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. Even more importantly, 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 parts: our subconscious brain, which automatically regulates most of what our bodies do, and our conscious brain, which we use for deliberate thought and decision-making.
We have very little direct control over our subconscious brain. It is fast-acting and constantly working in the background.
Homeostasis and Set Points
Our subconscious brain establishes set points over which we may have little control, and it will always try to restore our bodies to these set points. We have known about this process for around two hundred years and have given it the name homeostasis.
By contrast, our conscious brain is slow and clunky. We have some control over it, but perhaps not as much as we think, because we can become influenced or indoctrinated by ideas.
Our subconscious and conscious brains can work together. For example, when we catch a ball, our conscious brain is far too slow to calculate exactly where our hands need to be when the ball reaches 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 it has difficulty maintaining that set point, it may call in the conscious brain by sending a message such as, “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 heartbeat, helping distribute oxygen around the body.
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 also decides what type of fat we store, how much we store, and where we store it. These fats serve as readily available food when we need energy quickly.
Again, our subconscious brain decides the set points for where and how much fat we need to store. We may try to use our conscious brain to override these set points by going on a calorie-restricted diet. This may work in the short term, but rarely works in the long term.
However, we can try to move the set points so our subconscious brain is now working to meet new, healthier targets.
