The science behind losing weight
Imagine you are eating healthily and enjoying it. Consider you can notice when you are full and satisfied after a meal.
These changes can be made easily and naturally as you learn about the power of your mindset and go beyond your current thinking patterns and behaviours around food.
The power of thought
The power of how you think about the food you are eating can go beyond thoughts and actually impact on the hunger messages your body gives back to you.
Consider the following study conducted by Dr Alia Crum at Yale University to illustrate the power of your mindset on how your body interprets the food you eat. It is not only your behaviour that can help you lose weight but your belief system that can have an impact too.
Dr Crum carried out a simple milkshake study and asked the participants to taste the milkshakes at 2 separate time points separated by a week during which physiological responses were measured.
Both groups were told the first milkshake was high indulgent, high in fat and caloric content. At the second time point they were told it was a low calorie, low fat diet shake. In fact the milkshake was the same given each time and contained an average number of calories and fat for a shake.
The participants then had their hunger hormones measured. Hunger hormones are key to the messages our stomach sends to our brain. The ghrelin hormone encourages us to seek out food and then drops if we get the right amount of calories, giving that feeling of being satiated.
When participants thought they were consuming the high fat, indulgent milkshake, ghrelin levels dropped at a 3 fold rate stronger than at a rate when they thought they were consuming the lower calorie shake. This tells us that the body was responding as if participants had consumed more food even though they had consumed the same shake.
The impact of our mindset on how our body responds to the food we eat
This study was important as it showed if a person thinks the food or drink they are consuming is ‘healthy’ it can leave the body feeling physiologically hungry and not satiated. We may believe that by telling ourselves that we are eating ‘healthy’ food this helps us to lose weight, however this is too simplistic.
As this study showed, when the participants thought they were eating a healthy shake it left their bodies feeling physiologically hungry and not satiated.
In the interests of losing weight you can easily use your mindset to help you to feel full and not to go seeking more food from the cupboard.
The key is to think about the well balanced meal you are eating as being indulgent as this will send the messages to your stomach that you can be satisfied from the food you are eating and your hunger hormones will easily respond.
How your brain responds to the mixed messages about food and how this can easily be changed
When you eat, your brain produces dopamine, the pleasure hormone. This pleasurable feeling that you get should see food as a pleasurable activity but for many of us the messages around food are mixed, as some foods are labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
This then creates a muddle of thoughts and feelings around food. It is hard to go against such a strong pleasure hormone and no wonder that often we eat more food when feeling low in mood or stressed, to bring comfort.
However, studies have shown that the more we eat, the less pleasure we get from the food, as overindulgence leads to a lower production of dopamine.
There are a lot of pressures and circumstances in life that can lead us to comfort eat and so what can help break this cycle?
Part of the answer is to make more decisions around the food you eat from the prefrontal cortex (PFC) rather than the emotionally driven part of the brain that encourages you to follow your usual habits and behaviours.
How to stop comfort eating
Again science can back up this recommendation. A scientific study was carried out on 13 women of average weight. Their emotional state was measured using an MRI scanner. The women were then shown high and low calorific foods. The less happy women were more interested in the high calorie food whilst the group of women that were observed as being happier in the MRI scanner were more interested in the low calorie foods.
This shows that our mood is a clever determinant of our food choices.
Thankfully we can easily create more dopamine by seeking out positive activities and positive interaction. Imagine waking up tomorrow and finding more activities that you enjoy with people you naturally have fun with, to allow your body to experience pleasure and happiness more easily.
This change in activity will then lead you to be less driven by the primitive emotional part of the brain to seek comfort in food and you can make food decisions from a more healthy assessment of what your body needs.
Reduce your stress and lose weight at the same time
When we are stressed our body releases cortisol to improve focus and concentration to deal with the crisis at hand, this rise in cortisol will burn the food we eat.
However, if the stress continues past an immediate crisis or event and becomes chronic stress, then the body will flick the switch from burning the food to storing fat in visceral fat around the abdomen.
This abdominal fat contains cortisol receptors, and so the more visceral fat we have the more cortisol receptors we have and so the more stress we can manage. This becomes a negative cycle as the stress leads to more comfort eating and more visceral fat is stored.
Thankfully this switch can be naturally reversed as you find more helpful ways to reduce stress levels and find more time to feel relaxed, calm and more in control.
This change in approach to life events and workload for example can lead you to cope with life better using your prefrontal cortex and make proper assessments of situations and notice things that are going well. This will then lead to less stress and your eating habits can be more balanced and less responsive to stress.
Sleeping yourself to a healthier weight
Sleep is our ally when wanting to lose weight. When we don’t get enough sleep our hunger hormones are not working as they should.
Let’s look at those hunger hormones again.
Leptin tells you when you are satisfied and don’t need to eat any more. Ghrelin sends the message that you are not satisfied and need to eat more. Dr Matthew Walker, sleep scientist, explains that studies have shown that in sleep deprived people these hunger hormones go in the wrong direction. Leptin is decreased and so you lose the satisfaction hormone. Ghrelin increases telling you to eat more.
Dr Walker describes that overall when you have under-slept you are 20-30% more hungry. You may have noticed that the food you crave when you are very tired is more of the carb, stodgy and sugary kind and this is because your body is craving these foods.
You also aren’t burning many more calories if you are awake longer, those that you are burning don’t equate to the extra you are probably eating.
You also become more impulsive around food choices as your prefrontal cortex that allows more proper assessments of situations is inhibited when sleep deprived.
When you are not getting sufficient sleep your body holds onto fat and gives up what you want to keep, which is muscle.
A bonus to getting more sleep is that you then exercise more intensely, the caloric challenge that you pose to your body is higher.
You may be thinking if there are any quick fixes to help with depth and quality of sleep? Recommendations are:
Reviewing your sleep hygiene routine and aiming to get between 7-9 hours of sleep each night
Reducing artificial light between the hours of 11pm to 4am
Check your caffeine intake and when this is consumed during the day. Caffeine is still 25% active in the body up to 10 hours after consumption.
For more info around sleep please see my previous Sleep Journal
Stress can also impact your quality of sleep, another reason to find better ways to manage chronic stress. Meditation, exercise, self-hypnosis are just some ways to reduce stress.
If you would like to find out more about how Hypnotherapy can help you to lose weight, contact me
