Let me clarify a bit about these tips, and why they are neurological and psychological.
In today’s modern society, we are obsessed with food. We talk about it, we read about it, we define entire cultures by it, we take pictures of it and post it on social media so others can admire it and of course we eat it…too much of it. In Australia 25.6% of all adult males and 24% of adult females were found to be in the obese category 45.2 % of males and 30.9% of females were overweight.In the US we see a similar story, where it was found that 33.3% males and 35.8% females fall into the category of obese and 37.8% of males and 29.7% of females were overweight. In this map you can see all of the countries that are coloured orange, have adult populations where 24% or more of the (males and/or females) are considered to be obese.
To be clear, in order to be classified as obese, your body mass index (BMI) needs to be above 30 and above and to be considered overweight, 25 and above. For those of you who don’t know BMI is your weight in kg divided by your height in metres, squared. And yes, BMI has a lot of issues in terms of its accuracy and critics who talk about bone density and muscle mass, amongst other things, but lets be honest, if you look around your local supermarket, you are not seeing 6 out of every 10 people that happen to be big boned, body builders. So we have a problem with food.
But this is not an evolutionary problem. That is, it is not our bodies saying, “consume as much food as you can, you don’t know when you next meal may be and where it will come from”. No, this is a control problem, that is compounded by portion sizes of deliciousness and of course lifestyles that are centred around sitting down. Now this may be a simplification of all the contributing factors to this epidemic of obesity, but it serves the purpose of this short video.
So, the truth is that we eat too much because food brings us pleasure and like all pleasurable things, we want lots of it. Its not uncommon that we plan our entire day around the meals of the day. In fact we all know that most social outings that involve meeting friends, have some form of food present.
Ok, so we find food pleasurable, more specifically, we find the sensations that we get and perceptions that we develop from it pleasurable. And a significant part of this is the perception of flavour.
Flavour is the combination of taste and smell. You see, the receptors on our tongues, are only geared to picking up 5 main flavours, which are salty, sweet, sour, bitter and savoury (or Umami). The rest of the complexity that we get from the foods that we consume are smells that we register in the olfactory mucosa, located at the top of the the nasal cavity.
If you would like to put this to the test, simply eat your favourite food while you have a cold and a blocked nose, and you will find that the food is far less enjoyable, or simple, hold your nose tight as you try the next bite of your today’s lunch.This method will not work as well as the blocked nose from a cold because some of the molecules that register on the olfactory mucosa will travel up the nasal pharynx. Worth a shot anyway.
Anyway, thats enough background, here is my neurological and psychological tips to weight loss and yes, as cliche as it has become, I will deliver it in the form of a list.
So, 1) Eat your food really slowly - The experience of pleasant flavours decrease as you consume more of the food. This is like when you hurt yourself and you rub the area that is hurt (increasing the stimulus), the experience of pain will defuse. One of the mechanisms behind this is called Alliesthesia, meaning changed sensation. This process is triggered by sets of receptors in your stomach and is relatively slow acting. Thats why you should eat slow and give your stomach time to reduce the pleasure you gain from your food.
2) Smell your food a lot and chew it excessively - Studies have also shown that a quicker acting process based around the receptors in the nose and mouth, called sensory specific satiety, takes place when participants smell their food and chew their food, even when they don’t swallow it. This effect causes us to find our food less pleasant to eat in a very similar way to the Alliethesia and therefore makes us more likely to want to consume less of it as we reach the sensation of satisfaction sooner. While the same effect can be achieved by chewing the food but not swallowing it, the spit bucket method is not one I would recommend outside of a laboratory environment.
3) Don’t let yourself get too hungry - The feelings of pleasantness that a food can evoke can be augmented by about by a factor of 3 when you are really hungry, making you want to eat more than you should. Studies have shown that neurones in the orbital frontal cortex, a part of the brain where the responses to taste and smell are first combined, will fire at a rate of about 10 spikes per second when a food is smelled and the subject is hungry. After the participant has been given 50 ml of the food, the spikes drop to 3 per second. So regular snacking on healthy foods is a good thing.
Now a couple of practical tips, not so neurological or psychological.
4) Buy one dish between two - When you go out for dinner with your partner, share one main dish between the two of you. The reality is that portion sizes in most restaurants that you go to are too big. They contribute way too many of your daily calories in one go and if its dinner, they contribute them at the wrong time of day. you should have light meals in the evenings. Along the same lines, reduce your intake of alcohol. Not many health benefits to be had at all, and the whole one glass of red wine thing, that needs to be weighed up against the fact that alcohol is a group one carcinogen (WHO), contains huge amounts of sugars, kills brains cells and so on.
5) Do aerobic exercise - This means that you should do lots of running and skipping and anything that gets your heart rate up significantly for at least 30 minutes. This will burn lots of calories and this type of exercise tends to suppress the hormone ghrelin, which is known to increase appetite, and increases the levels of peptide YY, a hormone that suppresses appetite.
Please note that you should consult with your doctor before you decide to undertake any of these tips, as she will be more aware of your specific case and the health implications of a change in lifestyle and habit.
Ok, so those are some tips to help take that edge off the food addiction that most of us have. Of course, there are other factors that one has to consider for effective weight loss and there are techniques that I could talk about to maximise our chances of success, but I will talk about those in another video about Habit formation and breaking those habits.
Weight loss is a preoccupation that has come to concern the majority of us, given that in western countries, there is a real problem relating to the fact that most of us are either overweight or obese. This is not an issue about body image or standards of beauty, this is simply about our health. Being obese or overweight leads to all kinds of health problems that reduce our quality of life, from a physical and a psychological stand point. The important thing to keep in mind is that in most cases, we can do something about this. The fact of the matter is that, losing weight is simple, your body does not create energy and store it for you. If you don’t put the calories in, or you burn more then you consume, you will lose weight.
Thank you very much for reading, I will catch you again soon.
-Rod Peredo - SOCM Services
Watch the video to this post at: http://youtu.be/zHj31HrqAN8
