MiGGi Matters : How to train your brain to manage stress and trim your body

Get to know your brain to manage stress and trim the body. "Like most people, I was not dealing well with the low levels of continuous stress in my life. Stress had me turning to comfort foods, which tend to be high in fat and sugar, and sometimes to alcohol. It was stress-induced overeating and under-exercising that was wreaking havoc on my body. And my brain was driving it all." This book is not about dieting, as we know, diets may make us fatter and more stressed. Because it is not about WILLPOWER. It is about BRAINPOWER. When neuroscientist Dr Selena Bartlett had this light-bulb moment, she was doing research on alcohol and sugar addiction at the University of California San Francisco. She sat at her desk for hours each day, ate poorly, rarely exercised, and unthinkingly reached for candy and cookies far too often. Then her lab discovered that sugar has exactly the same effect on the brain as alcohol and nicotine-one of the most addictive substances in the world. Then with breakthroughs in brain-imaging technology and neuroplasticity, that is our ability to see how the synapses inbrains fired differently during exercise and over-eating. Selena realized that if your brain can changed by unhealthy habits, so to can you change the brain to get healthy habits. This book is the result of research from her own lab and from the labs of many scientists and her own hard work at recognizing her bad habits, managing stress, losing weight and keeping it off, and exercising each day. In clear, accessible prose, she explains how the more primitive parts of the brain can overwhelm the rational part-what Selena calls having a MiGGi (for the emotional part of the brain) moment. She shows you how to become aware of those moments and how to respond instead of react to them. She tells you how to manage your stress through better eating and through movement-the why as well as the what to do. Selena Bartlett, Ph.D., is a group leader in neuroscience and obesity and a Professor at the Queensland University of Technology. Dr Bartlett has delivered many lectures, seminars, and workshops on the stress and its effects on the brain. She has written more than eighty scientific papers in neuroscience and therapeutics. This book aims to help people understand the brain's plasticity and how you can apply practical neuroscience tools to manage stress and trim the body.