Is There a Connection between Obesity and Motivation?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Weight Loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Are there any common links between obesity and how you are motivated to do things? And do the same rules apply to thin people. Do they have trouble motivating themselves when it comes to exercising or doing anything else, for that matter? From what I have come to understand just recently that maybe the case.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean what you are about to read here is set in stone. I was quite surprised the other day when I was looking for information related to dopamine, When I came across this rather interesting article, which was discussing the above topic. One of the factors which can cause people become overweight in the first place can be an addiction to food.

Food is based on a reward mechanism behaviour and that may be why some people do tend to over eat too much, there could be other factors involved, but we are looking at one primary reason here, for the time being. That being dopamine, which is a highly addictive reward chemical.

Examples of this have been found in mice if you overstimulate a mouse with dopamine and get it to do a task it will repeatedly do that task every time you give it a dopamine fix, say, for instance, flicking a switch, as long as you keep giving it a buzz of dopamine it will continue to flick the switch until it no longer can do it. This is one particular instance of how an addiction can occur in people.

One of the problems with this is if you do become addicted to a paticular drug you have to keep taking more of it to get the same effect, and this may or may not be the case with food and depends on what you are eating. The big problem with dopamine is it gives you feelings of pleasure and satisfaction so it’s no wonder it can become very easy to get addicted to a lot of substances. What scientists found in a particular study was that when people become addicted to a certain substance they tend to have fewer dopamine receptors in their brains.

So they tend to need to have more of a fix in order to get the same feelings or pleasure this is what starts the addiction in the first place. Because eating can become very addictive the scientists decided to have a look at the brains of obese people, to see if this was why they were eating too much food and not necessarily getting that satisfaction feeling.

So to look at this in more detail what they actually did is put together some obese test subjects to take a chemical which would show up on their brains while they were having a cat scan, they found in comparison to normal weight individuals that the obese people had fewer dopamine receptors in comparison to their counterparts.

One of the scientists said that because they probably had very high levels of dopamine their brains were probably trying to compensate for this, so this is the reason why they had fewer dopamine receptors, but they also did say that it could be the case that’s how their brains were anyway and this could be one of the reasons why they over ate.

They could not actually say whether or not obese people do have lower levels of dopamine, the main reason for this is the human body is as such very complicated. However, what they do suggest is if you think that you may be suffering from a lack of dopamine then there are certain things that you can do, if you are not exercising already and are lacking motivation then this could be a good place to start.

Alternatively, it may be a fact that you could be lacking in certain key foods below you will see a list of foods that you can eat, which will help you if you are lacking motivation in whatever you are doing whether it be finding the motivation to exercise or any other parts of your life.

Foods that can help with dopamine levels:

• Eat some ripe bananas they contain something, which will boost your dopamine levels.
• Eat plenty of foods, which have high antioxidant levels, plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables blueberries are a good choice. I regularly eat these with porridge in the morning.
• Eat chicken because of the high protein levels
• Cottage cheese you can get different types of cottage cheese I have one with pineapple or cheese and chives, and it is delicious with a jacket potato.
• Eat eggs, there are so many things that you can do with eggs one of my favourites is scrambled eggs on toast made with wholemeal bread.
• Eat plenty of fish, this is largely due to the high amounts of Omega three oils, which are really good for your brain.

This is just a small list of foods you can eat to boost your dopamine levels, I’m sure there are many others that you could try. Just out of curiosity have you noticed yourself if you are overweight that is that you tend to lack motivation when it comes to doing things? It could be the fact that your own dopamine levels could be quite low, which might be something worth considering

Related Posts

1. Reasons Why Obese People Eat More Food
2. Obesity and the Salt Connection
3. Can You Still Lose Weight If You Eat Cheese?
4. Is Technology Fueling Obesity ?
5. What Causes Food Addiction ?
6. Is Fast Food Really As Addictive As Heroin and Cocaine?