What you believe about your body affects your body:
Psychology researcher Ellen Langer of Harvard University has long been intrigued by mind-over-body effects. She and student Alia Crum therefore invited 84 women, ages 18 to 55 years old, who worked as housekeepers at seven Boston hotels, to participate in a study. Those in four hotels were told that their regular work was good exercise and met the guidelines for a healthy, active lifestyle. After all, the women cleaned about 15 rooms a day, taking 20 to 30 minutes for each, so they did get a bit of a workout. Those in the other three hotels were told nothing.
Questionnaires established that the actual amount of work the women did, at work as well as off duty, didn't change over the four weeks of the study. Yet the so-called informed group told the scientists that their life was healthier. They had taken to heart the information about the fitness value of stripping beds and scrubbing bathrooms.
More surprising, the women in the informed group lost an average of two pounds, saw their systolic blood pressure (the first number) drop 10%, lost about 0.5% of their body fat, and reduced their body-mass index by .35 of a point. The other women showed no such changes.
True, these weren't "I dropped 20 pounds in a month!!" results. But considering that the women made no changes in how they lived or ate (the informed group didn't start dieting, for instance), it was nothing to sneeze at. The only change for the women who reaped these benefits was in their heads: They now believed that their cleaning work was a fitness routine.
"If you can put the mind in a healthy place, you can have dramatic physiological consequences," says Prof. Langer, whose study will appear in the February issue of Psychological Science.
That's from the WSJ [gated]. The article maintains that this is an example of the placebo effect. I'm not quite so sure, if only because the mind can't melt away pounds all by itself. (Even thought has its limits.) My own guess is that, once the housekeepers were made aware of the exercise benefits of cleaning, they then tried to maximize these benefits. Perhaps they dusted with a bit more fervor, or used the stairs instead of the elevator. Because they now expected their job to provide them with a good workout, they made sure to always get a good workout. Unlike the placebo effect, which works by misleading our conscious awareness - we think a sugar pill is Prozac - my hunch is that these women lost weight precisely because they were made aware of the real potential benefits of their job.
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Perhaps the women, feeling generally better about themselves, also made small changes to their eating habits, like eating slightly smaller portions, without really thinking about it. That could account for a weight loss of .5 lb per week. This is just a hunch, based on my own fat person experience, but when I feel better I tend to rely less on "comfort food."
ps - how does someone moving a cleaning cart take the stairs instead of the elevator?
Or perhaps the study wasn't blinded and the researchers unconciously erred in favor of their hypothesis. Body fat and blood pressure measurements are unreliable.
As you said, you can't measure somebody's work with a questionnaire; you have to measure it, too.
Btw, why did they lose weight anyway? Doing exercise doesn't always cause weight loss. I exercise and my weight hasn't changed in four weeks.
Maybe when they were told their work was like a fitness regimen, they started making subtle changes like holding in their stomach muscles, standing more, using better lifting techniques that utilize more muscles, or being more likely to do extra trips, repetitions using the motivator "im working out more"
when i last went on a weight loss diet, i was also working at a very active job as a vet tech, and i made small internal changes to posture and such as i mentioned, because i wanted to burn that extra 100 calories a day from an increase in exertion. i did lose weight very quickly with my diet and small changes at work challenging myself to move with more muscle.