How To Think Yourself Thin!

What if you could just tell yourself to lose weight and it worked? What if you could think yourself thin? Could it really be as simple as that? Well, research seems to show that it could be!  It all comes down to whether you believe what you’re doing has an effect on your fitness.

Let’s take an example.

If you’ve ever stayed in a hotel, you can’t have missed the housekeeping staff swinging into action to clean the rooms, change the bedding and clear away the mess left behind by the guests. But do they view their work as exercise? Do they think their getting fitter just by doing their jobs?

Professor Ellen J. Langer and Alia Crum – Harvard psychologists- took 84 female hotel housekeeping staff from 7 hotels.  They were cleaning around 15 rooms per day, each room requiring at least a half-hour of walking, plus the expected bending, lifting, carrying, and pushing you’d associate with the job. Although these women were obviously getting plenty of physical exercise (I mean, almost every part of their job involves some sort of physical activity), they didn’t see it that way. In fact, when Professor Langer quizzed them about their fitness, 67% of them said that they didn’t exercise regularly or take part in any fitness program, and 37% said they didn’t get any exercise at all!

What They Perceived, They Believed

In a number of areas including body fat percentage, blood pressure, body mass index (BMI) and others, their health seemed to be more related to what they perceived to be their levels of exercise instead of the actual exercise they were getting.  Even though the activities they were doing exceeded the Surgeon General’s requirements for what is classed as an ‘active lifestyle’, their health didn’t reflect it,

So Langer and her team divided the 84 workers into two groups.

The first group of 44 maids received a presentation explaining the benefits of exercise and were told that their daily housekeeping tasks easily met the US Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle. They were shown that exercising is all about activity; about moving your muscles to burn calories and that it doesn’t have to be painful to have an effect.

How They Changed Their Beliefs

To prove to them that their daily tasks did actually constitute exercise (just like a workout routine), they were even given the exact details of the average calorie burn for various activities. For example:

• changing bedding for 15 minutes burns 40 calories
• vacuuming for 15 minutes burns 50 calories
• scrubbing a bathroom for 15 minutes burns 60 calories

This information was also then pinned up in their rest areas to remind them of what good exercise their work was. The other group was given no information at all about how their work was good for exercising.

What Were the Results?

Professor Langer and her team went back a month later to see if anything had changed. They took the same measurements again and were amazed to find that in the group who had been given the information there was a significant improvement in every one of the measurements they recorded!

How could this be? Langer’s team checked with the housekeepers and their managers to see if they’d somehow changed their way of doing things because of what they’d learned. Maybe their workload had changed? But there were no signs that there had been any changes at all. The level of work, and how it was done, was the same.

So What Happened?

The conclusion was that the mindset of the women had changed because of what they’d been told, and their physical health had improved as a result. Their new belief – that they were getting exercise through their work – had actually made them fitter!

So, the message is simple. Keep reminding yourself that every physical activity you do is burning calories and is increasing your fitness levels. You’ll get better results for the same level of exercise and you’ll be getting fitter, faster!