Nutrition and Health: Why knowledge is not enough

Apr 27

Posted in Techniques

This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series Health Behaviors

Your body is built and maintained out of the food you eat. So it’s not exactly a surprise that nutrition and physical health are closely tied together.

And since your brain is part of your body, your mental performance is also related to what you eat. Likewise, your emotional state and mood are affected by what you eat.

When I state it that baldly, it seems so totally obvious you might wonder why I’m talking about it at all. But this basic idea is not one that we act on very successfully.

Judy Stone, a former psychotherapist who retrained as a nutritionist when she saw the impact of dietary change on depression, goes so far as to advocate nutrition change instead of the use of drugs for most chronic illnesses.

“Even the Harvard Health Newsletter (April 2008) has come around to trumpeting the drug-free triumvirate of diet, exercise and lifestyle changes,” says Stone. “Unfortunately, they avoid wholeheartedly advocating a change of course in healthcare, citing patients’ lack of initiative, the convenience of taking a drug, and the forces of pharmaceutically driven medical care.”

watermelons pills
Water melons by Zela, Pills 2 by PocketAces

And there she has put her finger on several of the key issues, although I wouldn’t necessarily phrase the first problem as “patients’ lack of initiative”.

Eating is a very complex behavior, closely linked to social, cultural and economic factors. (Take a look at this rather beautiful photo essay on what families eat around the world, for example.) This is why it isn’t quite as simple as “good nutrition is essential for health, therefore we eat well.”

(The definition of eating “well” is also occasionally controversial. It’s fairly well agreed that eating a diet high in sugar and saturated fats – that is, eating like the average Westerner – is eating badly, but it seems there are a wide variety of ways of eating well. As Monica Reinagel of Nutritiondata.com reports from a nutrition and health conference, a doctor named Daphne Miller has investigated the longest-lived peoples in the world and found that there are more differences between their diets than similarities.)

Even when we know what a good diet looks like, and even if we can afford it when the price of food is rising worldwide, people don’t just use food to meet their energy and nutrient needs. There are factors of familiarity, associations with comfort and security, issues of control… the psychology of food is complex and fascinating.

So if you want to improve your physical health, mental effectiveness and emotional stability by improving your diet, it may not be as simple as sitting down and working out a new diet on nutritiondata.com, though I would certainly suggest that as an early step in the process. One reason we eat unhealthy foods full of sugar, fat and salt in the west is that they taste good and lift our mood (however temporarily). What we need is to, firstly, have better means of managing our moods and dealing with our emotions, and secondly, a change of mindset so that we actively enjoy healthy foods and feel no particular desire to eat unhealthy ones.

That shift of mindset is quite hard to achieve with our ordinary consciousness, since it isn’t really operating mainly at a conscious level. Hypnosis is a powerful tool to achieve this kind of shift, though. I worked recently with a woman who had a weakness for sweet things but wanted to improve her general health and lose some weight. She had a couple of sessions with me, and now happily reports that she has achieved her goal of preferring healthy to unhealthy foods. She’ll still eat sweet things occasionally when other people offer them, but she has no particular desire for more than one, which is a big change for her.

The first client I ever worked with had a similar shift, and I’ve blogged before about the experience of a young British woman who just found that she wasn’t interested in unhealthy food after a visit to a hypnotherapist.

If you want to achieve this kind of attitude shift, you could start off with my self-hypnosis starter script, which is a general script for any change you want to make. You might want to pair it with the longer therapeutic relaxation script for greater effect.

If you find that’s not enough, my Healthy Lifestyle CD has the “Positive Eating” track specifically designed for shifting your attitude to food. Or you can commission a custom hypnotherapy recording from me or, if you’re local (Auckland, New Zealand), come and see me.

You can get further (free) information from my Weight Loss Support article. And I’ll be blogging more on nutrition, so if that’s an interest of yours for any reason, make sure to subscribe to the newsfeed.

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