Food as reward-background for understanding

According to information gleaned from my Medifast manual, I'm learning a lot about the brain and the role it plays in obesity:

Have you ever felt "driven to eat" or "not satisfied"? Reward deficiency syndrome is a problem with the brain's pleasure mechanisms, essential to feeling like we've had enough to eat. Some people are born with fewer "pleasure receptors" in the brains. These receptors are signaled by "pleasure molecules" to let our brains know when we're content and satisfied. So for those of us born with a shortage of them, eating an ice cream cone might not be as pleasurable as it would be for someone without a reward deficit. We feel the need for a bowl of ice cream.

A muted pleasure response to ice cream and other yummy, rich roods does not make us want them less. Rather than saying no to the ice cream, we eat more of it in an attempt to get the pleasurable feeling of eating something that tastes good.

Dopamine is an example of a"feel good" pleasure molecule neurotransmitter that gets released in response to rewarding activities, including "natural" rewards (e.. love, reproduction, eating) and "unnatural" rewards (e.g. compulsive overeating, drug & alcohol abuse, gambling).

Dopamine molecules have to attach themselves to the pleasure receptors located in various places around the brain. If the pleasure receptors don't work like they should, the reward signal is diminished, driving people to get a "fix" of something in order to feel good. For the obese the fix may come in the form of overeating. Dopamine has been shown to be the primary controller of hunger and the motivation to eat and is also involved in the "rush" of food, drink, sex, and drugs of abuse.

People prone to obesity may have a tendency to overeat, especially sweetened, high-fat foods, in an attempt to stimulate our short supply of pleasure receptors. However, when we attempt to stimulate these blunted dopamine receptors by overeating to compensate for the reward deficit, we desensitize the few receptors we have, and make bad eating behaviors even worse...a vicious cycle.

There's also genetic evidence of this in the "Taq 1 A1 allele" genetic code. With this code, we are more likely to be obese or to have substance abuse disorders like cocaine, alcohol, or opioid abuse. Obese individuals with this genetic code may be prone to abusing food in a way similar to how an addict or alcoholic abuses drugs and/or alcohol.

Finally, I understand these cravings and not feeling full or rewarded. I understand how and why I need to work with this issue. The type of weight I carry causes inflammation and swelling in the joints, leading to arthritis, coronary problems and cancers. I never understood this before. I hope it not too late to reverse some of the damage done over the past 30+ years.