The Mindset for Healthy Eating | Gillian Riley | TEDxChelmsford

thank you do you feel completely free to eat anything you want and what if you're trying to lose weight can you still have anything in any quantity this is important because we all have an innate need a deep need to know that we're free to have any freedom that's rightfully ours after all throughout human history people have fought for and even died for freedom for the right to self-determination and yet when any anyone tries to eat less they usually go about doing that by denying their freedom of choice you hear them say things like oh I can't have any of these on this diet or perhaps they think to themselves I can have this one but I mustn't have anymore this isn't just about dieting this way of thinking can be created by anyone the assumption is if I give myself permission to eat all of those things I'm going to go ahead and do that so I have rules I forbid I don't allow myself to eat the things I love the most and the quantities I desire my experience of it though is unsettling feels wrong so I start to break some rules and I feel free again I will fight for and maybe even die for my freedom to eat whatever I want this of course is a very well-known phenomena this problem of restricting some food for a while and then falling right off the wagon and it's often binax described explained in terms of one particular piece of research conducted many years ago in 1945 and known as the Minnesota starvation experiment this experiment took a group of healthy young men and put them on a low-calorie diet for six months it was about between fifteen and sixteen hundred calories a day it was documented that these men became completely obsessed with food hysterical irritable apathetic and depressed not only that but after the experiment had finished these men ate excessively for the next two years with what they described as an insatiable appetite ending up of course considerably heavier than when they'd begun and previously these men had been selected on the basis that they had no problems with food or weight at all so that experiment had actually created the now-familiar dieting scenario feeling dreadful stressed way too preoccupied with food and then later on a lot of eating so what's going on that experiment had been designed especially to study starvation nothing else was being investigated and so everything was explained entirely in terms of the physical effects of the diet and yet many people when they cut back on their eating experience similar problems when actually they've been quite a long way from starving the truth is our body can adapt to some degree of starvation that's necessary for survival there are even people these days suggesting that a little bit of starvation is probably very good for us it's called fasting I'm not necessarily recommending it I'm saying there was something else behind that mayhem in Minnesota there's a factor that's been overlooked and that is the issue of prohibition of not feeling free to choose there was massive pressure on those men to follow that diet and at least from much of the time they were quite literally locked up without food to prevent them from eating one man wrote in a diary that there was a list of rations for the coming week posted on a notice board every Friday and the men would avoid looking at it because of the fear and dread it would provoke if you've ever done any dieting this might feel familiar because this is the mindset that people adopt even when they make the rules themselves the mindset of prohibition has a profound effect on us and there's a fair amount of research confirming what we all know anyway which is the prohibiting food makes it more attractive many studies show that compared with identical items food that had previously been forgiven always scores higher in taste tests the mindset of prohibition is universal among the people I see Dyanne for example a 46 year old stay-at-home wife another thoroughly resents the idea that she can't have something or that she mustn't have something because it's bad for her and her emotions around live are a powerful there was a time long ago when she was very good at being good and following the rules but these days she wants to be free from restriction and refuses to do anymore dieting she is concerned about her health oh because she's pre-diabetic so her sense of prohibition is intense she keeps trying to force herself into changing her ways thinking things like you've got to stop eating all of that rubbish and you're not allowed any of those and she keeps eating the food she's prohibiting her problem is she can only feel free to eat something by eating it you know there is advice out there and you might have heard of this of people saying that you improve your relationship with food by going out leasing everything you possibly can everything you want everything you can get your hands on but in fact that can make things worse because when you do that you become even more afraid of giving yourself freedom and as a result even more prohibitive in your attitude as someone once said to me in a seminar the last time I gave myself freedom of choice about food I gained 40 pounds and she had see people think they must prohibit because if they don't they will eat too much but that's not inevitable there is another way and that is to give yourself permission to know that you can eat absolutely anything without actually doing that what makes the difference is instead of trying to obey instructions instead of thinking in terms of rules and restrictions is to freely choose to eat less now there are a lot of people who use the word choice in this regard but in fact they put limits and conditions on it all over the place this isn't just playing around with words either because this is related to the way our brains work which is why it's so important there are two separate studies actually a number of studies but two types of studies that are very helpful to bring together they use the MRI brain scanning technology and one of these types of studies shows that there is an inverse relationship between weight and activity in the prefrontal cortex right behind the forehead at the very front of the brain so the heavier a person is the less they are using the only part of their brain that could control their decisions about what they're eating they're eating is driven more by an active midbrain reward system and the other set of studies show us that this part of the brain isn't used by anybody when they obey instructions it is used in identical circumstances when people are allowed to freely and deliberately choose for themselves now people who know about these things say that our brains function on the basis of user or lose it and what neuroscientists mean by this is the ways in which we habitually think actually direct and have an effect on the way that our brains function so what this means is that this brain activity or lack of could just reflect the habitual mindset and that can be changed the solution especially in the process of making healthy changes especially when working on eating less and especially eating less of certain kinds of things is to embrace freedom completely to know that you can follow any nutritional advice and still know you haven't lost your freedom at all you're still canny absolutely anything and you don't have to do that to prove it that penny finally dropped for Diane when she agreed that she's always free to eat food that will wreck her health from that realization she began to make choices so whereas previously she had never gone one day in her life without some sugar even when she was dieting she would save up her calories or there'd be an excuse to do some cheating now she has a different way of thinking about choice so she's choosing what she really wants which is to support her health by letting go of the sugary treats it's not that she doesn't ever feel tempted the difference is she doesn't feel resentful about that like she got the bad end of the deal she knows she's got options so she's able to consider them like oh that looks nice but am I just going to feel really disappointed with myself after I've eaten that sleepy and sluggish for the rest of the day she doesn't feel rebellious because she doesn't have restrictions to rebel against just different choices creating different outcomes it's only by recognizing your freedom that you can consider an option that you might actually prefer if you don't have a good sense of freedom then you probably won't care because your priority is to feel free you either do that by overeating no matter how bad you know you're going to feel afterwards or by changing the way you think now most people do have some sense of choice about food like chocolate or vanilla you know that's a choice but the more freedom you include the more self-control you can develop I encourage you to keep in mind that you're always free to eat absolutely anything in any quantity currently and at any point in the future you can have a binge you can spend all day snacking and all evening too you can eat huge meals that never end and you can eat poor quality food that doesn't give your body the nutrition it needs I'm not encouraging you to do that I'm inviting you to discover the power in genuine freedom of choice otherwise eating less isn't so likely to last because like anything in life if you're not freely choosing it it's going to feel negative and like a punishment a real sense of freedom around food may not be everything that you need in order to develop a peaceful and empowering relationship with food but it could be the essential part if you're now thinking yes but I want the freedom to stop eating so much this is precisely my point the mindset for healthy eating begins with freedom of choice a freedom that is rightfully yours you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 403,826

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Health, Food, Motivation, Personal growth

Id: E5TIpQsOAHU

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2015