Dieting individuals who prefer to eat their meals in dim light may be more likely to overeat.
If you diet, take the lighting conditions where you eat seriously. You're more likely to adhere to the diet if the lighting is bright. Eating in dimmer lighting, even if only slightly dimmer, may increase your risk of lapsing.
To investigate whether dim light was linked to bulimic behavior in dieters, investigators performed two studies of 245 and 156 college undergraduates, respectively. About one in five students in each study group was overweight.
Results from the two studies indicate that among the students who were greatly concerned about their weight and body shape -- who, for example, admitted to being "preoccupied with the desire to be thinner" -- those who preferred dimmer light while eating were more likely to think about and engage in binge eating than their peers.
However, no significant correlation between light preference and overeating was found among individuals who said they were less concerned about their weight and body shape.
Sometimes the disinhibiting effects of dim lighting help us be how we want to be. But dimmer lighting also has a dark side: When we want to inhibit our impulses because they're destructive (e.g., the impulse to eat even though you're not hungry), dimmer light loosens us from our healthy inhibitions and 'frees' us from the very constraints that we are deliberately seeking.
The findings remained true even after researchers took into consideration the participants' possible depression and paranoia, both of which were also associated with bulimia symptoms and preferred light while eating.
Among students in the second study who scored high in dietary restraint, those who preferred dimmer eating light were again more likely to think about and engage in binge eating than were their peers.
Finally, researchers analyzed the lighting preferences of 12 students who scored beyond the cutoff point for diagnosed bulimia and found that they preferred to eat in dimmer light than did their nonbulimic peers.
These study results imply that if you want to lose weight and keep off the pounds, then you should make sure that you keep the dining area bright -- i.e., turn on all the lights, use brighter bulbs, open the curtains or window shades, rearrange lamps so that they more brightly illuminate the eater, or even move to a more brighter lit room for eating.
In light of these findings, New Year's resolutions to lose weight may be largely unsuccessful not because of each individual's inability to improve themselves, but because "the naturally low lighting level makes dieting success more difficult in January than at any other time of the year.
For success at dieting, it would be wiser for people to have 'spring resolutions' or 'summer resolutions' rather than the New Year's resolutions of January.
The present study builds on earlier research that indicated that "night people" -- those who prefer to stay up late and sleep in -- may be at greater risk of binge eating than morning people.
The take home point?
Early to bed, early to rise, makes a person eat more sensibly.
Personality and Individual Differences January 2002
As time goes on, we will see more and more of the importance of chronobiology in the future.
A book that I read last year is Lights Out by T.S. Wily. It is an absolutely fascinating book that reviews a basic concept that most physicians, even natural medicine physicians, are not aware of.
The biggest change humans have gone through in the last ten thousand years happened less than one hundred years ago. Electricity and the widespread use of the light bulb qualify, along with the discovery of fire, the advent of agriculture, and the discovery of antibiotic treatment, as a "point of no return" in human history.
In 1910, the average adult was still sleeping nine to ten hours per night. Now, the average adult is lucky to get a full seven hours per night. Most of us don't even get that much.
The author speculates that obesity, and all the major killers correlated with obesity, are in large part related to short nights and working ridiculously long hours.
Circadian rhythmicity plays a major role in our health. We need to eat, sleep, and reproduce in and reproduce in sync with the spin of the planet or our species risks going the way of the dinosaurs. The long hours of artificial light that confuse our ancient energy regulation systems can disrupt important physiological processes.
Another interesting book is The Body Clock Guide to Better Health: How to Use Your Body's Natural Clock to Fight Illness and Achieve Maximum Health, as it goes into far more detail.
One of the Amazon reviewers wrote this about the book:
We often awake at the same time and become tired at the same time each evening, especially if a regulated sleeping pattern is followed. We generally have a schedule or a certain order in which we complete tasks when we do arise.
Where we sit at the dinner table, what time we leave for work and arrive home again, the order in which we dress ourselves, the order in which we perform our household chores, the path we take around the aisles of the supermarket - all these, and many more, comprise the patterns of our lives, and the patterns are unique to each individual person.
This book allows one to develop a personal record monitoring such factors or "patterns" as alertness, pain threshold, hunger, and sleeping patterns. Our biological clock tells us when the best time is to perform a number of functions each and every day.
Just as some individuals are more productive first thing in the morning, others are more productive, particularly creative people, late at night or at 3 a.m. when others are sleeping soundly. Based on chronotherapy, the book "The Body Clock Guide to Better Health" suggests how to synchronize your health care and internal clock, based on your individualized body rhythms.
Your heart rate, body temperature and hormone production vary with your personal internal clock. This, in turn, influences such things as the best time to take medication, the easiest time to detect disease and even assists you in determining the ideal time, if their is such a thing as an "ideal" time, to have dental work completed.
Generally, there is a time when each individual is more tolerant of pain, so if you are planning to have root canal work, you probably should not have this completed when your tolerance for pain is at its lowest.
The material has clearly been thoroughly researched from a scientific approach and well written by authors who have extensive experience in their chosen fields. What most impressed me about the book was the "completeness" of the subject matter. The material is in-depth, easy and enjoyable to read, and the content holds your attention from start to finish.
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