Could 'listening to your body' help you lose weight? | Corrinne Burns

A new study has linked people's ability to gauge their heart rate to how well they keep their weight under controlCan you count your heartbeats – without taking your pulse? Whether you realise it or not, you almost certainly can. We all have an "interoceptive sense", an awareness of the visceral signals that originate from inside our bodies. Nerves travel from our internal organs to the insula cortex of our brain, where a dynamic representation of our inner physiology is created – an inner dashboard, if you will.Interoceptive awareness (IA) is the ability to perceive and process the signals from this physiological dashboard. Our personal level of interoceptive awareness, as measured by the ability to accurately count our own heartbeats, is a stable trait that varies substantially across the population. Good cardiac sensitivity has also been linked with sensitivity to other visceral organs, too.Does it matter? It might. In recent years, several researchers have reported links between IA and our sense of "self", and with the ability to recognise and process emotions. Now, Dr Beate Herbert and colleagues have found evidence that IA is linked to body mass index, with poorer IA scores predicting a higher BMI.Their research, published in Appetite, suggests that good interoceptive awareness is what allows "intuitive" eaters – those who eat in response to physical rather than emotional cues and as a result eat only when hungry – to keep their weight down.Could it be that the ...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Psychology Blogposts Diets and dieting Health guardian.co.uk & wellbeing Human biology Society Neuroscience Life and style Source Type: news