Cooking for myself taught me excitement and happiness aren't the same thing

For a while I was obsessed with fermented food. It's good for you, so I made and ate everything like I was possessed — miso, natto, nukazuke, fermented this, fermented that.

And what happened? I started farting nonstop and my gut got bloated. I don't know if "over-fermentation" is even a real word, but my gut was clearly telling me, "You're taking in too much." Even good stuff, overdone, is just excess. That was the first thing my body taught me.

So I rethought how I ate. Kept the fermented food, but started paying attention to fiber and protein. And cutting sugar as much as I could. Food from outside almost always uses sugar, so I started cooking without it, and I cooked for myself more and more. Before I knew it, I'd lost weight.

Fix your gut, move your body. That alone really does make you lose weight.

As I kept cooking, something interesting started happening. I could kind of tell whether it was my brain wanting something or my gut. What the brain wants is usually sugar. The second something sweet catches my eye, my brain starts yelling "I want that." But the gut couldn't care less. I looked into it — turns out sugar is like nicotine or alcohol, something the brain takes in as a hit right away. It's the quick fix, so no wonder it's hard to resist.

That said, I'm not trying to make sugar the villain. The body needs carbs, but you get enough of that from carbohydrates like rice. I just keep the sugar from getting out of hand.

So then the question is, what does the gut actually want? Where I felt that clearly was a bowl of miso soup — fermented miso, ingredients picked for fiber, and no instant dashi powder.

I take the heads and guts out of dried sardines, blend them into fish powder, and use that for the stock. For ingredients: komatsuna, onion, shiitake. This was unbelievably good. A different kind of thing from the "whoa" rush you get off something sweet. It fills you slowly, from somewhere deep in the body. Ah, this is the happiness that wells up from the body, I thought.

That's when it clicked. Excitement and happiness are two different things. Sugar gives you excitement. Comes fast, fades fast, and you want it again. Miso soup gives you happiness. Not flashy, but it lingers, slow and warm. They say the gut is the second brain, and I've heard a lot of the hormones that make you feel happy get sent from the gut. I don't know if that's true. But it doesn't clash with what my body actually feels.

I'm not knocking instant dashi. A lot of it has sugar, so I don't use it at home. But the miso soup you get outside made with dashi powder is good too. Less "happiness," more just plainly tasty. And that's fine, that's its own thing.

I'd probably been mistaking excitement for happiness this whole time. Drowned out by the hit of sugar, I just couldn't hear my body's voice. Once I stripped away what I didn't need, the happiness I must have known all along came through clearly again.

So I decided this is how I eat. Not what the brain loudly craves, but what the gut quietly asks for. That was all it came down to.

• What the brain wants is the "excitement" of sugar; what the gut wants is the "happiness" that's good for the body

• Excitement comes fast and fades fast. Happiness lingers, slow.

• Strip away what you don't need, and the happiness the body knew all along comes through