The Metabolic Power of Thought

“Thoughts rule the world.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the most fundamental building blocks of nutritional metabolism is neither vitamin, mineral, nor molecule. It’s our psychological relationship with food. It’s the sum total of our innermost thoughts and feelings about what we eat. Consider the word relationship. Each of us, whether we know it or not, is in an intimate, lifelong, committed union with eating. It’s not by accident that the same words that describe our relationships with people equally characterise our relationships with food—love, hate, pleasure, pain, expectations, disappointments, excitement, boredom, uncertainty, change. This relationship with food is as deep and revealing as any we might ever have.

The great Sufi poet Rumi once remarked “The satiated man and the hungry man do not see the same thing when they look upon a loaf of bread.” And Al Capone, noted gangster, astutely observed, “When I sell liquor, it’s called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, it’s called hospitality.” Indeed, how each of us thinks about eating (known as eating psychology or food psychology) is so profoundly relative that if a group of us were looking at the same plate of food, no two people would see the same thing.

Say, for example, we were examining a plate of pasta, chicken, and salad. A woman wanting to lose weight would see calories and fat. She’d respond favorably to the salad or chicken but would view the pasta with fear. An athlete trying to gain muscle mass would look at the same meal and see protein. She’d focus on the chicken and look past the other foods. A pure vegetarian would see the distasteful sight of a dead animal and wouldn’t touch anything on the plate. A chicken farmer, on the other hand, would be proud to see a good piece of meat. Someone trying to heal a disease through diet would see either potential medicine or potential poison, depending upon whether or not the plate of food is permissible on her chosen diet. A scientist studying nutrient content in food would see a collection of chemicals. All of these are reflections of our perceptions, our unique nutritional and food psychology. What’s amazing is that each of these eaters will metabolize this same meal quite differently in response to her unique psychology and thoughts.

In other words, what you think and feel about a food is as important a determinant of its nutritional value and its effect on body weight as the actual nutrients themselves.