I love magic and I’m going to show you three ways to trick your brain to lose weight.
Which red dot appears bigger?
They’re the same on both sides, but the one on the left appears bigger. Now look at these two plates of food and do the same thing.
What does this have to do with tricking your brain to lose weight?
When your brain sees the meal on the left, it thinks has it has more food and is more satisfied. Let’s look at three things you can do to trick you brain to lose weight.
1. Streamline your eating ware. Most of your calories come from a plate, so I suggest you to downsize your plates to medium ones rather than large ones. Your brain will be happier because it will think you are eating more food.
2. Turn off the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is the hunger hormone. You know it’s there when your stomach is growling asking for food. One of the ways to turn off Ghrelin is to stretch your stomach. When the stomach is stretched, your brain is signaled to let you know that you have eaten enough, and the hunger hormone is turned off.
As you can see from the diagram above, some foods can activate the stretch receptors and some will not. 400 calories of fat will not come close to activating the stretch receptors. 400 calories of protein will also fail to activate the stretch receptors. 400 calories of vegetables will easily activate stretch receptors turning off hunger. I encourage everyone to incorporate more vegetables in their diet.
A recent study proves the effectiveness of this. Participants in the study were encouraged not to eat less, but to eat differently. Their diets incorporated a lot of vegetables along with other healthy foods. The results, they lost 17 pounds in 21 days.
3. Turn on your brain while you were eating. I recently showed a video of a group of high school kids bouncing a ball between each other. I asked my class to count the number of times the players with white shirts bounced the ball.
After doing this for two minutes most of my group came up with the right answer but failed to see the gorilla that walked through the group beating on his chest.
If you are eating while distracted, the food you eat may not register with your brain. This can leave your brain thinking that you need to eat, even though you just have. Studies show that if you eat while distracted you eat 10% more at that meal and 25% more at the next meal! Conversely, if you focus on your food, you will eat 10% less at your next meal.
I suggest you do a two-minute pause before eating. Get your food and sit at the table. Turn off distractions. Look at your food, smell your food, and think about your food. This will help the food to register with your brain.
