Suddenly, you find yourself 40 pounds overweight and it is becoming increasingly difficult to get your shoelaces tied up. You are on full alert. Before rushing out to reach your SUV and try to grab a coach in a gym (whilst both can be achieved effortlessly in Chicago, the story may be a bit different if you were in Llandudno, Clwyd, North Wales), you decide it is now time to have your lifestyle transformed by saying goodbye to pizza and burgers (or, fish and chips, your call) and commit to a one-week fat-blasting jump-start recipe you found somewhere online. Surely, the weight-blasting recipe includes plenty of protein, a scarcity of starch, and virtually no sugar or fat. Yes, your new healthy life now begins.
However, things soon get out of control, not on the dietary part, but on the psychological part. You start to become unsettled and hyperactive, easily angered, and have an unstoppable desire to get yourself fed. Indeed, there are even researches indicating that dietary habits can even affect your preferences on film titles. For instance, as you are on a diet and hungry, you are more likely to choose violent films over milder ones. Such a bad mood fills up your head, disrupts your daily circadian cycle, reduces your ability to make decisions, and, at worst, makes you alienated by everyone else. The psychological control during dietary conditions has recently attracted extensive focus from not only obesity research but also from the food and fitness industry. Currently, researchers are actively looking for potential answers as well as solutions to the problem.
Several recent research results are now suggesting that the psychological changes during dietary conditions are more complex than previously assumed. Different behaviors are controlled by different molecules secreted in the brain: unsettling, hyperactive and aggressive behaviors are controlled by compounds different than those for more calm behavior. This idea may provide a potential therapeutic approach in personal fitness as well as obesity treatment by selectively inhibiting the activity of specific neurotransmitters to regulate and control the feeding behaviors of overweight patients.
References:
Gal D & Liu W (2011) Grapes of Wrath: The Angry Effects of Self-Control. Journal of Consumer Research 38(3):445-458.
Yang Z, et al. (2015) Octopamine mediates starvation-induced hyperactivity in adult Drosophila. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112(16):5219-5224.
Passamonti L, et al. (2012) Effects of acute tryptophan depletion on prefrontal-amygdala connectivity while viewing facial signals of aggression. Biological psychiatry 71(1):36-43.
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