4 ways your thoughts affect your metabolism, gut and longevity | Sarah Ann Macklin
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How can our beliefs about food change hormone responses and metabolism?
I'm Dr. Rupee and on this show I help you feel more in control of your health through food and lifestyle medicine. What if I told you that two people could eat the exact same meal with the exact same calories and have completely different hormonal responses because of what they believed about what they were eating? Or that a group of women lost weight and dropped their blood pressure by 10% just by changing the way they thought about their daily activity. Well, these aren't fringe findings. The way We think about our health can meaningfully impact our biology. My guest today is nutritionist Sarah Ann Macklin, Sunday Times best-selling author of Healthy Shouldn't Be This Hard. And on this episode, we're going to unpack four ways in which our thoughts can either help or hinder our health.
There's a body of evidence showing that the belief you hold about your food, your movement, And even your genes can rewire your biology. And why we all need to learn the art of self-compassion to truly shape our health for the better. Sarah Ann Macklin, how is it possible that our thoughts can affect our hormones and our health?
So my background is a nutritionist, and I was always really aware about how important food is, right? For how we think and how we feel. And it is. There's so much to be said in that. But there is a massive missing ingredient here when it comes to how we look at ourselves with health information, how we relay health information and how we interpret health information. And so for me, yes, it's bi-directional. It's not just the food that affects our mind, it's bi-directional. Our mind can also affect our entire physiology. And that to me was the missing, kind of the missing picture. And so I first started coming across this research by an incredible researcher at Stanford called Dr. Aliyah Crum. And she is someone who I have looked up to now for years.
She did this fascinating study called the Milkshake Study. So what she did is she gave two participants I'd quite like to be in this actually, if I'm honest with you. Two participants, um, what she told um them was milkshakes. And she said to one group, this has around six hundred calories in, and she said to the other group, this has got around a hundred and eighty calories in. She labelled one indulgent and one diet. So just think about how many times you're going out, maybe looking at drinks and ordering something that's diet or healthy or like, oh I'm gonna indulge tonight and have something a bit more delicious. And then she looked. afterwards at the participants and how they responded with their hunger hormone.
And the one that was indulgent, their hunger hormone actually decreased, which meant that they felt more fuller and they didn't want to eat any more. The ones in the diet group, their hunger hormone didn't change. What was interesting is both of those milkshakes both contained three hundred and eighty calories.
So they were identical.
They were identical.
Wow.
And so sometimes when you're relaying figures it can be hard to catch up, but basically neither was indulgent or diet. They were both exactly the same, but the perception that the participants had in that study Thought actually changed the way that their hunger hormone related to what they thought and perceived that milkshake to be.
This is wild.
Isn't it wild? And so I'm thinking, hang on, for years I've been seeing clients in clinic as a nutritionist, and I'm like, this is really healthy. No, this is more indulgent. You shouldn't be having that this this often. And if you're thinking about when you read in the news or when you're looking on Instagram, you know, the the way the linguistics of health food is in is is, you know, described and interpreted has the biggest effect. maybe more than the food itself. And so I'm like, wait, that should be the baseline of scaffolding when we're talking about health and food. And so that took me down an entire massive journey. As a nutritionist, to totally change the way that I kind of work with with clients, work with myself, but also really wanted to get this message out into the world that actually, before we start with all the external metrics, which can work and do work.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How can our beliefs about food change hormone responses and metabolism?
0:00–9:49
2
What did the Milkshake Study reveal about labeling and hunger hormones?
9:49–18:10
3
How does the way we think about exercise affect body composition without changing the activity?
18:10–26:22
4
Can believing you have (or don’t have) certain genes actually alter your health outcomes?
26:22–33:48
5
Why is self‑compassion considered the most powerful tool for lasting health change?
33:48–42:20
6
How does chronic negative self‑talk impact stress, cortisol, and weight loss?
42:20–50:13
7
What practical tools (thought diary, chocolate‑bar test, etc.) can help rewire our mindset?
50:13–58:48
8
What are the key take‑aways and next steps for listeners to apply these ideas?
58:48–1:04:59
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Doctor's Kitchen Podcast
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