Your body, and specifically your brain, is one of the wonders of the world. To be fit and healthy, we need to eat the right amount of the right foods (and also engage in a certain amount of movement).
The science of Biochemistry is highly sophisticated and can tell us down to the microgram what we should be eating, at least for an average person doing average things. All good.
But over thousands of years, our bodies have developed a system that decides what we should eat, tuned to our specific bodies and to what we need right now. But even more important, under the right conditions, it automatically makes us want to eat what we should.
Wouldn’t it be smart to get a better understanding of how this incredible system works, so we can make it work even better for us and live an even longer, healthier life? How our bodies naturally self-regulate
Our head-brain is like the master controller for everything our bodies do. We can think of it as split into two: our subconscious brain, which automatically regulates most of what our bodies do. We have very little control over our subconscious brain, which is very fast-acting.
Homeostasis and set points
Our subconscious brain establishes set points over which we may have little control, and our subconscious will always try and restore our bodies to these set points. We have known this for some two hundred years and given this the name Homeostasis.
By contrast, our conscious brain is very slow and clunky, but we have some control, but not as much as we may think, as we can become indoctrinated with ideas. Our subconscious and conscious brains can work together. For example, when we catch a ball, our conscious brain is far too slow and clunky to work out where to put our hands when the ball will be near us. This is done by training our fast-acting subconscious brain.
Our subconscious brain regulates our temperature, and we have no control over the set point. If our subconscious brain has difficulty maintaining the set point, it will call in the conscious brain by sending a message: “We are feeling cold. Do you mind putting on that nice woolly jumper you got for Christmas?” Our subconscious brain also controls the amount of oxygen in our blood by regulating our breathing rate and the speed of our heartbeats to distribute it. It controls the amount of sugar in our bloodstream, providing fuel for our muscles and the nutrients needed to replace body parts as they age and wear out. It decides what type, how much, and where we store the fats, which serve as readily available food when we need them quickly.
Again, our subconscious brain decides on the set points for where and how much fat we need to store. We may try and use our conscious brain to override these set points by going on some calorie-restricted diet, which may work in the short term but rarely works in the long term. But we can try and move the set points so our subconscious brain is now working to meet the new set points.
How we can try to do this is explained in the next article for which is free for members only, so you need to sign up here.
