Losing weight- all in the mind?

[Davey Boy 2.0]

Not sure about the source on this, will look into it tomorrow:

Alia Crum and Ellen Langer from Harvard psychology department took 84 female hotel attendants in 7 hotels. They were cleaning an average of 15 rooms a day, each requiring half an hour of walking, bending, pushing, lifting, and carrying. These women were clearly getting a lot of good exercise, but they didn’t believe it: 66.6% of them reported not exercising regularly, and 36.8% said they didn’t get any exercise at all.

Their health, measured by things like weight, body fat, body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio and blood pressure, was related to their perceived amount of exercise, rather than the actual amount of exercise they got, and this, so far, isn’t very unusual. A classic study of 7,000 adults found that that perceived health is a better predictor of death than actual health, and another looking at elderly people found that those who perceive their health to be poor are 6 times more likely to die than those who perceive their health to be excellent, regardless of how healthy they actually are. Once again this goes to show the danger of relying on self-report data for health research.

But it gets better. Crum and Langer then divided the hotel workers into two groups (by hotel). One group got a one hour presentation on what a fabulous amount of exercise they were getting, how they were meeting and clearly exceeding the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle. They were given information sheets, in English and Spanish, showing the calorie burn for activities like vacuuming, or cleaning a bathroom, and the researchers even put notices up in communal areas explaining what excellently healthy exercise their work was.

The other group was left alone.

Four weeks later the researchers measured everything again. The group who had been tutored about the health benefits of their work now perceived that they did more exercise than before – unsurprisingly - while the group who were left alone didn’t change. Neither group had changed their actual levels of activity.

But amazingly, despite no change in actual exercise levels, in the intervention group, simply being told about the value of what they were already doing caused a significant change for the better on every single one of the objective health measures recorded: weight, body fat, body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio and blood pressure.

It’s an outrage. Maybe mindset alone can influence metabolism and the benefits of exercise: perhaps this experiment shows, essentially, the placebo benefits of exercise. Maybe the cleaners changed their behaviour, or their diets, in ways that the researchers didn’t pick up, perhaps they had more spring in their step, tipping the scales in their favour. And maybe it doesn’t actually matter what caused the change, as long as we can exploit it: because the links between body and mind are far more fascinating than any pill peddler would ever have you believe.

[phishtaper]

this seems really wacked on so many different levels. yes, if you find the source, please post.

edit to add: source is Crum, AJ, Langer, EJ, _Mind-Set Matters: Exercise and the Placebo_ Effect, Psychological Science, v18(2), Feb 2007. Just grabbed it and will have a look. This is actually one of the top Psychology journals in the world. I can email the pdf to anyone who may want it.

Edited August 27, 2008 by Guest