Your mindset can have a big influence on your health and body.
How can this work with regards to your fitness and nutrition?
First, let me recap one point: when I’m talking about the effect mindset has on your health, I’m not just talking about feeling a bit more positive. I mean literal, measurable changes to aspects of your physiology like your hormone levels, your blood pressure, and your response to medications.
This is pretty amazing! If we can understand and use this phenomenon to our advantage, wouldn’t that be great?
These women got fitter by changing their mindset
A study was conducted into the fitness of a group of women working as cleaners in hotels in the US.
Cleaning is constant physical work, but when asked, most of these women stated at the outset that they didn’t think they got any regular exercise.
So here’s what was done: at the beginning of this study a whole range of measurements were taken - weight, body fat percentage, waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and blood pressure.
One month later the same things were tested again.
The catch was that one half of the group was given information that the physical demands of their job meant that they were getting a good amount of exercise (which, by the way, was technically true). The other half was not given this information. Can you guess what happened?
“The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.”
The group that was given the information about their activity levels demonstrated improvements in ALL of the measured factors.
That’s right: there were improvements in their body weight, body fat percentage, BMI, waist-to-hip ratio, and blood pressure! They also reported increased satisfaction with their work.
The other group showed NO change.
Neither group changed their physical activity or diet at all. Yet simply by changing one group’s attitudes towards the physical activity they were engaging in, their bodies showed an increased positive response to that activity!
Can you think yourself fit?
There are some really exciting implications arising from this study. It would appear that how you regard your physical activity may affect the benefit you get from it. Simply by turning their attention to the physical activity they were engaged in, the women in the study described above saw physiological changes that weren’t explained by changes in behaviour.
They simply were more mindful of their activity levels. That’s all.
I’m not suggesting you can simply think yourself fit!
Sitting on the couch and visualising bigger biceps probably won’t get you the results you want. But turning attention to the activity you’re already engaged in, and being mindful about any new exercise program you begin, could help you in your pursuit of better health and fitness.
Mindset and hunger
With that in mind, let’s talk about food! Specifically, let’s talk about hunger.
When you have an empty stomach a hormone called grehlin is released that travels to your brain and tells you that you’re hungry. After you have eaten, your grehlin levels drop and the hunger goes away. Given that the vast majority of grehlin is released by your stomach, not your brain, you’d think it relies purely on the contents of your stomach, right?
Not so fast.
The milkshake test
A test was performed where people attended a milkshake tasting twice. Once they were given a “Sensi-Shake” which claimed “guilt-free satisfaction” and less calories, another time they received a shake termed “Indulgence” which claimed “decadence you deserve” and a huge whack of calories!
“The mind is just like a muscle – the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets and the more it can expand.”
The first shake resulted in a significantly smaller reduction in grehlin levels than the second. In other words, the lower-calorie shake left people hungrier, as you would expect.
Here’s the kicker, though: yep, you guessed it, the shake was exactly the same both times.
Only the perception of those consuming the shake changed, and hunger was curbed much more when people believed they were drinking a shake loaded with calories. Interesting!
Mindset and a healthy relationship with food
Does this mean that how you regard the food you eat is going to change the way your body responds to it?
I should mention that grehlin does much more than just make you hungry. There seems to be a relationship between grehlin and insulin - when grehlin goes up, insulin goes down, and vice versa (it’s all a little more complicated than that, but you get the picture - they’re related).
So it would appear that grehlin is involved in the regulation of our energy systems and the uptake by our cells of the sugars floating in our bloodstream. So if we can change our grehlin levels just by the way we regard our food, we are influencing much more than just how hungry we are!
So, if we give ourselves a hard time for eating junk, does that mean we are actually setting ourselves up to get fat?
Perhaps it is not just important that we eat healthy food in appropriate amounts, but also that we have a healthy relationship with our food!
Once again, mindfulness of what and how we eat may be hugely beneficial.
Dr Alia Crum TED talk: Change your mindset, change the game
A lot of what I’ve talked about in this article is drawn from the work of Dr Alia Crum, currently of Stanford University. If you’re interested in more about her work, watch her TED talk: Change your mindset, change the game | Dr. Alia Crum.
Mindset: further reading
This article is part of a series about how our attitudes, beliefs and mindset can affect our health.
There is a fascinating and growing body of evidence that there is a much stronger relationship between our minds and our bodies than perhaps we have been led to believe.
I hope that these articles stimulate some new thoughts and ideas for you, or perhaps shore up what you already knew.
Read more:
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