The science of motivation
If your gap between intention and action has felt wider than ever lately, help is at hand. Dubbed ‘Dr Muscle’, Gabrielle Lyon combines exercise and nutrition insights with psychological tools to harness the power of your brain to transform your health. Here, she explains why motivation is a matter of science
It likely won’t be news to you that the recipe for a longer lifespan is a mix of healthy eating, exercise and keeping a lid on cortisol.
So why is it so hard to commit to? Well, good health starts in the mind.
After medical training, I spent two years in psychiatry examining what makes people the best versions of themselves. The thinking patterns I studied have become invaluable in helping patients reach their full potential. Yet, after my transition to family medicine, patients came to me in the prime of their lives showing signs of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity.
The chance to provide nutritional counselling that focused on obesity and weight management granted me a window into the consequences of a damaging lifestyle. My patients were frustrated and feeling stuck on a hamster wheel; I was frustrated by the limits of mainstream medicine.
Then I completed a fellowship in geriatrics and nutritional sciences. I ran an obesity clinic, and sitting for weeks with the participants, I witnessed the pain of them trying and failing to lose weight. I was a geriatric fellow providing care for the ageing – a role in which I witnessed the devastation wreaked by dementia, on both patients and families.
While the ramifications pained me, working with these two types of patients helped me connect the dots – revealing the before-and-after consequences of nutrition and exercise choices made by people who’d been left floundering by flawed advice. I had an even bigger revelation when I discovered that what these groups had in common wasn’t a weight problem at all; it was actually a muscle problem.
One study I worked on, examining weight and brain function, found a link between a wider waistline and lower brain volume. The working premise was that obesity causes insulin resistance in the brain – a sort of type 3 diabetes of cerebral matter – that could lead to dementia. People with obesity often had impaired cognitive responses, such as impulse control.
I became invested in the participants. Betsy was a mother of three in her fifties. She spent years struggling to lose the same 10kg. She’d been advised to focus on the weight she had to lose, but the real threat lay with what she had failed to build. Imaging her brain revealed her future: the pictures looked like those of someone with Alzheimer’s. I knew what was i
