Healthy

Last night I attended a seminar for gastric banding and I’m impressed. The procedure is simple, reversible, and seems quite safe. I personally would choose this over other types of weight loss surgery, especially gastric bypass.

The process involves inserting an inflatable band around the top portion of your stomach, which they can inflate or deflate quickly using a syringe and saline solution. This constricts your stomach right where a group of nerves exists – the nerves that signal your brain that your stomach is full. Also, it limits your intake of food, forcing you to eat slower, and eat less.

The surgery itself is laparoscopic, which means they only cut tiny holes and do all the work via remote control with cameras, as opposed to slicing you wide open. This is much safer and allows you to recover fast.

Afterwards they put you on a specific diet, which is the part I found the most interesting. It’s nearly identical to Eating Awareness Training (EAT) developed by Molly Groger back in the 80′s. So, it’s not the Lap-Band itself that causes the weight loss — the Lap-Band forces you to stay on the diet. It leaves you no choice.

That means if you could only keep yourself within the regime of EAT, you wouldn’t need the expense of the surgery. I’ve done EAT, I lost a lot of weight, but I let myself drift off the training and I started gaining weight back. This is not good, because EAT is not really a diet, it’s philosophical and psychological life change that if followed will keep you thin and free of weight-related health problems for the rest of your life. It’s not even hard! But the problem is, EAT is designed to undo programming that causes us to eat for reasons other than being hungry, and we’ve had years and years of this programming, and it’s hard to undo.

So, in essence, I can see where having a Lap-Band installed to enforce this training is not necessarily a copout. However, I would urge anyone thinking of getting the Lap-Band installed to first track down a copy of this book:

Eating Awareness Training
by Molly Groger

…try going through the training first, try sticking with it, and you’ll lose just as much weight as you would with the Lap-Band but without the $16,000 surgery.

When you’re happy, you smile. So, if you smile will it make you happy?

According to studies, the answer to that is “Yes.”

More and more it’s coming out that the connection between the smile and the happiness is not a one-way street. The signals sent from your brain to your body to make you smile when you’re happy can also be used in reverse. Some studies even suggest that it’s the smile itself which comes first … that your happiness is in fact triggered by the smile, not the other way around.

I am not happy as I write this (romantic problems) so let’s try an experiment. I’m sitting here at Starbucks, sipping coffee and writing on my trusty Sony Clie, and I’m going to try to cheer myself up simply by smiling.

6:42 pm – Big fake smile on my face. Still feeling sad.

6:44 pm – Still wearing a big fake smile. I’m right in the window and people are walking by. I’m on display with this stupid grin on my face, and I’m feeling more than a little foolish.

6:45 pm – The smile is now genuine because it’s starting to become funny.

6:46 pm – I am really starting to feel like an idiot now, but it’s still funny and people are smiling back at me. And, yes, I definitely feel more cheerful than I did a few minutes ago. So it works for me.

Now let me take the experiment one step further. The next person who comes through the door frowning, I’m going to talk them into smiling.

Later now. My victim’s name was Dave, a nice guy about 40 years old, wearing glasses and talking with an Australian accent. He admitted he was feeling down because of his financial situation, so I convinced him to sit across from me and try the smiling experiment. We smiled at each other until he finally asked if I were gay or something (no, I told him, this is a real experiment). A few minutes later he was laughing, and I asked if it cheered him up … and he said yes.

So in this unscientific little test of mine, I have concluded that something about smiling does in fact lighten your mood. I know from prior experience that forcing yourself to laugh works as well, but you can’t really sit down by yourself in a public place and laugh for minutes on end without scaring people.

Let’s not end this here … why don’t you try it? Let me know how it turns out and I’ll report back with a follow up article. Maybe we can make this world a happier place one smile at a time. That would definitely be groovy!

Email results of your smiling experiments to: smiles@groovymojo.com

Further reading: The Science of Happiness by Stefan Klein, PhD; the Happiness Project; and Emotion and Facial Efference by R. B. Zajonc.