Facebook Could Be the Reason Your Diet is Failing

As you’re busy adding more friends on your Facebook, you may be neglecting to realize the pounds that you’ve been adding on your gut.  A recent study conducted by two professors from Monash University and Swinburne Technical Institute in Australia has shown a correlation between use of social networking sites and increased levels of social anxiety.

As we all know, increased levels of stress and anxiety usually coincide with an increase in weight gain.  So with this in mind, it could very well be the case that Facebook use could actually be preventing you from reaching your weight loss goals.

The study itself involved around 50 patients (albeit ones already clinically diagnosed with social anxiety disorder), and monitored the prevalence of anxiety symptoms with increased use of social networking sites.  They found that people had less social anxiety in online social interactions with increased use, but increased anxiety with actual “face to face” situations.  To make things worse, their decreasing confidence about their ability to handle a real life social situation strengthened their existing maladaptive beliefs, causing them to become even more inclusive, relying on the internet as a social outlet.

However,even if you are one of the few and the proud with health insurance these days, anxiety medication can may not be the best idea since many of them can cause an increase in body fat percentage.  Instead, you should consider some alternative methods of anxiety reduction before you commit to going on a medication.

One such “alternative” method is autogenic training.  Although it deviates a bit from what most people would consider to be “normal science,” it gets real results nonetheless.  Autogenic training is based upon the notion that all symptoms are a physical manifestation of an inner psychological conflict.  Practitioners of AT believe that all cells in the body contain information, and when there is a dissonance between the information in your body and the information in your mind, ailments are the result.

To correct this imbalance, AT uses 6 standard exercises that allows one to simply condition the way their mind interprets information from the body, or their stress response.  The exercises vary slightly, but all share the common goal of convincing yourself that all the parts of your body are warm and heavy, signaling to your brain that it is in a state of relaxation.  By conditioning your stress response, you can not only mitigate any existing symptoms of an anxiety disorder that you may have, but train yourself to handle it better when it arises throughout the day.