Could you really imagine yourself salivating over a bowl of veggies instead of a baked chocolate sweetie?

Apparently it’s possible to train our brains to crave good foods in replacement of fatty sugar ones. I read about a study by the journal, Nutrition and Diabetes that used functional MRI’s to scan the brains of overweight people in response to food images. As expected at the start of the 6 month journey they found participant’s reward centres lit up when shown high calorie foods…’mmm donut’. But what was interesting was 6 months later was those who lost weight through healthy eating got excited by pictures of carrots and hummus (Sun Herald’s Sunday Life, May 22, 2016, p27)

Now if you know me, overweight issues aren’t really my concern, sorry. But we are increasingly becoming aware of the dangers of too much sugar for things like diabetes. What really interested me were the brains potential to correct or modify our ‘reward centres’. It seems we can train our brains to make healthier choices, with ‘habits’ being an important factor. So if we sit and watch a bit of telly most nights with a glass of wine and a block of chocolate to relax, our body expects it every time. We create an association. But we can uncreate that association or weaken it by choosing another food, such as nuts or an apple. We can also degrade the urges by doing another activity such as going for a walk when we are in the zone that usually produces the choccy attack. This unlearning process can take about 6 months and initially the replacement, healthier option tastes bland but overtime our body adjusts. The result, as you can imagine is a fitter, healthier person.

You can see your kids going through the same challenges… ‘There’s nothing to eat!’ Meaning ‘there’s no salty, addictive, sugar hitting junk in the cupboard’. Persistence is key. We need to encourage them to have the same disciplines:

-so they self-select healthier options

-keeping treats to a small percentage of their diet

-encouraging regular exercise instead of more sugar and iPod time.

Now the topic of obesity wasn’t really on my mind, but this article got me thinking about our wonderful brains that God has given us and the ability they have to adapt. More importantly, God has given us the power to be masters over our bodies: self control. The book of Genesis says God gave us this very mandate: “fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion…” (Gen 1:28). Of course He was referring to our dominion over all things created. We only see a feint glimmer of this ‘hand me down glory’ from God nowadays. Instead we see a world shaken by new chaos whether it is wars, disease or natural disaster. But what of our minds, shouldn’t we at least have dominion over them? The same story repeats; instead of order and control we often see ourselves mastered by our own desires, brokenness and mental issues.

But what this study shows is that when it comes to our eating habits, we don’t have to be prisoner to our urges; we can teach our body to change. Like a rogue stallion, we can ride on every breaking wave and keep getting dumped by our bodies on the shore over and over again. Alternatively we can take evasive action; break associations or activities that will lead us past the donut stall. The potential to assert some level of dominion over our brains cravings is real but needs exercising.

But this still isn’t what I wanted talk about. I wanted to apply this thinking to the all too common problem of anxiety. The question is how can we train our brains to be less anxious? How can we assert some dominion over them so they don’t crush us with worry?

In the next post I’m going to explore this question with a simple one word answer.

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