Dr. Alia Crum

So fast forward, we did the study.

Hold on, did you order the cheesecake?

You know, I didn't order the cheesecake.

And the reason I didn't order the cheesecake was that at the time I had been obsessively counting calories.

I had been struggling with my weight.

I had disordered eating.

I had gone through a period of bulimia.

I was recovered at that time, but it was still sort of a like, I was well over the 2000 calories that I had allotted myself.

I was like, I will not have this cheesecake, but it was not a very pleasant state to be in.

So I hoped like, okay, maybe I can just make, maybe I can find a way to literally have my cake and eat it too.

Like if I just believed good things about it.

So I kind of went into that study with this wishful thinking.

And fast forward to what we found, which as you know, is that our beliefs did matter, right?

What we believed about the cheesecake, in this case, what people believed about the milkshake changed their body's physical response, right?

Now, that alone was radical, as we've discussed, because it took that calories in, calories out equation and flipped it on its head.

But when I started to apply these results in my own life, when I was like, okay, what did I learn from this?

How can I make this useful to me?

What I realized was that the lessons from the milkshake study were even more profound and important.

And I realized that what I thought was going to happen was the exact opposite as what actually happened.

So if you're eating, right, what you want to have happen is you want your ghrelin levels to drop, right?