Don’t think! You’ll get fat!!!
For those of us who are always watching our weight (isn’t everybody), you’ll be interested to find out that if you want to be a thinking person, now you can be dumb and thin or smart and fat … well, maybe I’m exaggerating. Seems that a new study says that “Thinking makes you hungry, and thinking really hard makes you really hungry.”* Leave it to those wonderfully laid-back Canadians to do a study on why people in sedentary, white-collar jobs gain a lot of weight.
Here’s how the study worked: At the Laval University in Quebec students were given different types of tasks that required different kinds of thinking, i.e. deep thought, relaxed thought, or no thought or attention whatsoever. After the tasks, the same students were offered snacks. Those who’d thought the least ate the least; those who’d really had to think ate “as if they’d spent the day plowing the fields.”
The moderate-brain-activity group ate 203 more calories and the deeper thinkers ate 253 more calories (an increase of 30%) over the most at rest group. Â Â According to the report in LiveScience, scientists found that when the brain is working really hard to think, stress hormones in the body cause blood glucose levels to fluctuate, inducing feelings of hunger. Â Researcher Jean-Philippe Chaput says: “Caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact that we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic currently observed in industrialized countries.”
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*The Week, News Health & Science, “Thinking can make you fat …” September 26, 2008, pg 21
