Sorry for the over the top headline, but the answer to the question appears to be yes…and please read this whole post, there is something really good at the end.

How Being Overweight Affects The Brain

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh scanned the brains of 94 people over the age of 70. They were looking to see the differences in the brains of people who were of normal weight (BMI under 25), overweight (BMI 25-30), and obese (BMI over 30).

If you are 5 foot 10 and you weigh 220, you have a BMI of 31.6 and would be considered obese. If you are 5 foot 10 and weigh 180, your BMI is 25.8 and you would be considered overweight for purposes of the study. There are certain athletes with lot of muscle mass that make the BMI inaccurate, but for the rest of us it is a valid measurement.

The Scary Results

It turns out that Obese people have 8% less brain tissue than people of normal weight. Overweight people have 4% less brain tissue than people of normal weight.

According to Dr. Paul Thompson, a UCLA professor of neurology, “This represents ‘severe’ brain degeneration, that’s a big loss of tissue and it depletes your cognitive reserves, putting you at a much greater risk of Alzheimer’s and other diseases that attack the brain… But you can greatly reduce your risk for Alzheimer’s, if you can eat healthy and keep your weight under control.”

*Source: Raji CA, Ho AJ, Parikshak NN, Becker JT, Lopez OL, Kuller LH, Hua X, Leow AD, Toga AW, Thompson PM. Brain structure and obesity, Hum Brain Mapp 2009 Aug 6

More Bad News

The parts of the brain that degenerated for overweight people are very important, it wasn’t brain mass that we can spare.

Here are the areas effected:

• Frontal and temporal lobes: Critical for planning and memory
• Anterior cingulate gyrus: Responsible for attention and executive functions
• Hippocampus: Important for long-term memory
• Basal ganglia: Essential for proper movement and coordination

Furthermore, the brains of overweight people looked 8 years older than those of people of normal weight, and the brains of obese people looked a whopping 16 years older!

So How Do We Stop This

I hope that this research has helped motivate you to get to a normal weight if you aren’t already there. I wish there were a magical, “brain pill” that could stop the damage. But the only solution is losing the weight.

You probably already know there is only one thing you can do in order to get there, and that is to eat the right foods at the right portions.

Exercise can help, but recent research demonstrates that exercise plays a much smaller role than calorie consumption. In fact, it can hurt your weight loss efforts if you aren’t careful because people seem to overestimate how much more they can eat after exercising.

So when you do exercise, make sure to track the calories you burn. This way, you won’t exaggerate the effects in your mind.

Do You Have the Willpower?

If you have the desire to get to a normal weight and for whatever reason just can’t seem to get yourself to eat right, then you are not alone. Only about 5% succeed in losing weight over the long term.

These habits are hard to break, and we just aren’t designed to “not eat” the food that is around us. In this case, abundance is a double edge sword!

Furthermore, willpower is kind of a myth. We consciously only have the ability to exhibit conscious self control in one area at a time. I have written about the cookie study before, but I think it is worth repeating (in a very short form).

Subjects were brought into a room and asked to solve some brain puzzles. Another group was brought into the same room and asked to solve the same brain puzzles, but in this case they had a plate of cookies in front of them – and were told that they could not eat them!

The group that had to “not eat the cookies” performed dramatically worse than the group without cookies.

*Source: RE Baumeister, E Bratslavsky, M Muraven, and DM Tice. “Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 74, 1998.

This means that when you are trying to avoid “bad” foods, it affects just about every other aspect of your day. So when a bit of stress hits, bye, bye diet.

So unless you have a stress free life, or amazing self control – changing your eating habits consciously is a tough road.

Shameless Plug – There is Hope

This is leading somewhere! If you can’t make the change consciously, then you have to make these changes unconsciously. A great strategy for nudging your unconscious mind in the right direction is to control your environment. Get rid of the bad foods in your house and workplace. Put reminders on the refrigerator, plan and prepare your meals ahead of time, etc… the more you can do with your environment to prime your unconscious mind the better.

And if this isn’t enough, try hypnosis. Hypnosis is the ONLY scientifically validated method for training your unconscious mind to eat right (and this is without using willpower – which just doesn’t work). Hypnosis works at a totally different level in the brain. It actually works at the level of self image.

If you don’t want to use Dr. Roberta Temes’ program, you can probably find someone in your area. Just make sure they are a licensed psychologist with a specialty in weight loss and not just a “hypnotherapist”. Expect to pay at least $200 a session for anyone of quality, and you will need anywhere from 4-7 sessions.

I do think Dr. Temes’ program is the way to start though. The home use sessions have been shown to work (by an independent source) for 92% (over 9 out of 10) of the people who try them. The program includes eight actual hypnosis sessions.

They are also kind of fun, and take less than 20 minutes a day. And of course we give you one full year to see if they work for you.

The Brain Health Weight Loss Special

Because of this new reason to lose weight and because we haven’t had a special in a long time, here is what we are going to do.

You can test drive the program out for just the cost of shipping ($5.95). And the page I am sending you to is a page we use for special partners where instead of $119, you can get the program for just $97.

http://www.hypnosisnetwork.com/hypnosis/ewl/special

Please take the time to read the reviews, not all are positive – but you will see that most people are really getting something out of this.

The coupon will work until Monday the 28th at 11:59 PM CST.

Also, please comment on the research at the beginning of this article – I respond to all posts.

You have probably heard about the Placebo effect. We know new drugs are measured against the placebo effect because a good percentage of people get better just by taking sugar
pills.

I think a lot of us don’t take the time to consider how crazy this is. Some pretty major health conditions are “cured” by basically the belief that the pill or injection will work.

This is obviously power of the mind stuff, but until recently scientists had never been able to actually “see” the placebo effect actually working in the brain.

Thanks to Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (f MRI) and PET scans, researchers can now see the brain work in real time.

The Placebo Research

A researcher named Jon-Kar Zubieta, a neurologist at the University of Michigan, used some amazing trickery in order to discover that the driver of placebo effect in the brain is an area called the nucleus accumbens (NAcc).

What is interesting, (and actually makes sense) is that this area of the brain is responsible for our expectancy of reward.

I won’t go into too much detail about the actual study (it involved researchers sticking subjects in the jaw with a needle to cause pain - OUCH!!!), and then giving them an intravenous pain cure.

The cure of course was just plain old saline solution (a placebo).

The PET scans revealed that the placebo caused an actual dopamine boost with highest dopamine release coming from the nucleus accumbens (NAcc).

All the subjects experienced some relief, but some more than others.

So the researchers used fMRI on the same subjects to see if there was a correlation between those who got the best placebo effect with those who potentially had the mostactive nucleus accumbens (NAcc).

Scientists are tricky! Here is how they pulled it off.

While using f MRI to monitor brain activity, they had the subjects play a game where they could receive monetary rewards. The anticipation of reward intensified the activity in the nucleus accumbens.

The cool part is that the people who had the highest activity in the NAcc during the game are the same people who had the most profound placebo effect in the pain part of the study.

The Take Home

So it seems that it pays to have an NAcc that hums if you want to get cured by a sugar pill.

I have been thinking about this study a lot and it begs this question.

Could we actually train ourselves to enhance our expectancy of reward, thus strengthening the NA? If so, this might mean we could develop some ability for self healing. Or it just might be genetic - nobody knows right now

Here is the citation for the study I just summarized.

Scott et al.: Individual Differences in Reward Responding
Explain Placebo-Induced Expectations and Effects
Publishing in Neuron 55, 325–336, July 19, 2007. DOI
10.1016/j.neuron.2007.06.028.

The research is still in its early stages and I would curious if any of you have any other real research on the subject (not new age mumbo jumbo, but real peer reviewedresearch).

If you do, just post it below.

Here are some other cool facts about the placebo effect:

• Orange, Red and other hot colored tablets work better as stimulants.

• Cool colored ones (blue, green, purple) work better as depressants.

• Big pills generally work better than small pills!

• Higher priced pills work better than lower priced pills.

• Injections work better than tablets

• And “branded” tablets work better than unbranded tablets!