How What You Eat Can Change How You Think

Are you on a New Year diet? The approach you choose to weight loss could have a profound impact on your brain.

If you prefer to read…

Let me set the personal scene. Like most women of “a certain age” I spent decades on a more-or-less permanent diet. Although I’ve never been officially overweight, I counted calories pretty much every day from the age of 11, convinced that without it, my weight would balloon out of control.

I still remember that biology lesson in which I calculated that my intake the previous day had been over 3,500 kcal, and was told this would shortly lead to obesity unless I took immediate steps to remedy the situation. I worked out that two oranges and a packet of peanuts should be my new daily intake…

Luckily, I didn’t have the willpower to follow through. But I became a sucker for women’s magazine-style weight loss advice, and went in for low-fat, high-carb eating, taking plenty of exercise to “burn off the calories”.

Three years ago I started to approach the thing rather differently, after reading The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. And then, in October 2013, I took the plunge and went Paleo, eliminating all grains from my diet and further reducing my carbohydrate intake.

The big effect of this last change was obvious to me within a couple of weeks. I felt peaceful, as if a battle inside my body had suddenly ended and the dark, fire-filled scene had shifted to the green hills of the Shire.

Worry and anxiety were dramatically reduced, replaced by calm. I had more space to play with interesting ideas, and felt more capable of making things happen.

As the weeks continued, another set of mental effects kicked in. I used to get really stressed by being hungry. I absolutely needed to eat breakfast soon after getting up – if it was delayed I would get horribly confused and upset, often tearful. A similar effect happened in the evening before dinner – less marked, but still significant. Now, I became much less stressed about food: I could even miss a meal if for some reason I needed to. (I

There were physical effects, too. My weight stabilised, for example. Before, it could vary by up to 2kg from one day to the next. Now daily weigh-ins became distinctly boring: 60.6kg, 60.6kg, 60.8kg, 60.6kg… My “thin” clothes fitted and stayed that way, even over Christmas. My hair and skin were apparently glowing with health.

But the principal impact was on the quality of my thinking.

Hang on! How come a change in diet had affected my mind so deeply? Particularly when I hadn’t been eating “unhealthily” before?

I’ve spent the last ten years or more thinking about thinking, exploring NLP and Clean Language, experimenting on myself, and working with coaching clients’ minds, motivations and metaphors. I’d already been using interesting research about embodied cognition, involving the heart and gut brains, and using space and movement to change how people think.

This effect was new to me – and struck me as important.

Grain Brain by David Perlmutter – who’s both a practising neurologist, and a nutritionist – provided a reasonable explanation. (Thanks to Steve Chandler and James Tripp for the recommendation.)

In his well-argued book, published in the UK this week, Perlmutter says: “Researchers have known for some time now that the cornerstone of all degenerative conditions, including brain disorders, is inflammation… Gluten, and a high-carbohydrate diet, are among the most prominent stimulators of inflammatory pathways that reach the brain.”

He says that the gluten in modern grains, and a high-carb/low fat diet, could be responsible for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, as well as such problems as chronic headaches, depression, moodiness, ADHD, anxiety and chronic stress, insomnia, poor focus and concentration… as well as causing people to become overweight and obese, with all the associated problems.

Up to 40 per cent of people are affected by gluten. Everyone is potentially affected by a high-carb diet.

There’s even a specific explanation for the upset-before-meals condition, and why switching my diet would change that.

It’s a lot to take in. I’m from the East Midlands, where Rosemary Conley launched her low-fat diet revolution. I believed what I learned in that early biology lesson: a calorie is a calorie and weight loss is as simple as calories in < calories out.

Now I’m asked to believe that it’s nowhere near as simple as that: in fact the government-advised Food Pyramid is just plain wrong – created from a toxic mixture of postwar scientific ignorance and food-industry vested interests. Doing our best to eat by the rules has been contributing to the explosion of dementia that is affecting so many friends’ parents.

And it’s quite possible that my lifelong tendency to anxiety and depression had the same cause. Blimey.

Thinking this way was a big shift to make. But I can’t deny the clear evidence of my own experience – a mind-shift of even bigger proportions.

So, if you’re choosing a diet for this New Year, may I recommend a gluten-free, lower-carb option? Eat meat and vegetables. Enjoy natural saturated fats such as butter and olive oil (they don’t cause heart disease – that’s another myth.) Explore the net for Paleo stuff: I suggest Mark’s Daily Apple and PaleoPlan.com as great places to start.

Your mind matters – at least as much as looking good in your bikini this summer. So select a diet that’s both brain- and body-friendly.

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• If you’re struggling with a major life-change such as switching to a new dietary regime, X-Ray Listening coaching can help. Book your free consultation here.