Your brain doesn’t care how you look. She’s trying to keep you alive despite yourself. She also has her own agenda. The brain weighs about three pounds, yet consumes up to 20 percent of our body’s calories.19 Dieting affects brain functioning, as evidenced by a series of studies in which researchers asked dieters and nondieters to complete a series of mentally challenging tasks. The dieters had more trouble focusing than the nondieters; they forgot words and sentences and reacted more slowly to stimuli.
