These are a few of the more unusual reasons why there is an explosion in the number of people that are overweight. Some of them are really surprising I find.

1) Not Enough sleep.

Apparently, there is strong correlation between the hours you sleep and you overweight. There is the obvious connection that overweight people have a ore restless sleep, but it was also shown that less sleep gives a hungry feeling that is more difficult to satiate.
A group of young nurses was followed and their sleep patterns recorded. 20 years later hose that slept only 5 hours put on more weight than those that slept 6 hours and they put on more weight than those that slept 7 hours. Puzzling.

2) Climate control

As we tend to live more and more in circumstances in which our environment has an ideal temperature of 21 degrees Celcius, we burn less fat in trying to regulate our internal temperature. This goes for cold (heating) and warm (climatisation) regions.

3) Less smoking

A though one, but people who smoke are thinner on average. And if you ever tried to stop smoking, you know that you gain a few kilos.

4) Prenatal effect

Having an overweight mother enhances you chances of having the same problems, and this very early in life.

5) Getting older

This you can see all around you. I see it even in my parents and less in myself (because I do something about it), but older people tends to put on weight. I guess this is because their calorie needs are less but they do not change their diet.

6) More drugs

In the 1970s a new class of antipsychotic medication called neuroleptics came on the market, and millions of people worldwide now take these drugs. Alongside their undoubted success in treating psychosis, neuroleptics have a drawback: users typically gain 4 kilograms in the first 10 weeks, and another 4 or 5 kg in the year that follows.
Neuroleptics are not the only class of drugs to cause weight gain: anticonvulsants to treat epilepsy, antihypertensives for high blood pressure, protease inhibitors to treat HIV and diabetes medications, including insulin, have all been associated with packing on the pounds. Beta blockers add an average 1.2 kg to people using them, and taking contraceptive pills for two years will pad you out with an extra 5 kg. Even common, over-the-counter antihistamines can fatten you up.

7) Pollution

In daily life, people are exposed to tens of thousands of industrial chemicals: pesticides, dyes, flavourings, perfumes, plastics, resins and solvents, to name but a few. We swallow them, inhale them and absorb them through our skin.
There is some evidence that low levels of some of these chemicals can lead to weight gain. Some of these chemicals are endocrine disruptors that interfere with the functioning of hormones such as oestrogen. Numerous animal and human studies suggest that when oestrogen is not functioning properly there is a tendency for weight gain.

8 ) Fat equals fecund

Statistical analysis proved that indeed fat people tend to have more children. And as children of fat people have a larger probability to get overweight too (see point 4) this increases the number.

9) Older mums

Combining point 5 with the fact that the age at which women have their first child has increased by 5 years (on average) makes it easy to see that this is indeed a possible cause for the trend of seeing more fat people in the streets nowadays.

There are off course other factors at play, but it seems to be hard to make the correlation stand out with the recent increase in the number of overweight persons.

One of the obvious is too much food, junk food or lack of physical exercise. Studies have, up to date, not been able to pin down the relationship in a certain way.

This post was inspired by a 2006 New Scientist article.

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Tests rhesus monkeys showed that when monkeys are fed a low caloric, but otherwise fully nutritious, diet, they exhibit a higher count in naive T-cells. These are white blood cells that detect and fight new pathogens as they enter the body.

There is also indication that kin of diet could help prevent heart disease, diabetes, stroke and even cancer.

This finding confirms what Wallace Wattles advocates in his book ‘The science of getting well’. In this he recommends to only eat whenever we have a genuine hunger.
I was always reluctant to try his method on getting well because it is hard to do. Especially with our modern way of life. But there could be a lot of truth in it and is worth trying.

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I read an article today in New Scientist about the subconscious and it influence in our lives. The article is called: ‘The other you’ and it gives an overview of the current scientific understandings on the subject. (Older articles can be read via their archives section, but you will need to wait some time before this article appears on the site)

On of the interesting things that this article mentions is that our subconscious is constantly monitoring our environment in a way that we cannot do in a conscious way (it is a well established fact that the things we do and perceive consciously are limited. The tiny number of 3% is often put forward).
So what the subconscious does is to monitor the outside world and log it and then call our conscious attention whenever it ‘thinks’ this is needed. The problem is that we do not have a lot of control over when this happens.
The article also goes on to say that the subconscious often outperforms the consciousness. They give the example of playing tennis or driving a car. Once you know how to do it, you can do it automatically, as on auto pilot, read: performed by the subconscious.
But also in social situations, the subconscious often makes better decisions than the consciousness. And people who are very creative use this part of themselves to get their best ideas.

And now for the link with the law of attraction.

From the same article, and everyones personal experience, we know that we have very little to no control over this part of ourselves.

And here comes all the literature on ‘the law of attraction’: they devise a way to ‘talk’ to your subconsciousness and get it to pay attention to whatever we want (and do not forget, NOT to pay attention to whatever we do not want).
A large part of ‘The secret’ is actually a way to control or to guide the subconscious processes in ourselves.

And science tells us that if we succeed in doing this, our subconscious will start showing us whatever it finds interesting (but now it finds interesting what we told it to find interesting). And that whatever it shows us is really relevant. This then also explains why we are told to act when after visualizing we get hunches.

In conclusion, I would say that these scientific findings are pointing in the direction that if we can somehow direct our subconscious, we can harness a great and efficient power in ourselves.
The methods to do this, I have not read any scientific account on, but I am sure that in a few years research will direct us in the good direction, finally proving ‘The law of attraction’

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