The dieting trend is often considered good around the world and many celebrities seem to support and endorse it. It has been called the source of healthy living and wellness and has formed the basis of the world’s fastest growing $250 billion industry.
But there is another side to it. And that dieting can be harmful.
A study of nearly 2,000 overweight and obese people who wanted to lose weight found that those who succeeded in doing so had about 80 percent more depressive symptoms than those who did not.
It’s probably a great sales pitch for cutting calories, but being hungry can affect our minds in a number of ways, not least by making us ‘hangry’, i.e. we’re angry because of the long gaps between meals. can come in the condition of
In fact, research is showing that being hungry or starving can negatively affect everything from our emotions to our decision-making ability, at least in the short term. All of these things ultimately affect how well we think and make decisions.
This is a problem that is much more serious than dieting. In a world where many people struggle to feed themselves, it must be remembered that hunger can exacerbate inequality.
A study found that providing school meals in Indian schools improved students’ academic performance by 13 to 16 percent.
Without adequate nutrition and calories, the way our brain develops and functions can be affected. But how can everyday hunger affect our thinking?
Emotions have a profound effect on the way we think, especially when we don’t understand them. But controlling our emotions is easier when we understand how they affect our thinking and decision-making.
A bad mood often makes us more pessimistic, for example it makes us think more negatively.
Research shows that if you’re not anxious, you’re not at risk when making any financial decisions, but if you’ve seen a movie that made you sad, then if you If you’re trying to sell a jacket online, chances are you’ll sell it for less.
But what does all this have to do with our food?
Hunger seems to be a factor in negative emotions and bad mood. In a 2022 study, psychologist Nienke Jonker and researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands asked 129 women, half of whom were asked to fast for 14 hours, about their hunger intensity, eating habits and mood. Questions were asked.
These researchers found that hungry women reported more negative emotions, including stress, anger, depression, fatigue, and confusion.
Researcher Junkar says that these effects were not insignificant in these women. Rather, hungry women reported that they were twice as angry as others. She was completely in a state of anger due to hunger.
A bad mood can completely change the way you see the world. If you are in a bad mood, you will remember all the negative things that will make your mood worse.
This negative mood can cause us to misunderstand the situation and make mistakes in decisions. Because of this, we see the world in black and white and miss out on all the important things.
When we feel down, we focus more on the negative than the positive, which can make us feel bad about ourselves.
In another series of research and experiments, psychologist and neuroscientist Kristen Lindquist of the American University of North Carolina and other researchers found that hunger increases the tendency of people to experience negative emotions.
They showed 218 people (some of whom were hungry) neutral, positive, and negative pictures (such as an angry dog), and then asked them to use their gut feeling to determine whether A more ambiguous image is positive or negative.
People who had previously been shown a negative image were more likely to rate the image as negative, even though they had been instructed not to be influenced by previous images. Participants who described themselves as hungry before taking the test were more likely to engage in such manipulations.
However, hunger doesn’t just make us feel bad or think negatively, it can also make us emotional. For example, if you’re writing your resignation letter before lunch, it will be tough.
An example of this is a 2011 study that found that Israeli parole judges were more lenient at the beginning of the day while hearing cases, and stricter in their decisions after a meal or later in the day.
Although the study was criticized for factoring in judges’ trial schedules rather than the intensity of their hunger, the science doesn’t support the theory that we become stricter when we’re hungry.
According to Lundquist, it is difficult to determine causal effects in real-world situations, such as those found in research conducted during parole board hearings. There are always alternative, possible explanations. But you can often control them under laboratory conditions.
To test whether people were really harsh to others when they were hungry, Lindquist invited 236 people into his laboratory.
About half of them had fasted for at least five hours, while the rest had eaten some time before. They were then asked to do a difficult task of creating geometric shapes on the computer and then suddenly the system crashed and they were asked to do it all over again.
At the end of this difficult exercise, participants were asked to give a possibly less harsh opinion of the researcher.
“People who were hungry and weren’t paying attention to their emotions or weren’t aware of their physical condition gave judgmental opinions about the researcher,” Lundquist says.
The reasons why hunger makes us feel and behave this way are complex.
This may be due to a lack of self-control that occurs when fasting lowers blood glucose levels. This theory suggests that we all suffer from negative thoughts about the world, but that we can control them. Until hunger destroys our ability to do so.
However, this theory has been criticized and other theories are gaining popularity. For example, Lindquist believes that feelings such as ‘hunger’ are actually a misinterpretation of a physical state as an emotional state.
Lundquist argues that hungry people who don’t reflect their emotions are more likely to be misunderstood and, as a result, may become more angry and harsh.
“The sensations you get in your body are doubled when you’re hungry,” says Lindquist.
“You might not normally be angry with your co-worker, but when you’re hungry, you think it’s really bad,” he says.
This theory could be a game changer for dieters. If the negative mental aspects of feeling hungry are caused by misinterpreting a physical sensation, then we can probably learn to interpret that physical sensation better.
It can work like cognitive behavioral therapy, which helps us reframe our thoughts and feelings.
Jonker’s research on the feelings of hungry women supports that women with symptoms of an eating or eating disorder report more positive feelings about being hungry than women without such symptoms. Although disordered eating habits are a complex mental health condition, the findings suggest that these women learned hunger as a negative experience.
However, when you have an eating disorder, this state of mind is extremely dangerous and unhelpful.
It is for evolutionary reasons that we can perceive hunger as something deeply unpleasant. After all, when our body lacks nutrients, our brain forces us to react.
“From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that hunger, along with emotion, shapes our responses and that we focus on immediate gains rather than long-term gains,” Lundquist says.
A study from the University of Dundee in the UK shows that when people are hungry, they become biased towards the present and delay gratification.
In this study, researchers offered participants either £20 in cash immediately or to download 20 songs or double that amount in the future.
Participants who were not hungry were willing to wait 90 or 20 days, respectively, for the larger reward. But most of the hungry participants were willing to wait 12 to 40 days. Which shows that hunger forces us to act quickly instead of planning for the future.
Diet also directly affects our cognition. A 2021 review of research on the effects of hunger or starvation on cognition found that being hungry affects the ability to focus on different tasks at once.
Most of us know that when we’re hungry, we have constant thoughts of chocolate cake, hot crispy chips, or spicy noodles. And research shows that this is very common.
Hunger increases our attention to food. Which reinforces the idea that hunger drives the body to eat or seek food, and that distracting us from whatever we’re doing is the first step in the process.
In the modern world and especially in the West though food is not hard to come by so being distracted by hunger can do more harm than good.
Cognitive psychologist John Rommel of the University of Heidelberg in Germany and colleagues investigated whether being hungry makes people more prone to mind wandering, such as fantasizing about food.
“Typically if you find people mentally wandering, they’re less effective at their work,” he says.
He added that this effect only applies when the task is fairly complex, such as reading.
“If we’re ironing or something, I think our mind can wander and it doesn’t affect the performance of the task because it’s quite simple.”
They investigated how hungry people are affected by mind wandering in a complex task.
They asked the participants to read 27 pages of the famous novel ‘War and Peace’ and then take a comprehension test. They were also asked if their mind was wandering during this time and if so, what they were thinking.
In this study, 39 people were asked to come to the laboratory without eating for five hours, while 91 were asked to come to the laboratory on a full stomach.
Forty-six people in each of the two groups were given a recording of a sexy story and tested to see if their mind wandering increased.
The researchers discovered that people whose minds were wandering performed worse, and that the hungry group was the most prone to mind wandering.
These individuals were 10 percent more apathetic than others and were primarily thinking about food. Which shows that being hungry also dominates sexual desire.
John Parkinson, a psychologist at Bangor University in the UK, has shown that hungry people who are distracted by the thought of food are more likely to make errors in a fine-tuning task.
“There are mixed feelings of fear and anxiety,” explains Parkinson.
“If I disturb you by showing you pictures of snakes or something, you lose your attention.” And you will concentrate on how to get rid of the snake.’
“Similarly, when we’re hungry and trying to get rid of the sensation, our thinking can be significantly impaired,” says Parkinson.
If you’re trying to solve problems in the moment, says Parkinson, you may ‘choose easy, quick solutions over long-term, complex solutions.’
Even simple decisions require attention, such as what to eat. If we’re on a diet, we need awareness to curb our cravings for fatty, high-carbohydrate foods. But if we go shopping like this hungry and mentally wandering, we end up buying a lot of useless stuff.’
Hunger is a powerful physiological signal because it helps us survive. But, it can interfere with our thinking. When we’re hungry, we’re likely to have difficulty doing complex tasks and choose simpler ways of thinking. Irritability, emotionality, harshness and belittling our current situation are just feelings of hunger and they further confuse our minds.
But being aware of hunger can be very useful. The next time you’re angry or in a bad mood, ask yourself if you’re hungry.