Weight-loss motivation for nerds
 

This report about a link between being overweight and your brain shrinking really hit me.

http://health.usnews.com/articles/he...ns-shrink.html

Other reasons to lose weight, while important, do still prompt an inner argument, even being healthy because I can't really remember what it feels like to be totally healthy and it becomes hard to believe it can happen. But my brain?! It's been a good motivator to help me not eat too much, as I now have a little voice in my head that says, "Stop! Save your brain!" I don't like exercise, so it's hard to exercise for the sake of my clumsy, awkward body, but if I'm exercising for my mind ...

As a fortunate happening, I also recently read this article about how stress changes the brain, and my hope is that I can undo an damage my weight has already done to my brain. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18angier.html

I read about this study a few days ago. I wonder though, it doesn't seem to indicate whether the brain tissue lose occured as a result of the excess weight. I mean, how do we know that overweight people don't naturally have less brain tissue, and that's part of what leads to being overweight? They need to test people over the course of their entire lives, compare what they find to the person's weight, and then we'll get a better understanding of what's really going on.

That's a good point - they say that most of the loss was in the frontal and temporal lobes, and isn't the frontal lobe the impulse-control area? Maybe some overweight people have a decreased ability to control the urge to eat. I'm just making this up here, I minored in psychology in college and that's the extent of my knowledge of the brain. :D

Either way, sounds like a good reason to maintain a low weight just in case there's a causal relationship! I want to be one of those scientists who works until I'm 90 years old, I can't afford to lose more brain tissue than necessary.