Your mindset and belief about the food you eat has an incredibly powerful effect on how your body uses that food.
A fascinating experiment in New York Times best-selling book E-Squared: 9 Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality, is a 72-hour challenge. During this 72-hour period, people were instructed to infuse each bite of their food with positive thoughts, envisioning each bite bringing nourishment to their body. Amazingly, after the 72 hours, many people found they had lost 3 pounds! I don’t know about you but that’s an experiment I will definitely be putting into practice.
That beautifully illustrates the truth of God’s Word in Proverbs 23:7: For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.
I wrote in a previous post about the Milkshake Study conducted by researcher Alia Crum. The focus was to see if there was a placebo effect in food label language as there is with medications. What she did was to divide people into two groups; giving each group the exact same milkshake containing about 300 calories total. One group’s milkshake was labeled “sensishake” saying that it was fat-free and guilt-free with only 104 calories. The other group’s shake was labeled “indulgence” and “decadence” saying it had 620 calories.
The author studied ghrelin, the “hunger hormone,” which signals the need for food. When we are hungry, ghrelin levels rise, causing our metabolism to drop in case we do not find food. When we eat, ghrelin levels drop and metabolism spikes in order to digest the food.
The results of her study were fascinating. Participants who consumed what they thought was the “light” shake had significantly higher levels of ghrelin compared to those who consumed what they thought was the “indulgent,” shake, with much lower levels of ghrelin. In fact, the “indulgent” group’s ghrelin levels dropped three times as much as the “light” group. That means the milkshake they consumed left them more satisfied on a physiological level even though they were identical!
So what does this mean for us on a daily basis? We must understand that our thoughts and mindset have a very powerful and direct relationship to the food we eat and how it affects our physical body. By infusing our meals with negative thoughts, we program our bodies to respond negatively. But if we infuse our foods and meals with positive, nurturing thoughts, our bodies will respond accordingly.
Maybe that sounds a little “out there” but think about this: Dr. Emoto proved that water is sensitive to intention as you can see in the video below. You are made mostly of water and since water is impressionable, what you think and say has a powerful effect!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAvzsjcBtx8
Research done by The HeartMath Institute on the human heart and the power of our thoughts and intentions has proven that the heart’s electromagnetic field changes according to your emotions. Their research shows positive emotions create positive physical effects in the body including boosting the immune system.
It highlights the importance of being intentional: eating slowly, really tasting and enjoying your food, appreciating all aspects of it, including how it will nourish and satisfy your body and also how important it is to eat in an atmosphere of peace, aware of your thoughts and emotions. The worst thing you can do is eat when you are stressed or anxious. Also I believe praying over your meals is another powerful way to positively influence food’s effect on you.
Have you experienced how your mindset may have influenced how your food affected your body?
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Fascinating as always, Ann. A healthy weight is more than simply calories in and calories out. The milkshake study is mindblowing!
It’s interesting. I’ve never really considered it, but as we’ve grown and matured, so has our mindset about food. And as our mindset has shifted, so has our health. Thanks for the reminder of our life’s interconnectedness.
Glad you found it as interesting as I did Holly. Thank you, as always.
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