Apr
27
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.”
 
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.
Technorati Tags: food, nutrition, diet, hypnosis, hypnotherapy, health, mood, emotions, emotional eating, drugfree, drug alternatives, personal change, self-improvement, attitude change
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May
9
Before I leave the topic of nutrition (for now) and move on to exercise, I’d like to expand on something I said in Nutrition and Health: Why knowledge is not enough. I talked there about how we sometimes manage our moods with food. Why does this even work?
Well, it seems we are wired to experience the consumption of sweet and fatty things as a positive. Mothers’ milk is sweet and fatty, and any human who doesn’t like its taste is unlikely to survive to have descendants. As a very small child, we repeat a process over and over: we are hungry. We get distressed. We cry out. Our distress is relieved when something sweet and fatty goes in our mouths. So in our formative years, when we are laying the foundations of our emotional life, we make a powerful association: Sweet and fatty things in our mouths relieve distress.
 photo credit: Marcus Vegas
The problem is, unlike our ancestors, we don’t have to work hard in order to obtain sweet and fatty things. We can walk into any of thousands of shops in a moderate-sized city and get them quickly and with a minimum of effort. Not only that, but our energy output in our daily lives is much lower than that of our ancestors (as I’ll discuss again when I talk about exercise).
The result is, we take in more energy than we need, and when we do that, it gets stored as fat. Now, fat is great when you’re living in a situation where you may need to run away from something dangerous for an extended period, or walk for days to get to new hunting grounds, or keep warm without much shelter, or survive periods when little food is available, but in the postindustrial west we don’t often encounter those situations any more. All body fat does now is increase our risk of heart disease and stroke.
We also have a contradiction at the heart of our culture. On the one hand, fattening foods are widely and cheaply available and heavily marketed as desirable. On the other hand, the body image portrayed as an ideal – often in that very same marketing – is unrealistically (even unhealthily) thin, especially for women. (There was controversy in New Zealand last year when a burger chain used bikini-clad models in its advertisements. Most of it centred around the perceived sexism, exploitation and objectification, and rightly so, but what struck me was that these women looked like they had never eaten a burger in their lives, and in fact hadn’t had a square meal in some time.)
Because we’re social creatures who are influenced by group norms, what this sets up is an inner contradiction between a desire to eat the sweet and fatty foods and a desire to look like people who aren’t doing that. Hence, guilt. Hence, liposuction.
Hence, also, the startling figure that in the US, people are spending more billions of dollars on diet products than the US Government spends on health, education and welfare combined, despite the fact that 95% of people who use these products regain any weight they lose and in fact often end up heavier.
O Noes! photo credit: Janet 59
There’s a better way. (I mean, come on, there has to be a better way.) Basically, it boils down to changing your relationship with food, resolving the internal contradiction, and choosing your day-by-day, moment-by-moment behaviour out of a strong positive sense of self rather than under the pressure of marketing, social expectations and your own transitory moods.
I have plans to produce a CD specifically for food issues, which I’ll announce here in the blog when it’s ready (so make sure you subscribe if you don’t want to miss it). In the meantime, if you’re in the situation that so many people are in – wanting to have a healthy body but struggling with your food habits – what you can do to get started is this:
- Think about your eating and recognize that a pattern of guilt, yo-yo dieting, and more guilt isn’t working so well. Never has in the past, never will in the future.
- Cultivate alternative ways to manage your moods.
- Learn about healthy ways of eating, if you don’t already know. Knowledge by itself isn’t enough – just having a map won’t get you to the other side of town (or even the other side of the street). But to go where you haven’t been before, a map is very helpful.
- Make a plan and set some realistic goals for moving your eating in a healthy direction.
- Use my free Attain Your Goals recording to help you move towards those goals.
That doesn’t directly address the internal contradiction or the strong sense of self, which is why I’ll be producing the CD. But it’s a start in the right direction, and will introduce you to some important resources to help you begin a journey to long-term healthy eating.
Technorati Tags: diet, nutrition, food, fat, mood control, mood management, emotions, weight, weightloss, overweight, obesity, body image, guilt, personal change, psychology, goal setting, lifehacks
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May
12
When I was at school, I was a skinny nerd. (I’m still a skinny nerd, actually, though I’m working on the “skinny” bit, and at my age “nerd” mostly means “gets paid more”.)
I did play a sport – field hockey – mainly for the sake of not disappointing my dad, who loved sport and made a nice extra income as a part-time sportswriter. But I was one of the worst players in what was one of the less talented teams in the “C” grade competition. I hated the compulsory “fun” runs the school made us do – I never did get an answer to my question on why they had to be compulsory if they were fun. In short, exercise didn’t grab me.
So, for everyone who had a similar background, and who looks on the sweat-soaked and testosterone-pumped exercise industry with a jaundiced eye, I present seven benefits of exercise I can believe in.
1. Memory and concentration. This is a huge one. What scientists are discovering – and you can read more about this in John Medina’s fascinating book Brain Rules, which I’m reading currently – is that exercise actually brings about the creation of new neurons in your brain, and causes blood vessels to penetrate further and more effectively into the brain, carrying glucose and oxygen in and toxins out.
As Medina. points out, our not-really-all-that-distant ancestors used to move round a lot – 10 or 20km a day, probably – in the interests of eating and not being eaten. This was before all this new-fangled agriculture caused us to settle down in one place, and long before industrialization caused us to stand or sit in front of a machine all day making minimal, repetitive movements. We got to move around, we saw new things all the time, and our bodies were continually exercised. These are the conditions our brain is adapted for, and it works better when we give them to it.
There’s a correlation between exercise and reduced risk of Alzheimer’s in later life, and cognitive function, concentration, memory, creativity and intelligence are all measurably improved by exercise.
2. Stress management. Our stress response sets us up to fight or run away and floods our bodies with the chemicals we need to do that. The problem is, the mechanism is designed to be used to escape from physically dangerous situations in a short timescale, but in our modern lives it’s also triggered by situations which don’t lend themselves to physical action and which may endure for days, weeks, months or even years – employment worries, relationship worries, financial worries, traffic, politics and our own self-talk. It’s like trying to pound in screws with a pipe wrench.
Exercise uses up those stress chemicals and purges them out of our system, resets it to what should be its normal state.
photo credit: doublej11
3. Improved mood. Both depression and anxiety are helped by exercise. In fact, exercise is more effective than some antidepressant drugs, according to psychology professor James Maddux of George Mason University, who calls it “maybe the best non-pharmacological antidepressant we have”.
Now, much as I like my local pharmacist, I’m all about the non-pharmacological interventions.
4. Reduced addiction risk. According to the same article I just linked to, physical exercise is apparently a helpful factor in breaking away from addictions. (One of my clients who came to me to stop smoking took it up as a teenager when an injury prevented her from playing sport; I don’t know if this is part of the same phenomenon.) Note to self: Recommend exercise to clients who want to stop smoking.
5. Energy. I’ve spent a lot of my life fatigued. There could be many reasons for this, but poor diet and lack of exercise are two of the strong contenders. Now that I’m dealing with both of those, I find I do have more energy. So when I read that a study has found that low-intensity exercise reduces fatigue symptoms by 65 percent, I’m not too surprised. (That’s low intensity, notice. Not even medium.)
6. Longevity. In a long-term study of doctors in the US, the two strongest factors in their longevity appeared to be not smoking and being physically active.
Genetics plays a part, but only about 25-30%. A recent study of a very long-lived man found that he and his long-lived younger relatives didn’t have any unusual genetic advantage; they had just eaten well, stayed relaxed, and kept physically active.
7. Physical health. Yes, I deliberately left this until last, because usually people just think, “Oh, exercise, good for your body.” And it is, very good, but as I’ve shown, it’s good for a lot of other things as well. When you’re a skinny teenage nerd who’s alienated from his body (and actually in reasonable health so far, all things considered), the physical benefits of exercise are not a convincing sales story. At my present, bordering on middle, age they are beginning to be, though, and there are many of them.
Exercise is good for the muscles, bones and major organs, for the blood system, lymphatic system and nervous system. In fact, I can’t think of any part or system of the body that exercise doesn’t benefit. The increased blood circulation and increased oxygenation detoxifies the body, and all the parts and systems seem to respond to the challenge of exercise by improving their function.
And exercise doesn’t need to be intensive to start the benefits coming, as I’ll talk about more soon. Until then, contemplate the benefits of exercise, and see if you’re moved to try a little.
Technorati Tags: exercise, exercise benefits, health, lifestyle
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