Restricting Calories Can Make You Crazy (No, Really)

The objective was to make the men lose 25 percent of their body weight, and then re-feed them back to normal. They also were required to walk for 22 miles per week. And let's talk about the crazy stuff that went down: They felt exhausted, irritable, impatient, and easily annoyed. Men reported flipping out at each other for tiny things that wouldn't otherwise bother them -- their friends' idiosyncrasies or waiting too long in a line. They become obsessed with food. Several men started collecting cookbooks and recipes; one man, Carlyle Frederick owned nearly 100 by the time the experiment was over. Another man was so tempted by a bakery window that he bought a dozen donuts and gave them to children on the street, just so he could watch their joy eating them. Men developed elaborate rituals to eat their food, or even mixed water in with the meal to make it look like more. At first the participants were allowed to chew gum, but when some of them started chewing up to 40 sticks per day, gum was forbidden for fear that it would skew the results. They stopped caring about almost anything else. One man reported that he couldn't wait for the experiment to be over not because it would be an end to physical discomfort, but because it was both exhausting and boring to be so obsessed with food. When they went to the movies, "you weren't particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate." They lost all interest in women, dating, and sex...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news