Most addictions normally have some root cause there is a possibility that some emotional trauma, could trigger it off or in some respects you could say it’s self punishment to a certain extent.

What Happens ?

So how does this all come about what is the process in our brains that makes us act this way, when you are motivated to do anything in life, there has to be a certain amount of good feeling with what you’re doing. In the human brain we have a chemical known as dopamine which is a motivational chemical this is what drives us to do things, and if there is a lack of it then not to do things.

Studies have been done on rats, that when stimulated with dopamine in their brain’s they will perform the same task over and over when given a dopamine fix, and a association that went with it. In the study done on the rats they were trained to press a switch and then given the dopamine fix.

When this happened the rats would continually press the button everytime they were given the dopamine fix until they couldn’t do it any more and were exhausted. So as we can see from this particular study when you do something that causes you to stimulate the dopamine receptors in your mind it is going to be very hard to stop this behaviour from happening.

This in a nutshell is how we become addicted to various substances, whether it be alcohol, smoking, shopping or any other addictive behavior. This is why it can be very hard to break addictive behaviour by willpower alone because this is all happening in the primitive part of your brain.

Are We Programmed This Way ?

It would seem we are some recent research that was done on people, revolved round using one particular sugary food dough-nuts, participants were shown a picture of a dough nut or a screwdriver, when they were shown a picture of the dough-nut, their brains electronic waveform activity went haywire but not when shown the screwdriver.

After the test subjects had eaten and quite a lot of dough nuts eight to be exact, their brain scans were totally different this time. When shown the same pictures again there was hardly any brain activity at all.

The test subjects were then tested after eight hour fast, to see what the results would be this time on this particular occasion to parts of the brain were stimulated, one part being limbic region which is otherwise known as the lizard brain, so it was saying here is food not only am I hungry, and making a decision between the screwdriver and the dough-nut.

The part of the brain that is called spatial reasoning decided that at the present time the dough nut, was far more important than the screwdriver was at the time. There probably wouldn’t even be any conscious thought during this process, so as we can see from this it’s very easy to understand what happens when we see food before us.

In a nutshell it’s all about needs at a certain time so if you’re walking down a dark alley your senses will be very highly attuned just in case you might think something is going to happen so on that particular scenario you’re less likely to be thinking about food.

And more what to do if someone tries to attack you. so in conclusion it’s probably best to make yourself aware and when you want to eat that sugary snack or doughnut, think consciously more do I really need to eat it or not.

And eat something in its place instead that isn’t so loaded with sugar.

Source : Daily Mail

The Facts

Vegetarians health tends to be better than people who eat meat, and they don’t suffer from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and any other diseases which tend to be linked with being overweight, this study however to me seems to make some very bold claims it says that you can achieve weight loss without having to do any exercise which to me seems a bit outlandish to say the least.

The information was compiled from 87 other studies done in the past, obesity is now skyrocketing especially in western civilisations where fast-food joints, are in abundance and as collective nations we are eating more food than ever before.

Overall the weight of vegetarians compared to their meat-eating companions, tends to be quite a big difference, in comparison this is between three and 20% less than somebody who does eat meat, now here’s the part that to me seems quite hard to believe they say that a low-fat vegan diet will help you lose one pound of fat per week, without exercising and doing anything else this also includes not controlling the amount of portions that you eat.

From what they say you can eat unlimited amounts of fruit and vegetables regardless of portion sizes without gaining weight, it goes on to say that the food eaten in a vegetarian diet helps with the fat burning process, also eating vegetables helps with insulin resistance instead of the food being stored as fat it tends to get taken up by the cells and burnt off hence no weight gain.

A team of researchers found that by switching to a vegetarian diet over a period of five years the participants did in fact gain less weight, in another study of 55,000 women found that the ones that ate meat were far more likely to be overweight than those people whom didn’t eat meat.

My Thoughts

Here are my thoughts on this I myself have never tried becoming a vegetarian or vegan for that matter, I was in a relationship once with someone who was a vegetarian and she never seemed to put on any weight perhaps it’s something I could try for a month to see what happens.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress although I must admit I think I will find it quite hard, to switch to eating vegetables and fruit etc. Mind you it would be interesting overall experiment to see what exactly did happen, I could do weekly updates just to see how I feel what difference it makes and so on.

In a post I wrote earlier this week about a program called eat to save your life which was hosted by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, they actually got some sausage meat and put it through a mincer so you could see what came out of it surprisingly there is more fat in sausages than there used to be compared to nowadays, they took a few selections of meat and you could see that today’s farming methods do in fact leave more fat on the meat.

Even chickens are bred this way when you actually look at a chicken it’s hard to tell how much is lean meat and how much isn’t, put on a supermarket shelf you tend to see quite a big piece of chicken which seems good value for money.

This gives the consumer a feeling of that they are getting more for their money when in fact in reality they are not, quite a while back now I wrote a post called how to beat supermarket psychology, in that post there are two videos based around how supermarkets do things, in one of them they actually liquidise a chicken and separate the fat off so you can actually see how much fat there is in a chicken compared to days gone by.

If anybody would like to put forward their argument or point you view regarding this I would be very interested to hear from you do you know anybody who is vegetarian and maintains constant weight ? and you a meat eater and is it harder to lose weight if you are one, comments and thoughts are always welcome please feel free to leave yours.