This week you may have read in the newspaper meal made with love and affection tastes better. If you are convinced that nobody, but nobody, makes Sunday Lunch like your mum or Dad’s fry-ups are the best, you’re not alone. A recently published journal provides the evidence for why your taste buds are tantalized by home cooked food and repulsed by grub from the local greasy spoon.

A study published by the journal of Social Psychological and Personal Science described how our perception of food and pain is affected our relationship to the individual who is serving the food or care. Food cooked by a loving grandmother tastes better and being cared for by a sweet-natured nurse reduces your pain more. So it comes as no surprise that marketing people go along way to making us feel at home when selling us food, such as gravy, cornflakes and tea.

Researchers at the University of Maryland explain this phenomenon and how it relates to pain. Professor Kurt Gray attributes our interpretations of someone’s intentions alters how we view and perceive the world around us. He goes on to say ‘it seems we also use the intentions of others as a guide for basic physical experience.’

This explains why everyone’s grandmother makes the best cakes and why we demonize the person who steals the last parking space!

So how can this help you with exercise or weight control? The relationship between our perceptions that control our motivation and the sense of enjoyment can be used to help you achieve your goals. Exercising and dieting alone can make for difficult progress, it is better to share this with someone you trust, who is fun and will have a similar motivation to you. Not only will this create a social benefit to your exercise regime, it has also been found that group exercise can help to keep you on track.

If you are dependent on yourself for motivation and inspiration, it can be difficult to bring yourself to the gym. You may start to feel badly about yourself, which may have a downward spiral on your motivation. Without an additional kindly person to help you along, all your negative thoughts are directed onto yourself and your focus becomes your pain as opposed to the all the benefits.

Cycling or running may not compare to Grandmother’s apple pie, but enjoyment comes in many different forms. Try to do what you love and the rest will come easily!