The Hungry Brain, Continued

The previous post ended with the question of how the BrainWeighve app might help to alleviate the body’s tendency to hold onto fat. Does the previously mentioned article by Dan Hurley offer any clues? It was written back when the roles of the hormones ghrelin (“Keep eating”) and leptin (“You’re full”) were being explored. And more was going on, too. Hurley wrote,

One fruitful new avenue comes from the revelation that hunger, blood sugar, and weight gained per calorie consumed all ratchet up when our sleep is disrupted and our circadian rhythms — the 24-hour cycle responding to light and dark — thrown into disarray. All this is compounded by stress, which decreases metabolism while increasing the yen for high-calorie food.

In the ensuing years, research found that night-eating definitely promotes weight gain. This is the type of solid information a person can use, and can use BrainWeighve to help implement. We have already seen one of the ways in which the app can be used to help reduce stress.

This is where having a comprehensive list of action plans will come in handy. Of course, in this case, the stored suggestions could be more accurately described as “inaction” plans: sleep enough, at the appropriate times; and don’t eat at night.

It is astounding, how much hunger originates in the brain. Differences in the gustatory cortex and the somatosensory regions of that organ can put weight on a person. Hurley quotes clinical psychologist Eric Stice, whose research demonstrated a seeming paradox: people who experience less pleasure from the food actually are at increased risk of putting on fat:

But his more recent studies have convinced him that the reduced pleasure is a result of years of overeating among the obese girls — the same phenomenon seen in drug addicts who require ever-greater amounts of their drug to feel the same reward.

But wait, there’s more!

Eating behaviors are also linked to areas of the brain associated with self-control (such as the left superior frontal region) and visual attention (such as the right middle temporal region). A recent fMRI study led by Jeanne McCaffery, a psychologist at Brown Medical School, showed that successful weight losers had greater activation in those regions, compared with normal-weight people and obese people, when viewing images of food.

As always, stress plays a big part too, because…

[…] stress pathways in the limbic system feed into the reward centers, and they drive reward-seeking behaviors… We’re not necessarily fat because we’re hungry but because we’re looking for something to deal with stress.

The BrainWeighve app can help us contradict other factors, like the hormone ghrelin that tells us to eat, eat, eat. Most obesity triggers are found in the brain, lying in wait to trip us up and urge us to consume. With the help of BrainWeighve we can train other parts of the brain to fight against that compulsion, and weaken it, and even induce it to limp away in defeat.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “A New Suspect in the Obesity Epidemic: Our Brains,” DiscoverMagazine.com, 08/22/11
Image by Kevin Tan/Flickr

Teen People, This Is 4 U

The BrainWeighve app points out that overflowing brain energy is likely to be burned off in a useless and even harmful way, like nail biting or — you guessed it — overeating. What can cause this counterproductive behavior? Well, for one thing…

Not being able to make a decision can produce overflow brain energy…

What does it take to make a decision? As the app suggests, a good start is to create two lists, the for and the against; the pro and the con. From the different lengths of the two lists, you’ll get a rough idea of the problem’s shape. One thing you will notice is, there will be varying reasons for things being on either list. Say you’re thinking about quitting a stupid job. In the column for YES QUIT the first entry is “hate the boss.” That much is clear.

Then, things get more complicated. In the column for NO DON’T QUIT one item is “keep up car insurance” and another is “get my own apartment.” But are they of equal weight? Depending on where you live, being without wheels is a grueling fate. Keeping a car on the road is definitely worth putting up with a boss you wouldn’t spit on if he was on fire. And comparatively speaking, living at home isn’t really that bad.

And there it is

One of those things, mobility, may not be an absolute life-or-death need, but it certainly is a major issue. The other thing, getting your own place, is probably not primarily a need, but more of a want. In another year, it might be more of a need.

One of the gigantic skills of existence is to figure out the difference between needs and wants. It applies throughout life, and in every facet of living. To distinguish between a want and a need is a talent that few are born with, and most of us have to work hard to develop.

Needs can be met. Wants never end.

Needs are permanent parts of our hard wiring, and their main feature is that they can be fulfilled and satisfied. Maybe not permanently, of course. Your body needs water, pretty much every day. But thirst and other needs can be quenched, for various periods of time.

Wants are transitory, they come and go, and they will gaslight you. Wants will whisper in your ear, “Just satisfy me, and you will live happily ever after.” But they are lying. Wants are like a whack-a-mole game. As soon as you knock one down by caving into it, another want pops up to distract and torment you.

Next…

After discerning between a want and a need, the next step is to decide which one to chase. Concentrating on needs is definitely a more useful place to put your energy. If you get this figured out, the good vibes can carry over into other areas of life. But wait, there’s more. When something carries over from elsewhere, to impact the current dilemma, it’s a weirdly opposite situation that can lead to the same positive result.

For example, do you excel in some other area of life, like music or sports? Then, whether you realize it or not, you already have a head start. If you are any good at all, at some specific skill, this means you have already figured out a few things about the difference between wants and needs. Congratulations, you are a winner! Because you can carry that knowledge over into reclaiming your own body.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by Jan Tik/CC BY 2.0

To the Teen People, More

Have you ever heard an adult say something like this? “Nobody warned me that raising kids would be so difficult,” or “Nobody told me owning a house would be so hard.” Actually, someone probably did, and the person just wasn’t listening. Now they know, and occasionally they have a thought that is worth passing along. It used to be fashionable to give the elders a listen, at least, because they have “been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt.” And the refrigerator magnets, the drink coasters, and the keychain.

Boring and ignorable as the oldsters may be, they are well-intentioned in trying to help you escape some of the traps and avoid some of the holes they fell into. Maybe they won’t go into detail about how they know this stuff. Anyway, in the best case, they can actually throw a little light on the subject. A fellow human is hoping that you will not end up saying, “Nobody told me it would be so easy to turn into a humongous bag of flab.”

What if they aren’t there?

This world can be a miserable place, but here’s the beauty part: If suitable grownups are not available, we as people can be our own guides through the wilderness at any age. Some of our contemporaries are as wise as any elder. Everybody is wise about something, and with the BrainWeighve app, people can find peers who have met up with a certain challenge, and crushed it. A person can find workable advice from others in the same age group who have actually experienced, and are experiencing, all this mess.

Some people do find keys that take them into things, and others find keys to get themselves out of things, and they are happy to share their keys. That’s what the plan lists are for, to remind us that there are ways to cope, if only we open ourselves up to hearing them.

Say what?

We talked about Dread Lists, where typically about half of the obnoxious situations are school-related. A fair portion of them have to do with grades. As it turns out, the people with the best ideas about maintaining an acceptable academic record, are people around the same age and attending similar institutions. The antidote to a Dread is a Plan, and a lot of people your age have already shared plans that have worked for them.

It is always a plus to hear how others deal with sticky situations. Even adults share helpful information with each other in forums and other online spaces. For instance, what to do about an incoming call from an unidentified number that obviously hopes to sell you something you don’t want or need. Pick up and say, “It’s done, but there’s blood everywhere.” The caller will probably hang up.

Okay, don’t do that really. The point is, people like to help strangers, and even if your cases are not exactly parallel, with BrainWeighve you can get ideas, or at least a useful notion that coping is possible.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

To the Teen People

When talking amongst themselves, some professional comedians (including some obese ones) admit that they went into the game because people were laughing at them anyway, for the wrong reasons. As professional funny people on stage, they at least have some choice about it, and some control over why people laugh.

They often discuss the subject of public perception, and talk about feeling self-conscious and sensitive about how people regard them in everyday life. Like, “Everybody’s thinking I’m high,” or “Everybody’s thinking I shouldn’t have shaved my beard,” or whatever. Then one day, they realize — “Everybody’s too busy thinking about themselves, to spare a thought for me.”

This may be true of some grownups, who have big issues to worry about. Unfortunately, it’s not true in school, where quite a lot of people may be thinking about you because they don’t have anything better to do with their lazy brains. For some people, their teen years are an excuse to spend ridiculous amounts of energy trying to make other people miserable, and they are experts at it.

Distracting demographics

At the top of the page, it says “Childhood Obesity News,” so what does that have to do with you? Well, it’s a technical issue. Here is the official word from both the U.S. Department of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, regarding the phases of life. They are:

(1) infancy, between birth and 2 years of age; (2) childhood, from 2 to 12 years of age; and (3) adolescence, from 12 to 21 years of age. Additionally, Bright Futures guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics identify adolescence as 11 to 21 years of age, dividing the group into early (ages 11–14 years), middle (ages 15–17 years), and late (ages 18–21 years) adolescence.

On a closely related topic, it should be known that clinical trials of the BrainWeighve phone app are being organized at the University of California, Los Angeles. There will be two successive beta tests of eight teens, both for three weeks each, followed by the four-month main trial with 30 adolescent subjects.

The seeming contradiction

A number of studies, including those in the childhood obesity field, raise the ordinary person’s eyebrows by being filed under “pediatric” when the subjects were 16, 18, and even 21. But it’s totally legit. By coincidence, obesity is the ideal field in which to corral a wide age range in a single group. A person of legal age, who is 30% over his ideal weight, and a toddler who is 30% over her healthy weight, are similar in many ways.

Likewise, almost any school-related problem can be found at all educational levels, from one-year-olds in daycare to 21-year-old college students. The details may differ, but the underlying dynamic is startlingly similar. We have talked about a number of reasons why school can be stressful — and have not yet mentioned the issue of grades, which is a biggie. Stick around, teen people. There is something here for you.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

School Then and Now, Continued

Of course, money has been a factor since forever. Kids from affluent families have always enjoyed lording it over those whose economic situation is not so great. Even if their parents won’t spring for the latest phone or a car, privileged kids find multiple ways to make their status known. Along with financial superiority, the popularity game has always been uncomfortable at best and vicious at worst. It doesn’t take long to learn that squashing and slandering others is one way of making yourself more noteworthy and admired in the little universe of school.

Some causes of social anxiety have always existed. Betrayal is one. There is always the girl who pretends to be your bestie, totally worthy of being confided in, and then she goes around telling everybody all your secrets. She was there in 1885, and she’s there now. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” This should not be true at school, but unfortunately, it is. School can be especially horrid for kids who have a bad home situation and hope to escape it at school, only to find persecution there too, just in different forms.

Here too? Yes.

Educational institutions are rife with psychological trauma as part of the daily background stress. It’s not even necessary for something on the Dread List to happen on any given day, since every day is fraught with the sense that something awful could happen at any minute. In gathering basic information to create the BrainWeighve phone app to help kids avoid and escape obesity, Dr. Pretlow’s team learned that around half of the life situations they dread originate — you guessed it — at school.

In a piece titled “Obesity and the Emotional Toll it takes on Children’s Mental Health” the author Mahender cites the major areas where this is apparent. Bullying certainly is one, and it may manifest both verbally (taunting) and physically (some kid grabbing a handful of an obese child’s flesh and saying, “Can you pinch an inch?”). Another type of unwanted attention originates in negative stereotyping and social shame and stigmatization. Many types of discrimination are available to cruel schoolmates who go in for that sort of thing. Two of the most common results are chronic depression and, of course, emotional eating.

The writer reminds parents:

These children may hear from peers (and even adults) that being overweight is their own responsibility. They could receive insults.

[C]ompared to his slimmer friends, your youngster who is fat is more likely to suffer from poor self-esteem. His low self-esteem may cause him to feel self-conscious about his appearance, and his lack of confidence may affect his schoolwork.

Childhood obesity has financial expenses in addition to health expenditures, and your child’s weight issue is closely linked to his emotional life.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Obesity and the Emotional Toll it takes on Children’s Mental Health,” NewsPatrolling.com, 10/19/22
Image by Dark Dwarf/CC BY-ND 2.0