. Like I could fall asleep. I couldn’t care less. But for me, food does that same thing. I eat. For me, it’s sweets. I have a bar of ice cream. My brain goes, “Wow.” And then I can’t stop. I have to eat the whole box, right? And especially when you combine this with emotional stuff that we’re going to talk about, I’m sure it becomes even more complicated. So, it’s that it’s just a combination of ADHD that predisposes you from having a deficit of dopamine and you need to look for it in the environment and food being the fastest way that your brain, if you’re predisposed to it, to get it.

JULIE: Kamy, I was very excited to have you on the show. Absolutely. To talk about food and you’re right, it’s something that we haven’t yet discussed to date. I wrote a wee book a few years ago called The Missing Piece and it did touch on eating disorders. And I don’t have the statistics right in front of me but it’s alarming the higher percentage of those with ADHD that have issues with bulimia, anorexia, over-eating or eating compulsive disorders. It really is extremely high compared with neurotypicals. So, I’m so, so glad that we’re addressing it today.

KAMY: We weren’t even predicting this or marketing for ADHD back then. Our program has 80% of the kids having ADHD. And this is a program for children’s weight loss exclusively. There’s nothing else about it. So, the connection there’s at least the correlation is really strong. There was also a study way back in 2013 showing that children with ADHD are four times more likely to develop obesity for the same reason. And to even tie it back to something personal, and I’m glad you wrote about this, but I personally also struggled with bulimia. So, a lot of my nights where I would go over-eat, it would be… it would be crazy. I tell this to parents all the time, and they’re like, “Yeah, okay, finally, it makes sense.” I would eat in excess. I would go make myself throw up. I would come back and continue eating because my brain wasn’t done getting dopamine. It was just the stomach couldn’t handle it anymore and then the cycle would repeat and repeat.

JULIE: My issues also, while I didn’t have bulimia or anorexia I did put on a lot of weight and over the last 18 months I’ve lost 30 kilos. So I’m down to where I should be but I’m very, very mindful that was based on calories in calories out but I’m very mindful that that is a process and one has to stick to it very, very much to continue that good work or to maintain that good work. So I’m all ears! So let’s continue. For parents listening, how can emotional eating begin to develop in children? I mean what early patterns of behaviours might signal that food is becoming tied to emotions or regulation?

KAMY: There’s a lot of little signs, but there’s also big signs. The simplest sign is if you take away or if you start even mentioning the idea of restriction of a snack, does your kid throw a tantrum? Do they go crazy? Do they have an emotional response outside an outsized emotional response to that? But a lot of stuff is we talk about emotional eating often but a lot of emotional eating is just boredom eating, right? You’re coming back from school, your brain is you know looking for a moment of stimulation because you’re having a dull moment. You’re going to the pantry, you’re get grabbing some snacks. Maybe you’re pairing that with an iPad or an Xbox right and you’re eating. But on the other hand of that it’s emotional eating surfaces often through binge eating and sneaky eating, especially at night when your emotions are heightened. And to tie this to also ADHD and how the brain works, your frontal lobe, which is your brakes, the brakes of your brain that can suppress emotions and also suppress your impulses outside, they’re strong in the morning, but they’re weaker in the evening. So at night, your emotions naturally come up. And often children, even before experiencing an emotion, they’re going to food. And for me, this is even to this day because of the association was so strong as a kid, it’s still too true today. If I’m going through a difficult time for the business or personally, my brain, the first thing that it screams is, “Oh, you know what? You’re hungry.” It doesn’t even tell me I have an emotion. It’s like, “Oh, hunger. Hunger. Interesting. Okay, why do I need to go eat an apple right now?” And for me, it was always fruits, right? When I was a kid, it’s like the quick hit of sugar was a really good source of dopamine. So the signs are as a parent sometimes even harder to see and we work through this with parents in the program. It’s first you take away the suppressants. You take away the thing that they’re using to suppress their emotions which is the highly dopaminergic foods, the abundance of technology and then you have a chance to actually see the emotion that was underneath. That’s the most surprising thing. Two, three months into the program, parents tell us, “How come my kid is saying for the first time that they’re anxious? Oh, they’re telling me that they’re lonely. Why? Why is that? Why now?” Often it’s because they were they were always feeling that way. It’s just they had no their only outlet was food. And now that they don’t have that anymore, they have to express it. They’re looking for something to cope with it.

JULIE: That makes so much sense. You mentioned before as well as binge eating, you talked about sneaky eating. And I know about sneaky eating because when you discover lolly wrappers tucked in behind a cushion or you have a chocolate bar and have shame and guilt wrapped around that. And so you dispose of that chocolate bar before anyone can discover it and you know, look at you sideways as to where did that appear from? So yeah this sneaky eating I know all about that. Talking of which, we’re talking about guilt and shame. So what role does that play shame play in this cycle? And let’s take it back to children. Shame with children who may be already feeling different because of their ADHD.

KAMY: So, two things come to mind. The first one is the quickest way for your kid to start having sneaky behaviour is to give them any reason for them to hide this from you. In other words, to make them feel even just a little bit ashamed. And it’s in the very subtle things. It’s not often parents that are like, “Hey, you should not be eating. Like, stop eating.” It’s not that clear. It’s like sometimes even saying, “Hey, haven’t you already had enough?” Or, “Didn’t you just eat already?” And the kids like, “Oh.” And in their expression, they can’t really express this. But what they’re experiencing is they have an emotional need. They’re going to food for it. They’re feeling ashamed for it. So, they have to figure out a way to get this emotional need met without the parents preventing them from doing it. It’s not that, oh, I just want to have a lolly wrapper or just I want to eat some chocolate. Often it’s that like for them it they experience it that way, but really what’s underneath is either the stimulation, they’re looking for dopamine, which is a strong need as well, or it’s an emotional response to anxiety or loneliness or whatever other emotion. They’re going to food, they feel ashamed. Now, they start sneaking. They’re not going to eat in front of you as a parent. They’re going to start hiding it. So, when I was a kid, I knew it was so funny. I knew exactly where my mum would hide the chocolates, and she would keep changing the spots, but I could almost predict her. I could know when’s the next spot that she would go put it. I would go eat the entire box, and often she would forget. She would forget for months that she had hidden these chocolate boxes. And then eventually, she goes to that, you know, hiding place and she sees that there’s nothing left. And I’m putting it on my brother. I’m not admitting that it’s me that ate it. I’m like, “No, it’s it must be someone else. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Right? But at the core of it, it’s that if I truly felt that I wasn’t even allowed to express this behaviour in front of my parents, I wouldn’t feel any shame. Like I would eat and my parents would be okay with it. And that’s better because at least as a parent, you can see the behaviour and you can monitor it, right? And you can start making some changes. But if you make them feel ashamed and they start hiding and sneaking, a lot of parents like they discover when we work with them that the kids doubling up on lunch and breakfast and they had no idea or they’re going around and they’re like after school this which also exactly what I would do. They’re going to the candy store buying a bunch of candies, finish it all before they come home and you can it’s much harder to address it that way. Right? So that’s one part. The other part is shame itself is a very strong emotion. And if you feel a lot of shame, what you want to do is eat, right? Because it’s an emotion that you want to suppress. And maybe I didn’t make it clear as to why exactly eating leads to emotional suppression. Food doesn’t just give dopamine. Food also gives serotonin and a bunch of other stuff, right? But food in your brain acts essentially as a SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor). So the drug that people get prescribed for anxiety and depression, it goes straight into your frontal lobes. Your frontal lobes become stronger. They have more top-down suppression over the amygdala and the emotion is suppressed at least for a short while. So that’s how it works.

JULIE: Wow. You mentioned about the lunch boxes or maybe I was thinking lunch boxes in my head, and I know this is ADHD aside as a parent you might look at your child’s lunch box and “You didn’t eat the apple or you didn’t eat the ham sandwiches I packed for you.” And if you say that often enough, what the child may do is actually throw them straight in the rubbish bin. They don’t like ham sandwiches, but they don’t want to displease their parent who made the lunch. And so you think all is well because the lunchbox comes back home empty and you’re none the wiser. Meanwhile, that child is, you know, maybe sneaking other sweet foods or going to the store or buying candy as you talked about or actually not eating at all, which is another story altogether. They’re very, very interesting. This little subtle things we may say really can dampen our child’s ability to freely express themselves and their emotions. So, thank you for that.

KAMY: If I may, also, I think it’s really important. A lot of parents come to us, they’re very confused as to why their kid won’t eat the apple or the ham sandwich, right? Picky eating is also very commonly associated to ADHD. Some kids have such a strong ADHD but not the predisposition to get dopamine from food. So they become picky eaters. They get their dopamine from other sources. They get it from technology. They get it from socialization, from physical touch. Couple of different ways to get dopamine. And because food doesn’t give them much, they’re just like, “No, I don’t want this at all.” Right? Especially if not if it’s not dopaminergic food. For example, if you offer something like very simply potatoes, chicken, broccoli as a lunch, this is extremely boring. This is not much dopamine, right? They’re not going to touch it. They’re going to want the fries. They’re going to want the chicken nuggets. They’re going to want the goldfish. They want the highly dopaminergic food. But if you don’t give them that, they’re actually a lot of kids just don’t eat. Especially if they’re on stimulants and they get their dopamine artificially, right? And then yes, if you start shaming them or making them feel as to they should eat, they’re going to start trading it. They’re going to start throwing it away. They’re going to start doing a bunch of stuff.

JULIE: Very interesting. Your mission through your Step Together business is to help parents break these cycles early, right? So what’s one shift in understanding that can immediately change how a parent approaches food and emotions and behaviour in their home?

KAMY: At the core of this, this is the understanding that I wish my own parents had. There’s only so much a child can do, especially when it comes to ADHD. One of the very early things that we teach parents is that a child’s frontal lobes, the part of your brain that has impulse control and the part of the brain that has difficulty with dopamine deficiency, this starts developing around 5 to 7 years old and it matures in your mid-20s. And the kids that are in our program, they’re, you know, as young as 5 years old, as old as 17year-old, they’re typically around the 12-year-old age. And they don’t have much frontal lobe development. And parents come to us and they tell us, “Hey, we want to help our kid. Can you tell our kid to stop eating as much?” And we’re like, “Okay, that is a core misunderstanding of what the problem is.” And it’s also tied to shame and restriction because a kid at that age is they’re smart enough to understand, right? A 12-year-old is smart enough to understand, “Yeah, being overweight is not healthy. Eating all this food is not good for me. Yet somehow I can’t stop. Right? All these professionals, all my everyone is telling me, “Hey, you should be able to stop yourself, but I can’t. Like I’m trying so hard.” And so they beat themselves up for it. Right? That’s where the self-esteem issues start becoming really problematic. If your experience of life every day is that you’re a failure and you can’t do something as simple as stop putting food in your mouth, how do you think about yourself for anything else? You can’t do such a simple thing. So that’s a core mentality shift that we help parents make. It’s not on the kid primarily to make these changes. Our work is with the entire family. And often times if we have as little interaction with the kid as possible, that’s even better because they’re not going to feel singled out and targeted. But the parents themselves are the ones primarily communicating with the kids and making the changes that are required to help the kid. And this is also something I wish I truly wish my mum knew because at a young age when she was trying, I mean I knew. She taught me about calorie counting since she was 7 years old. She had a PhD in public health. She knew everything about health but she herself also had bulimia when she was trying to teach me how to overcome my weight issues, funny enough she also told me how to make myself throw up. So that goes a little bit deeper. She passed down her bulimia but on the other hand she also was trying to restrict me and prevent me from overeating. So most of our work is actually with parents themselves. If parents have habits or behaviours whether it’s related to food or anything else, sometimes it’s like parents come to us and their relationship is the thing that needs the most work because the emotional baggage of their relationship is such a burden for the kids. And the kids have no outlet because they don’t want to put more burden on their parents. So they go to food. But sometimes it’s parents themselves. They never overcame their own weight issues. They passed on to their kid or the opposite. They had anorexia and they don’t know how to address it. They don’t want to make the kid feel restricted. Right? So that’s the core thing that we’ve discovered and we help with, it’s the entire family has to change. It can’t be the kid alone. That does make sense?

JULIE: It really does. So, how do parents support healthy relationships with themselves and with their children around food without creating more pressure and more restriction and more guilt? What do they do? Where do they start?

KAMY: It’s interesting because that’s exactly where we start with the parents in the program. The first the very first question we ask them is what is your definition of healthy? Not even just food. Just what is your definition of healthy? And unfortunately, we right now live in a society where that not only is it not often addressed, but when it’s addressed, it’s often mixed up, right? We have this confused idea of, okay, we want… we don’t want to be restricted. We want to have our fun with food. We also want to be healthy and have, you know, good health outcomes. But I’m very comfortable pushing this idea and helping parents realize that junk food is not joy. That a lot of the behaviour that we have today is not truly pleasure. And that comes… I can’t, we can’t really tell parents that we get them to actually experience it. So it’s like one of the typical situations for kids is throwing a big birthday party. a lot of junk food, birthday cake, Doritos, pizza, right? And that’s their experience of fun. That’s how you celebrate the most important day of your life. Is that really joy? Is that really fun? If you as a parent are eating that food and you pay attention to your experience in your body, you feel horrible. You feel pain for like couple days, but you’re giving that to your kids. Sure, they’re going to have fun for 5 seconds, 10 seconds. Like, I’m not going to deny. Pizza, cake, all these things, they feel extremely good. You put them in the your mouth, your brain is exploding with dopamine because your blood sugar spikes. A lot of the foods are designed to be dopaminergic, right? They’re designed to activate these kinds of responses. But is, if you pay enough attention, is the 10 seconds of pleasure, both for you as a parent and for the kid, worth all the pain that you’re seeing? So a lot of times we help parents actually restructure what healthy means for them, right? Does healthy mean just being able to enjoy foods and feel lethargic and go to sleep and feel horrible and just be kind of anionic about life or do you want to have the abundance of energy to put back into your family to feel alive and to see your kid thrive? It all starts with what you put in your mouth. We are literally what we eat, right? So we have to help restructure the entire family, how they think about food and kind of go against the culture, especially in America and to be comfortable to being the ones who don’t have the junk food in the house in abundance because it’s problematic for the kids, especially if they have ADHD. They just can’t help themselves. They go grab dopamine whenever they can. So that’s where we start.

JULIE: After personally losing my weight, the first thing I did was get rid of all triggering foods. Massive. There was nothing less except for food that was healthy for me, high in nutrients, a variety of flavours and foods, natural sweets, fruits and the rest. But actually not having the temptation there was wonderful for me. And I so enjoyed… you said broccoli, potatoes, and chicken before. How boring that is. I love that. That’s my go-to meal now. But I’ve learned to use spices and not sauces, but spices and herbs. And what a difference that can make. Different ways of cooking chicken. So it’s not always, it doesn’t have to be dry and stringy. Could be poached and it can you know, all these beautiful ways of enjoying the food that once upon a time I would consider boring.

KAMY: So three things come to mind while you’re saying that because I’m hearing the parents they’re saying what we have to get rid of everything and we have to eat stringy chicken for the rest of our life. The answer is no. I’m actually I still am a foodie and I because of our genetic predisposition we’re always going to get more pleasure from food. So to tie it back to ADHD, it’s truly understanding this equation. Your brain is constantly looking for cheap sources of dopamine the fastest and with the least amount of effort. If that dopamine is in abundance in your environment, whether it’s food, cocaine, alcohol, whatever it is, it’s going to fall prey into it and it’s just a matter of time. So I’m saying say no to fun foods. I’m just saying make it so that your environment is crafted so that you’re not falling prey to it when you don’t actually want it. Because that’s the experience that a lot of people have. It’s like you go you have the bag of chips, you didn’t actually want it. You feel guilty about it and you beat yourself up for it. But you keep having this. We put it on ourselves and this is often something my parents definitely did this and a lot of parents that we work with have this. We put it on willpower. We’re like, we our kids should have the willpower to say no. But willpower can only go so far, especially if you have ADHD, right? Much easier to not have it in the house. And if you want to have it, for example, if you want to have ice cream, make it an event. Put barrier in front of the dopamine, go for a 30-minute walk, then we have ice cream. So your brain learns that to get this amount of dopamine, you have to put effort. And then it says like, okay, maybe I don’t want the ice cream. Maybe I’m okay with the food at home that’s like a little bit less exciting. So, that’s one thing. The second thing is if you’re a parent listening to this, you have to be very careful to not throw everything out just suddenly. We have a lot of parents who hear this and they’re like, “Okay, I’m excited. I’m on board. I want to do this.” Often children who have especially a lot of weight issues and eating issues, food has been their primary source of dopamine for so long that if you take it away, it’s almost like taking drugs away from an addict. Their withdrawal effects can be pretty significant. I’m not just saying tantrums or just like being an annoying kid. Sometimes children are becoming suicidal. They become really, really, really emotionally troubled. Especially if the root of it was emotional, right? That if there was… they were suppressing a lot of anxiety and loneliness, you take this away, it just floods them and they just don’t know how to handle it. So be careful. We work with parents very closely to make this transition slowly so it doesn’t shock them. Sometimes even despite that, parents are excited, they still do it and we’re like, “Hey, look, observe and maybe introduce back some of those suppressants while we work on the emotions to make this transition a little bit more smooth.” Then the last thing is you mentioned that you now get a lot of excitement from the broccoli and the chicken and the healthier food. So this is very normal. Your brain, if you’re blasting yourself with dopamine, whether it’s from technology or from food, you enter a process called dopamine down-regulation. Your brain start closing some of the dopamine receptors because it’s too much. It’s like, yeah, I can’t take all of this. So you become desensitized. You essentially become desensitized to stimulation. And now whenever you go eat healthy food, you’re like, ah, whatever. This is nothing. It’s not doesn’t even give me much excitement. And this is a very strong connection. If you use too much Tik Tok or Roblox as a kid, you won’t like healthy food. And when you can understand that connection, you’re like, “Oh my god, okay, I had no idea.” They only can experience pleasure from chicken nuggets and fries. But the opposite is also true. If you take away the stimulation, if you let your brain to resensitize dopamine up-regulation instead of down-regulation, then they can start enjoying stuff again. And it’s not just like they can enjoy the food again. They can enjoy going out on a walk instead of playing inside. They can enjoy talking to you as a mum, right? They can enjoy simpler stuff that’s supposed to give them dopamine, but because they were so overstimulated, they couldn’t, right? Sorry, by the way, go I just gave a long sermon, but it’s just it’s things that I wish every parents knew when it comes to these dynamics.

JULIE: No, I think it’s a fabulous conversation and I’m all ears. It really is. It really is a journey and the insightful bit for me really is as you said, it is a long journey especially if you look at food as an addictive source not to just whip it all away and go cold turkey, never mind the pun. That’s yeah, that’s not fun and games. It does take time and not just introducing healthier foods slowly but also working on the emotional regulation at the same time because they’re not in isolation is what you’re telling me. Yeah. They kind of work for good together and work negatively equally together. Wow. Very, very exciting stuff. So tell me about your work. What’s happening at the moment? What’s really meaningful for you or exciting for you right now, other than being on this podcast?

KAMY: Of course. So I was doing this work alone for a long time and in the last year I started expanding and hiring people and having a lot more people work with me to help more parents and now it’s going into transition where I’m coming on this podcast to spread the word and become even more not in the business myself but outside but I’m still training the people inside. And it’s just… it blows my mind to see families come in and out every week. And on one end it’s a it’s a four-month program and it’s a very structured program to help parents go through all these processes. And on one day one end they come with all this anxiety and worries and fears and on the other end they’re just they’re telling us every day not only did their kid lose weight but their marriage was repaired. There so many things are affected by this. Well, while you solve just at the surface just the weight issue, right? And for me to not be involved anymore, but to see it almost like happening on its own, it really appeases my engineering brain because I am still an engineer by education. So, yeah, that’s the most exciting thing to see how far this mission can go and how many parents we can help because I think millions and millions of parents need this.

JULIE: And isn’t it such a healthy way to approach food and health, however it is defined, in a world full of weight loss drugs and the nightmares that we hear of them and the addiction and the necessity to be on them for life, otherwise you’re going to put all the weight back on again. It doesn’t actually solve any of the real issues behind the weight gain in the first place. So, I love the fact doing it naturally and doing the hard work but working on the emotional side I think is really brilliant. Well done you. I think it’s wonderful.

KAMY: Well, I wanted to touch on the GLP1 because a lot of parents come with that question and a lot of parents are on GLP1s while they want their kid to have a different approach. But it also breaks my heart. A lot of parents are asking us because they you can start giving GLP1s to 12year olds and up, right? So they’re asking us, should I put my kid on a GLP1? And I often tell them this, sure, it doesn’t solve the root cause at all. Like most people know that. Most people know that you have to be on the medication for it to maintain the benefits. But these medications for me is it touches a more personal subject. If you by the way now you can take we go in a pill form. If you can take a pill that makes you lose weight and people start giving you attention and they give you love and they give you everything that you didn’t have for most of your life, there’s no way you can come off of it. There’s no way because as soon as you come off of it, you gain all the weight back and all the negative emotion and essentially life you built around it comes back. Right? So, it’s the most, it’s the one of the I think it’s we’re going to hear about this 10-20 years down the line about this being even worse than the pain painkillers. It’s going to fill a void that is very, very dangerous for us to play with.

JULIE: Definitely scary stuff ahead. For parents listening who are worried about their child’s relationship with food or who recognize some of their own childhood experiences in this conversation, what would you most want them to understand?

KAMY: At the very core is to see the excess weight as a symptom, not the problem itself. And to become curious, what is all the conditions that are leading to this? Is it simply the fact that we have too much of the bad stuff in the house and our child has ADHD and they go eat it incessantly? Is it because us as parents, we still have mindsets or beliefs about food or relationship with food or relationship with each other that is affecting the kids? Is it something else? Is it anxiety? Is it loneliness? It could be many things. But look at the weight as the symptom, not the not the thing itself. Because you will very simply like just like I did, go to a nutritionist and dietitian and they’re going to be like, “Yeah, here’s a meal plan. Here’s a weight exercise plan. Go do this and your kid will lose weight.” First of all, you’re going to be like, “Why?” Okay, I could have asked Chat GBT for that, right? You could have easily had that answer. Why is it so hard to stick to? What are the things that come up? Often that’s emotions. Often that’s different priorities. Maybe in this moment it’s important for you that your kid is having the weight issues because they just got bullied and they feel you know torn about it but maybe a month down the line something else becomes the priority. Really become curious what is the really what is the cause behind this and what is causing your child to have accumulated weights and don’t just brush it off as calories in and calories out because I did that for 20 years and it just led to more pain.

JULIE: Wow, there is so much to think about there. Kamy, you have been a wonderful guest today and I really appreciate you joining the show and sharing all this insight. Lots to think about. It’s amazing. So, I wish you so, so well with your adventure with Step Together and wish you all the very best. It sounds like a marvellous program particularly at this stage and age of the world and how we look on health and food. So, thank you so much.

KAMY: Thank you, Julie. It’s really been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

 

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