Thinking Makes You Eat More
We all know that increased physical activity makes us hungry, heck I just posted a little while ago about how swimming all day at the beach or in a pool as a kid, which happens to be one of the highest calorie-burning exercises you can do, would turn me into a ravenous animal when it came to dinner time, so we know for sure that exercise, especially the strenuous type, makes us eat more.
But what about activity that goes on within us, where it is not obvious that we are using resources from the outside, but oh yeah, there’s a heckuva lot going on inside the body. What I’m talking about is thinking, concentrating – using your noodle in other words. Using your brain power actually induces you to eat more, as proven in recent studies that set out to either prove or disprove that those that are actively thinking, problem solving and intellectually prosthelytizing are actually consuming more food because of this mental stimulation.
They found that it is true that we eat more when we are thinking, which means that you may be more incline to pick up that sandwich or that bag of chips if you have a day ahead of you that requires a lot of complex thought. The study wasn’t that big though unfortunately so a bigger study would need to be done to absolutely come to the conclusion that thinking makes you eat more food.
A small group of students was divided up and made to do different things from being sedentary (sitting down and not really thinking or doing anything physical either), and using the computer and having to use the brain and it was found that those that were actively using their brains actually ate more food than those whose minds were at rest.
The thought is that the big difference between those that were sedentary and not required to think and those that were thinking is that the brain requires glucose to think, and that this means it actively seeks out replacement for the fuel that it is burning through thinking, so it needs more food (energy) to replace what was being burned.
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