Have you heard before about this or that person who always ate only healthy food, exercised regularly, and ended up with cancer? Well there was a tid-bit of information that I heard a couple of times in a commercial on Hay House Radio that really grabbed my attention, and after much research I’ve found a reference to it online.

Here’s the story:

In the 1980’s some researchers set out to experiment on rabbits to learn how fatty foods (i.e.: fast food, deep fried foods, processed foods, most of these containing trans fats) cause atherosclerosis. They gathered a group of rabbits that had identical genetic backgrounds, put them in cages stacked on top of each other in a lab, and for two years fed them fat-filled, high cholesterol foods.

At the end of the two years the researchers were astounded by the fact that the rabbits in the lower cages were significantly healthier than the rabbits that had been living in the upper cages. It didn’t make sense since they were all fed the same diet so they retraced the steps of the experiment to discover what was different about the 2 groups of rabbits.

Here’s what they found:

The lab assistant had been feeding those sweet little rabbits their Big Macs and fries (that’s a joke, but those foods would certainly qualify for the experiment and for all I know, maybe they did feed Big Macs to the rabbits!) during the 2 years. While they were eating she would pet, play with, and talk to the rabbits she could reach in the lower cages. Since she couldn’t reach the ones in the upper cages she could only provide them with their food to eat.

Free eBook Fearless Fat Loss

All of the rabbits ate the same high fat food except the ones in the upper cages did not receive love, affection, or attention during the 2 years while the ones in the bottom were actually emotionally and physiologically affected by the assistant’s attention (who says that animals don’t feel anything! 😉 ).

The result of the study was that the rabbits who received the physical and emotional attention, the love and affection from the lab assistant were 60% less likely to develop clogged arteries than were those rabbits who were left alone.

I think that the results of this study are much more profound than what the researchers initially set out to prove. Am I suggesting that you abandon all thoughts of nutrition and start existing on a diet of fast food as long as you are getting a healthy dose of love and affection each day of your life? No, but I do believe that how you feel about yourself and the food you eat has a much larger effect on your health and weight than you might think.

This is even more motivation for doing the exercises in the 31 Days of Loving Yourself Thin series. The more you love and appreciate yourself for who you are now, the better you will feel about yourself, and the healthier you will naturally be. Not only because of the change in your thoughts and emotions towards yourself and your body, but also because the more you increase your love for your self, the more you will want to care for yourself, just like you naturally want only the best for your loved ones.

I mentioned in the beginning of this article that I found some information about this study online. If you scroll down to the end of this article there is a paragraph that references the study. The article is a review for a book titled, “The Heart: A Complete Guide to Health and Rehabilitation”, however it’s written in Hebrew and based on my research it appears it was not published in English. This is the only information I’ve been able to find online about the study but if I hear the commercial again (or find the archived show) on Hay House Radio I will update this post to include the speaker.