Nutrition Videos

In the two medical nutrition centers I've been leading in the past 20 years, I've met a lot of people that know the instructions for a healthy way of life that they have to follow, but they find it hard to do so because of psychological factors. Today, I'd like to present an experiment that was carried out a few years ago and shows this correlation very expressively, and the results are shocking. During the experiment, a group of people was asked to watch a video with very touching moments, like those that make us tear up and cry with the appropriate music. Half the participants were asked not to express the feelings they would feel during the video at all and watch it looking totally indifferent, during all the images and scenes. Namely, they were asked to suppress the feelings that they would reasonably feel. The other participants were allowed to express their feelings, as they felt appropriate, namely to give expression to the feelings they would feel. Let me point out that the participants didn't know the aim of the experiment. As soon as the video ended, the participants were asked to go to a nearby room, where they had to fill in some forms. As a small token of gratitude for the participation in the experiment, the researchers offered ice-cream to them. This is very common in many experiments and didn't seem weird to them. So, in that room, there was a large freezer with various ice-cream flavors and some bowls for the participants to serve as much ice-cream as they wanted. After serving the ice-cream in the bowls and before eating it, they had to stop at a counter for a few seconds, in order to fill in some forms, the only goal of which was to make the participants leave the bowls with the ice-cream at the only spot they could leave it, under which the researchers had hidden a digital scale that weighed the amount of ice-cream that each participant had served in the bowl. After the experiment was completed, the researchers estimated the total amount of ice-cream that the participants who had suppressed their feelings had served in their bowls, and they found that, on average, they had served almost double the ice-cream than the group of people that had expressed their feelings freely. How many times have you had to suppress your feelings due to the circumstances during the last few weeks? How many times have you felt anger that you had to hold back? How many times have you felt deeply sad or frustrated about something you'd heard, but in order to look strong, you suppressed your feelings? Did most of those moments unconsciously or even consciously lead you to unhealthy foods? Think about it. Maybe those moments were a lot. Thank you!