This week I have heard three very interesting statements from clients:

I weigh about 160lbs (11stone 5lbs) and, despite the fact that I used to weigh about 120lbs (8 stone 6lbs), I now think of myself as weighing 160lbs. I weighed that much at my heaviest when I was pregnant!

I don’t think I need to lose weight, but I get a dreadful shock when I see myself in holiday snaps. Who is that fat person?

I used to meditate 20 minutes in the morning and, frequently, 10 minutes in the afternoon. Now I’m supposed to meditate for 45 minutes every day, I don’t meditate at all.

Many people come to personal trainers like me to lose weight and get back into exercise. Were weight loss easy, then everybody would have the body they desire. For a non-exerciser, if it were easy for them to get back into exercise, then they would not be seeking me out. What people feel they lack is the motivation to eat less and do more to achieve these goals. In fact, a massive key to long term weight loss and regular exercise lies in our brain: ultimately what we think is far more important than what we eat or what we do. Because if we can’t get the thinking right, the comfort of the biscuit barrel and the sofa will ultimately out blast any motivated Brussels sprout.

The above three statements demonstrate three different problems: this is how I am and I can’t imagine change; at heart I don’t feel I need to change; by trying to do too much, I do nothing. The first two statements beautifully demonstrate that what you practise is what you get, with the same being true for movement, beliefs and for thinking patterns.

So to change the outcome, we need to find different ways of thinking. If we are grappling with weight loss, a good place to start is chunking down our thought processes surrounding food: why, what and when are we eating? For example, a client of mine has a really difficult time around 4pm; she finds herself picking at food because she is very hungry, and the food she is picking at tends to be biscuits or cookies because they are to hand and easy to eat.

Her brain knows she is hungry and is telling her to eat something sugary and fatty to rapidly get her energy levels back up. This is the brain’s reaction to a physiological state.

During the course of the discussion, it came out that she rarely ate breakfast. The knock on effect of that tends to hit with uncontrollable hunger in the afternoon. (See reference at end for related study) So she came up with the plan of eating a breakfast that contained a good source of protein and, at 3.30pm, whilst waiting for her children to come out of school, she would arm herself with some cold meat and chunks of vegetables to snack on. This meant that when she got home, she was not so uncontrollably hungry and could get on with preparing dinner without being nobbled by the Hobnobs – a British cookie. For most of us, no amount of will power can overcome hunger. Making a plan to avoid becoming so hungry helps achieve weight loss goals.

And when hungry, tired or feeling sorry for ourselves, the form of food we crave is both sugary and easy carb such as potato and fat. This equates to chips, cakes or doughnuts. These foods are highly addictive and this brings us onto the neurological process of addiction and how to sidestep it.

As part of a weight loss plan, eating piles of doughnuts plus sugary drinks do not help achieve the svelte goal. As part of a ‘lets get much fitter plan’, the smoking habit does not help us charge up and down the soccer pitch for the whole course of a game.

I once did a short course run by the Human Givens school of psychotherapy. And they teach a very interesting theory as to how to change the brain to change unwanted behaviour, such as smoking, drinking or chocolate gobbling. This theory is also mentioned in the study below.

When we are hungry, we have an expectation of how good food will taste – the brain predicts from past experiences that eating an Oreo now will taste good and satisfy us. And we tell ourselves that one Oreo will do the trick. We eat one Oreo, which tastes tremendous – so tremendous that we predict that another can only make us feel even better. And then that’s it. Whole packet mysteriously disappeared.

Cigarettes – again, smoking a cig will help us calm down and make us better able to continue with work; enjoy our drink just so much more; and help us relax. And surely relaxing is good for you?!

And then we decide to visit some horrible skinny, bouncy personal trainer who has clearly never smoked in her life, and can outstare a deliciously melting chocolate Brownie within arm’s reach without gobbling any of it up (alas, in my case, this is true). And we declare to this paragon of exercising virtue that we want to lose weight/give up smoking/start exercising.

This declaration comes from the Master Controller of the brain – the prefrontal cortex. The Boss. Just like the boss of a huge firm, Decisions Are Made. The secretary – a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate gyrus – is told to carry the order out. Then nicotine/sugar levels drop or we feel very hungry and security – the amygdala – sends an alarm signal. The secretary goes and looks in the memory store and sees that cigarettes/ chocolate Brownies/Oreos bring levels back to normal. But this time The Boss has said, ‘No to that’. So the secretary goes and sprinkles dopamine, the neurotransmitter of expectation of good rewards, over the memory stores until the Boss gives in and the cigarette is smoked or the Brownie munched. In other words, the secretary of the brain makes the memories of eating Brownies or smoking cigarettes so appealing, the will power of the Boss, the prefrontal cortex, is overcome.

To outwit this, we need to start building memories of the unwanted results of smoking/eating fattening stuff, such as smelling of smoke, having less money, slow recovery times, tight jeans, horrific holiday snaps and so on. And then we can start to overcome the urge for a whole bag of crisps.   For the cravings coming from the amygdala are only a short lived pang, so if we breathe through them and remember the downsides of doing the thing, we can change our thinking, change our behaviour and change our body. And discover our own motivation.

Of course, it isn’t all about addiction. Part of changing ourselves comes from setting achievable actions. The Boss, the frontal cortex, decides enough of being a lazy dumpling; lets get moving. Lets begin by signing up for a marathon in six weeks time and go out running more and more and more. We get off the sofa, begin running and in two weeks in we have a sore knee, a pain in a heel and strangely achy shoulders.

The third opening statement nicely demonstrates the problem of trying to do too much. This particular client is a doctor of palliative care, and is a leading light in practising mindfulness as part of pain reduction. As part of her further studies, she is actually meant to be meditating 45 minutes a day and is finding the whole process of a previously successful meditation practise now breaking down, illuminating.

Her process involves working out why she finds the thought of 45 minutes of sitting in meditation so off putting – and part of the answer lies in changing her kneeling meditation stool to a cushion since the kneeling one upsets her knees.

To bring it back to the brain; if what we do hurts us, the brain will find multiple ways of stopping us doing that thing. The trick here is to realise what the problem is and find ways of getting rid of the pain.

Sometimes we are just asking too much of ourselves. In a busy life, 45 minutes may literally be too much time.

To just expect ourselves to go from couch dumpling to marathon superstar in 6 weeks is expecting ourselves to have Haile Gebrselassie genes or a miracle.

Therefore if we take the decision to Do Something About It, no matter what that It is – and it is a real decision rather than a wish – in order to get motivated we can use our brain wisely, work out the problems, form a plan, so the next step is effortless rather than reliant on willpower alone.

There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other. – Douglas Everett. (1,490)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beneficial effects of a higher-protein breakfast on the appetitive, hormonal, and neural signals controlling energy intake regulation in overweight/obese, “breakfast-skipping,” late-adolescent girls¹,²,³

Heather J Leidy, Laura C Ortinau, Steve M Douglas, and Heather A Hoertel

1.      ¹From the Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology, School of Medicine, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO.

+ Author Notes

• ↵2 Supported by the Beef Checkoff and the Egg Nutrition Center/American Egg Board.
• ↵3 Address correspondence and requests for reprints to HJ Leidy, Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology, 204 Gwynn Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65201. E-mail: leidyh@health.missouri.edu.

Abstract

Background: Breakfast skipping is a common dietary habit practiced among adolescents and is strongly associated with obesity.

Objective: The objective was to examine whether a high-protein (HP) compared with a normal-protein (NP) breakfast leads to daily improvements in appetite, satiety, food motivation and reward, and evening snacking in overweight or obese breakfast-skipping girls.

Design: A randomized crossover design was incorporated in which 20 girls [mean ± SEM age: 19 ± 1 y; body mass index (in kg/m²): 28.6 ± 0.7] consumed 350-kcal NP (13 g protein) cereal-based breakfasts, consumed 350-kcal HP egg- and beef-rich (35 g protein) breakfasts, or continued breakfast skipping (BS) for 6 d. On day 7, a 10-h testing day was completed that included appetite and satiety questionnaires, blood sampling, predinner food cue–stimulated functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans, ad libitum dinner, and evening snacking.

Results: The consumption of breakfast reduced daily hunger compared with BS with no differences between meals. Breakfast increased daily fullness compared with BS, with the HP breakfast eliciting greater increases than did the NP breakfast. HP, but not NP, reduced daily ghrelin and increased daily peptide YY concentrations compared with BS. Both meals reduced predinner amygdala, hippocampal, and midfrontal corticolimbic activation compared with BS. HP led to additional reductions in hippocampal and parahippocampal activation compared with NP. HP, but not NP, reduced evening snacking of high-fat foods compared with BS.

Conclusions: Breakfast led to beneficial alterations in the appetitive, hormonal, and neural signals that control food intake regulation. Only the HP breakfast led to further alterations in these signals and reduced evening snacking compared with BS, although no differences in daily energy intake were observed. These data suggest that the addition of breakfast, particularly one rich in protein, might be a useful strategy to improve satiety, reduce food motivation and reward, and improve diet quality in overweight or obese teenage girls. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01192100.