Health Habits

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Posts Tagged ‘overeating’

Your brain on meditation

May 19th, 2009

Your brain on meditation

We all have stress in our lives.

Job stress, school stress, family stress, economic stress, the stress of your daily commute, etc…

And how we deal with that stress can have a huge impact on our health.

Some of us direct that stress outward.

While others turn it back onto ourselves.

Well, today’s post is for those self-flagellators who tend to beat themselves up with all of life’s little stresses.

According to a new study, with just 5 days of practice, test subjects learned how to perform IBMT ( integrated body-mind techniques) and were able to:

Reduce their levels of cortisol – the stress hormone
Improve blood flow and electrical activity in their brains
Improve their quality of breathing
Reduce their levels of anxiety
Reduce their levels of depression
Reduce their levels of anger
Reduce their levels of fatigue, and

“create a state of ah, much like in the morning opening your eyes, looking outside the grass and sunshine, you feel relaxed, calm and refresh without any stress”

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So, what is IBMT?

IBMT is a combination of several body–mind techniques including:

body relaxation,
breath adjustment,
mental imagery, and
mindfulness training, accompanied with selected music background.

In the study, subjects followed an instructional compact disc with body posture adjustment, breathing practice, guided imagery, and mindfulness training accompanied by a music background.

The sessions lasted 20 minutes each day for 5 days.

20 minutes x 5 days?

Hmmmm

Where do I sign up?

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For all of you super-geeks, here is a pdf copy of the complete study.

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Binge Eating: Is Your Brain Making You Fat?

October 10th, 2008

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that “overeating throws critical portions of the brain out of whack, leading to a malfunctioning hypothalamus, metabolic inflammation, insulin resistance, leptin resistance, obesity and type 2 diabetes”.

The study, published in the October 3 issue of Cell, attempts to expand on previous research which showed that over-nutrition is associated with chronic inflammation in metabolic tissues.

Specifically, they wanted to see whether metabolic inflammation compromises the brain’s metabolic regulatory systems and therefore promotes over-nutrition associated diseases.

Translation:

They wanted to see if a trip to the “All You Can Eat Buffet” would mess with your brain, causing an impaired metabolism and increased obesity.

The Results:

A trip to the “All You Can Eat Buffet” will mess with your brain, causing an impaired metabolism and increased obesity.

The Details:

There is a substance in your brain called IKKβ/NF-κB.

IKKβ/NF-κB is a mediator of metabolic inflammation. Most of the time, it just sits there, inactive.

However, a single session of overeating activates the IKKβ/NF-κB found in your hypothalamus.

Once activated, the IKKβ/NF-κB increases inflammation in your metabolic pathways and interrupts the normal signaling of the obesity regulation hormones, leptin and insulin.

When this happens over and over and over again, your body becomes resistant to insulin and leptin.

And you become fat.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the increased obesity leads to even more inflammation. Which leads to more leptin / insulin resistance and so on and so on.

This all results in quite the little vicious circle of inflammation, hormone resistance and obesity.

Conclusion

The researchers have concluded that “their findings could lead to treatments that might stop this cycle before it gets started”.

If they can inhibit the IKKβ/NF-κB pathway in the hypothalamus, they may be able to eliminate the inflammatory response to over-eating and the resultant hormone resistance and obesity.

They also noted that “if realized, such a strategy would likely offer a safe approach given that the critical pathway appears to be unnecessary in the hypothalamus under normal circumstances.”