Weight Loss Techniques Based on Evolution

Humans became bipedal about 3 million years ago, and brain development happened after that. But fast forward to half a million years ago, they started non nomadic agriculture and further about 150,000 years ago started using cooking. Cooking did three things that helped nourish the humans so more time is available for other activities and they could go farther and spread throughout the globe. But understanding what cooking did, we can come up with some weight loss techniques.

a. Energy for Digestion: When food is cooked, the raw form has changed so it can easily disintegrate and digest. This energy supplied to break it down came from fire and does not have to come from the body, making the cooked food more energy dense. To give you an example, celery if consumed raw, the body needs more energy to digest it compared to cooked celery. So raw vegetables need more caloric energy to digest but still the net is positive energy, but lower levels as some of the generated energy is needed to consume the next raw food. So based on this, if you can create juices that you can consume using raw vegetables and fruits, you can spend energy simply digesting this. There are foods that require such high energy to break them down for digestion, they even can have negative calories i.e. more energy is needed to digest than the energy they release. This does not mean they burn more calories, but simply that the calorie content is low and the body spends a lot of energy grinding them down chemically.

b. Diversity of Food Groups: Some of the foods were not palatable in the raw form but cooking allowed to take away the unwanted taste, allowing more food variety to be consumed. Using grinding or juicing as a way to break down food rather than cooking, a variety of nontasteful vegetables can be mixed into fruits creating a lower calorie mix as fruits have large amounts of sugar.

c. Concentration: To understand this, take sugar cane for example. You need to eat a foot long round sugar cane, expend quite a bit of energy to garner a spoonful of sugar. By then, you feel full so cannot eat a lot more. But if you consume the processed spoonful sugar, it is concentrated and refined so you need to expend less energy, it takes up less volume in your stomach and now you still have room to eat more. So the more concentrated and processed food you eat, it’s high in energy output density per gram and the more weight you put on. So by gravitating more towards unprocessed foods, ideally raw form, the less concentrated high energy food you are consuming.

Given that food cravings is as much an addiction and mental discipline problem, the above may be less difficult to implement to manage weight loss. In my future articles I will address the psychological issues of food and how to manage the cravings.


Here is a shake recipe to incorporate all of the above.

Blueberries - half cup

Cucumber - one cup

Watermelon - one cup

Celery - quarter cup

Ginger - half thumb size


Grind everything until very smooth, in 8oz water. Pour in a glass, add ice cubes and enjoy and beat the summer heat.

Language for Positive Habits

                                     

Continuing on with our discussion of mental discipline and bad habits control, let's look at the effect of language we use and the visuals we invoke. We communicate externally and with ourselves with language and visuals mostly. Yes we use gestures and other senses too but in a very limited fashion. Our brains use language overtly and visuals to get into emotional states. So by understanding our language and visual triggers and countering them in various ways, we can arrest the path to get to the undesirable emotions and behaviors. Sometimes, the method is narrowly defined as Neuro Linguistic Programming but we will look at it in a broader way to understand some of the methods by which the brain uses language and visuals. Rather than subscribing to any one technique or narrowly believing in one methodology, let’s broadly understand the verbal and visual tools used and maybe we will broadly tie them to mind your thoughts theme we are discussing here.

Just like the Pavlovian dog experiments, we anchor our emotions to certain external events. Lets take an example, you are trying to help someone, you are putting effort, but they don’t ask to find out how you are doing if you need anything. This anger against that person gets triggered by their apparent selfishness. The more you see them busy in their own self, the more your emotions get triggered. Now you are anchored into this. Now you need to unanchor yourself and then get anchored into a different emotion to be healthy as anger triggers intense inflammation as described in Chapter x. 

Now think of this person as a five year old, very self absorbed and not aware of others. The more you look at them, the more you think about them as a child in a grown body. Just bring a comical gesture about what they are currently doing and this loosens your anger and every time you see them remember the five year old analogy, then that becomes a new anchor. Through pure visuals and language “ 5-year old” you can shift your association from strong negative anchors to less strong and even positive anchors. Let’s say you get mad when someone eats with their mouth open making loud noises. Obviously the anchoring between your emotion and what you encounter cannot be changed right away. Instead if you imagine the person eating grass and it's coming out of their nose and ears, then the funny image may loosen your emotion and every time after you may not experience the same strong emotions.

Let’s digress a little bit and look into language and evolution. Language evolution in humanoids was thought to initially stem from mirroring or gesture observations. The F5 premotor neuronal brain area of monkeys and the Broca’s region of the humans contain a mirror system of observing gestures which is the pre-language communication system that served as a seed to more advanced vocal communication. But humanoids having two of the legs freed from walking could go beyond the monkeys to connect the motor skills developed by the freed legs, leading to dramatic motor brain connections and development, leading to complex hand use for skill development, brain and hands (motor skills) building and expanding on each other,. This increased motor complexity lead to increased brain development and language development, as motor skills is the precursor of language. This hypothesis of the author is corroborated by above references and research. Apart from this digression, coming back to our discussion of mirroring, we can imitate or mirror another human whose emotional and behavioral patterns we want to create in ourselves. By observing people whose mannerisms you think are conducive to your benefit, you can imitate and temporarily achieve the mirroring of actions and behaviors and thought patterns. This may be useful in situations where you are sad, angry, anxious, fearful and could lead to adverse actions if you don’t right away change your emotional course. This is why, your mom always said change your friends if you want to change your habits. Mirroring happens in society and we confirm to our friends groups. So if you have habits and patterns you need to change, first lose the group that supports or abets your habits or induces your thought processes.

Sometimes we have certain rules about things and when others violate those then that gets us in trouble via flared emotions. But sometimes we don’t believe in the rules and violate them but others feel differently about them which again gets you flared up or gets you into making decisions or involving in activity that is considered bad habit forming. Some of these are for example, people say, I need to enjoy life and they drink at parties. That’s a rule they laid out between enjoying and drinking. For someone else, it may not be so much fun. You are driving in the early morning, no one is up yet, see a red light but no one is around, and you feel it’s a rule that can be broken. But someone else may find it not acceptable. But this now can be applied not just alcohol and traffic rules but social rules, ethical rules, governmental rules, quid pro quo rules, and many more. You may feel after the end of the day, you can come home and switch on the TV and your spouse feels after a long absence, it’s time to talk and bond. You have to cultivate the reframing in order to live a peaceful life. I myself, feel in a group setting if someone doesn’t contribute in any way, feel they are not holding up their end. Fairness issues really rile me up. I find many governmental rules applied to some and not to others depending on who you know. This drives me mad about the government and their ever increasing red tape and getting into everyone’s business. But this attitude will only hurt my health. Some may think the marriage rules could be loosely interpreted and some the use of substances as freedom etc. So reframing is necessary if you need to get out of bad patterns and habits.

Meditation or guided imagery where you see the bad habits and emotions going away and replaced by desirable emotions, thoughts. This is more visual technique where you can sit calmly and imagine being immersed in the desirable state and visualise leaving the undesirable state. Sometimes just focusing on a simple object or sound keeps other negative thoughts away. Practicing something like this before sleeping is a good idea as this increases relaxation and not lose sleep over your daily stressors.

Sometimes you have to look at yourself in an unattached fashion, nothing committed and disconnected from the emotions in order to understand the situation without a bias to come up with the strategy to correct your thinking.

Imitating and being motivated by other successful people and how they manage their issues is another way to develop techniques to help our emotional makeup that seems to get us to make bad decisions. I have seen this where writers interview many successful people and think now they also can practice the same principles. I am sure it can work, that’s why we read books and have role models and want to be inspired by others. I certainly was inspired by Bill Robinson the Celtics Basketball player and coach who used his reputation to help the community. Having such role models is a good thing and stars in the various industries can take such fame and apply it to uplift humanity to do good things.

Setting clear, achievable, smart goals to achieve the outcome. This works for very measurable things including in my case achieving zero alcohol which means the number of days I had zero alcohol before I have to restart that clock and challenge myself to increase the number of days.

Acting Your Way to Mental Discipline

How do actors get into the emotional roles? We can learn a lot by following their techniques. Why? Because minding your thoughts is essentially playing a role of who you want to be if you want to discontinue your bad habits or addictions. If you are determined and disciplined enough to follow through, then knowing the psychological tools will be useful for us. Besides, the cognitive science behind the tools is very revealing and presents a comprehensive view of our pursuit of mind your thoughts for better health and better life. So let me dive into that.

Acting used to be melodramatic and exaggerated physical and facial expressions and emotional display. But innovations in the psychology of acting have been enthralling us lately and many of us are mesmerized by the realistic acting on the TV. This is happening because actors have realized that rather than portraying exaggerated gestures which can be conceived as overacting, they are remembering when they felt that emotion, recreating that past emotion and bringing it out through emotional memory. Rather than acting, they are immersing themselves in their past emotions by remembering the incidents. For example you can get angry remembering an incident that happened to you. In the same way, in a positive effort, you can remember a situation where you forgave someone and that incident set you free forever. By invoking that incident you can forgive again. This is called method acting or inside - out acting and is pioneered by Stanislavski. Later taught by Lee Strasberg, Michael Checkov and Uta Hagen, and practiced by notable Hollywood actors. It is like a James Bond role actor imagining an unfair situation in his life and showing that anger or vigor to go after a bad situation or a bad guy. You can do this too, by invoking past positive emotions and applying them to the current negative situation. Yes it takes discipline, but the will meeting the methods, is an effective way to mind your thoughts.

The second tool from the psychology research used by actors is Theory of Mind, a fancy word for understanding others state of mind or empathy. This research shows that exploring the new character, what that new character should be feeling, acting, expressing, belief system, with such planning, the character can be enacted more realistically. In this process, one has to become more empathetic, ie, understanding of the others feelings and emotional states. In our case, if we are wanting to be less attracted by our weakness of let’s say shopping. Then portray or act a role of a character who does not like shopping, the discomfort they face for not finding what they like, having to search a lot to find, and worrying about choosing between different products, colors, and online shopping has too many confusing labels. By listing these scenarios of the new character you will start feeling the new character and don’t want to shop or buy instinctively. This can be applied to other negative emotions and cravings by acting out a new character who does not like those same things as you do. You can do this as a fun game, slowly flexing your acting muscles.


Suppression of self-identity is another approach actors use to immerse themselves into the new role. The now and present is the new role, and past and before is your self identity. By forgetting that self identity temporarily and immersing in the now, one can forget self. Mindfulness practice is one of the ways one can enhance the present experience and be aware of the new role of being connected to the current environment, in this case the new role being enacted. You need to be aware of the difference between internal state awareness vs self-reflection. The practice is about increasing the former and decreasing the latter. Why are we even suggesting acting to control your bad habits? All of these techniques are essentially how you mind your thoughts and self. We are suggesting these techniques, only because you are interested in understanding yourself, and managing your addictions no matter big or small. All of us can improve ourselves, and that requires discipline to control our thoughts. I am not suggesting that medical intervention is not necessary, but in addition to it, having your own understanding to manage your habits is important. Besides, research shows that, flexing your muscles of acting, makes you more empathetic, and have less psychological issues as overly focusing on self, and inability to flex the psychological grips leads to psychological distress.

8th in the Series - Alzheimer's, Social Connectivity, Be a Joiner

The social connectivity turns out to be such an important determinant of health, I wanted to spend time researching this.  Previous blog addressed when you cannot get out of bed.  But what about the rest of us who can get out of bed? I saw an important documentary in Netflix called “Join or Die”.  It talks about Robert Putnam’s research on social capital being important for economy and democracy but let’s look at it from a health point of view, which is our topic of interest here.  He wrote a book “Bowling Alone” making his point that memberships in special interest groups and clubs determine the community health and your social capital.  Let’s discuss some subtle points.  We attend a lot of parties each week.  Whether that is a wellness bringing social connectivity or not depends on how you connect to the people in the party scene.  Women tend to have diverse interests and connect well.  Men on the other hand, may have a tough time connecting and I surely am one of those.  I am especially not a political, sports or news enthusiast, so I have a tough time. But knowing your interests and having a mind of helping others in these meetings, having a harmonious attitude can have a profound effect on longevity per the latest research. 

But social connections also means immediate family.  In America the family connections are less strong and friend connections are stronger, but we should also understand the need to improve the family personal connections.  We forget that we are already given a structure called family whether it’s mom, dad and brothers sisters or spouse, children and grandchildren. This is where the basic social connections are formed early on, so keeping these connections in a healthy realm is really the first step.  So use the same strategies you use for your friends experience to be fun to also your family members.

Read more on https://mindyourthoughts.org/

7th in the series - Alzheimer’s, Social Connectivity and Online Multiplayer Gaming

 

The feeling of caring and lasting relationships, and belonging are fundamental social needs. I came across a remarkable documentary on Netflix titled “ The Remarkable Life of Ibelin”. We all feel that video games are just shooting and violence and only for children. That’s what we saw in video parlors.  When we were growing up, that’s how video games were. But the above video shattered my myth.  The World of Warcraft is a multiplayer game, with social interactions across many people.  Just like in a real world, you can interact with players in different roles and ways and establish friendships.  You can have an avatar that is different, more meaningful, less fearful, more true to yourself.  But just like in real life, you can garner social connections, social wellbeing in the game, or just like in life, can create social isolation and ill being and loneliness.  This does not depend on how many hours you play but how you play.  If you are harmonious and passionate in the game, your character generates social wellbeing but if you are inflexible and passionate in the game, the game would not contribute to your social wellbeing feelings. How remarkable is that!

But here are the implications.  You are bedridden and sick.  Why that makes you sad? Because you are not being useful, socially connected and you don’t matter to anyone, life goes on.  Rather than being sad in bed, why not connect virtually and be who and how you want to be in the virtual world? Your sickness does not matter and you can live a productive life by coming across people and helping them whichever way you can through virtual relationships. Can you do  this by passively watching TV? But that’s what they make you do,  in the hospital or at home.  Yes, maybe you can read a book, listen to music, but that is complete isolation, the only connection is between the author and you.  Again there is no real contribution by you. Given your limitations, you can still be productive in the virtual world or The World of Warcraft, where real people are interacting in avatars, they don’t know you are sick or bedridden.  Imagine the people in old age homes, nursing homes, hospice care, single spouse with mobility challenges, depression and anxiety sufferers, and kids with autism or social phobias.  Given an idle mind is a devil's workshop, why not make it busy with massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) when you truly cannot get up?. Wouldn’t this benefit Alzheimer’s, and dementia patients? Research proves that.  

Read more on https://mindyourthoughts.org/

6th in the series - Alzheimer’s and Social Connectivity

The remaining lifestyle changes after diet were exercise, emotions, stress, and social connectivity. Let’s tackle social connectivity next.

Oxytocin is one of the key neurotransmitters controlling social behaviors, attachments, and interactions with the stress responses of the HPA axis (which includes the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenal glands). One very simple example of the power of social bonds is revealed in this clinical trial. One group of HIV-positive, AIDS-symptomatic gay men was allowed to openly discuss both their sexual orientation and their HIV-positive status with others. In contrast, the second group was not permitted to disclose this information. The first group of patients showed a much slower progression of the disease compared to the second group. This study highlighted the healing power of social bonds.

Additionally, in another study, oxytocin levels were measured during group singing versus speaking or singing alone. Group singing enhanced oxytocin levels, signifying stronger social bonding. Another study in a small fishing village in Congo examined the combination of oxytocin and testosterone within a family setting. Fathers who were considered better providers for their families had higher testosterone and lower oxytocin levels compared to those who were poor providers. This pattern was also seen in families with ongoing conflicts. On the other hand, mothers displayed opposite levels when fathers were less involved in caregiving. This suggests that a lot of social connectivity begins at home within the family unit.

A well-known example of this concept is supported by research on telomeres in baboons in Kenya. Aggressive alpha baboons were compared to more social, cooperative, and non-aggressive baboons. The alpha baboons had shorter lifespans, and DNA analysis revealed that they had shorter telomeres-protective caps on the ends of DNA strands - which were linked to their shorter lifespans. This finding correlates with Dr. Hans Selye’s stress research on the paradox of species, balancing self-preservation with social good. Future posts will explore the role of stress in more detail. However, it is important to find a balance between self-preservation and contributing to social good, as an imbalance can lead to the kind of social connectivity stress we are emphasizing here.

It’s important to note that social reward is not solely dependent on one neurotransmitter, such as oxytocin or serotonin. Instead, it results from multiple, parallel mechanisms, making it a complex phenomenon. This means there are many ways to derive social rewards, and it’s worth investing time in discovering what works best for you. These could be connections with various interest groups, reflecting the diversity of interests we have.

Diet and Human Evolution

In this post let’s digress for a minute from Alzheimer's and look at the brain development across evolution of humans.

How Food Scarcity Shaped Human Resilience

During evolution, individuals had to go through periods of no food in the day, or prolonged physical exertion or starvation sometimes.  There was no reliable source of food so starvation was something that they had to get over and survive. The exertion side of this equation, we will address in a different post on the exercise effects.  This resilience throughout their lifespan gave them better bodies and minds to cope with stress.  This metabolic switch to ketones fueling the cells in the neuronal networks in the brain lead to increased resistance to stress, injury and disease.  It also makes sense from this perspective, food is a number one survival intelligence needed for the self, protection from danger being the second which is needed more infrequently compared to food which is on an 8 hour cycle for humans. So food stress definitely has strong implications on brain and intelligence in early humans.  So based on this, an intermittent diet or fasting builds that resistance and repairs inflammation and oxidative stress.  A lot of the signaling is done by Gherlin, the hunger hormone released in gut cells and circulates in blood, acting at the hippocampus. Lab results on mice showed a 40% increase in lifespan for Alzheimer’s with intermittent fasting.

The Evolution of the Human Diet: From Fruit to Seafood, and Beyond

If we look at the diet evolution, apes and chimpanzees ate fruit.  So we started out with a fruit diet, then added meat when we started making hunting tools.  But all of these human-like tribes disappeared and homo sapiens sustained in South Africa where they depended on sea food.  The theory is that the easy to digest sea food with abundant omega-3 oils could have played a role in brain development, as the brain is a massive cell membrane region needing high amounts of fat for the phospholipid layers as language and other faculties improved.  Cooking was used 800,000 years ago so that it allowed a variety of ingredients to become edible for humans, leading to complex diets that our brains demanded. The grain and vegetable diet came on only later when the nomadic lifestyle changed and cultivation started.  Complex traits of language evolved around 100,000 years ago.  Coordinated civilizations occurred 12,000 years ago.  Only the highly adaptable homo-sapiens were able to survive showing that social and stress management is a higher order skill and therefore just diet alone is not sufficient to heal.  In math this is called a necessary but not a sufficient condition.    

Diet and Alzheimer's: The Challenge Isn't Knowledge, It's Implementation

We are concluding in this post the diet part of the lifestyle changes that can lead to reversal of or slow down Alzheimer's progression. The central message is diet knowledge everyone may have, but putting it into daily practice is very difficult and creative psychological solutions are needed, the innovation is in this psychology and not in the diet. One example is why not make salad a compulsory part of food at parties and take away the sweets for once?  Without such large-scale cultural changes, we cannot change our habits.  

Read more on https://mindyourthoughts.org/