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Securing the food supply.

A phrase in my last gluttony post fairly jumped out at me today as I re-read it over my eggs Benedict.

...[I]t is possible to become, out of habit, so psychologically deranged with respect to food that one begins unnecessarily violating social norms and the demands of duty and charity in order to secure one's food supply (when in fact the food necessary to support health is not at risk).  

The phrase is "to secure one's food supply."

It jumped out at me because it so perfectly encapsulates the constant feeling of need I used to have, all the fretting about my next snack or my next meal, before I got better, before the weight came off.  It sums up perfectly the remnants, almost like flashbacks, that I still have once in a while -- the sudden urges that I've learned to dismiss (most of the time), the odd tendencies I still have to fret about whether I've bought enough for the dinner guests.  

Back when I was heavy, I was always trying to secure my food supply.

Never mind that my food supply was not at risk; I had a constant feeling that I had to secure my food supply.

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Once I remember feeling faint at school and being taken to the cafeteria -- I remember sitting there with my saltine crackers and paper cup of juice, feeling naughty and special for being out of class.

That used to happen a lot:  the bottom would fall out of my brain and I couldn't think until I got something to eat.  A strange panic would rise, and I would go looking for food.   Within a few bites of, say, a cheeseburger, I would feel oddly soothed, relieved; but the panicky feeling wouldn't go away until I no longer felt the slightest twinge of anything that resembled hunger.  I would have to eat until I literally felt full before I felt safe.

This would happen between meals.

At meals there was never any question of stopping before I was stuffed. I hated that feeling of "head-hungry," not being able to concentrate; it always hit long before I felt "stomach-hungry."  I tried to prevent it by eating in advance.

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Though this is the first time I've lit upon this phrase, I've known about this problem for a long time.   One of my very first gluttony/weight loss posts on this blog, "What's wrong with me," identified the problem as "an  irrational fear of getting hungry:"

Consider the evidence: 

• I tend to "stock up" at meals by eating extra.  I catch myself explicitly thinking, "I'd better eat more now so I won't get hungry later."  
• There are certain foods that I eat compulsively if they are just sitting around as leftovers, even if they don't taste very good to me. Never sweets, always carbohydrates, great for packing in as many calories as possible in a short period of time.  White rice; plain pasta; tortilla chips; dry cereal; white bread; pizza; saltine crackers.  I can still eat a whole sleeve of saltine crackers, no problem.  (No wonder going low carb helped me.  Eliminating these things from my house was a good thing.)  
• I rely on external cues to tell me how much to eat.  If people around me are eating, I do too.  If there's still food on the table, I have another helping.  If something will be thrown out if I don't eat it, I eat some.
• I get very antsy on road trips as mealtime approaches, if we haven't yet planned when and where we're going to stop for the next meal. 
• I get irrationally irritated when I'm over at someone's house for dinner and dinner is delayed for some reason.  I have to squelch the urge to keep asking, "So, when's dinner going to be ready?"   I mean, I know it makes me a terrible guest, so I do my best, but it's really hard!
• My friends who dine with me regularly will tell you that whenever I am responsible for feeding a crowd, I am very preoccupied with there being "enough" food. Either I make too much, or I start apologizing for it the minute people arrive. "Erin!  Chill out!  If we get hungry we'll make some sandwiches!"  Doesn't matter.  Hostess anxiety is my lot in life.
• Oh, and then there's this recurring dream I keep having where someone gives me piles and piles of food and I know that I have to eat it.  The menu, the reason I have to eat the stuff, and the setting varies (buffet restaurant; friend's house; interview luncheon), but the theme is always there.  I have had this dream for as long as I can remember, maybe five or six times a year. 

Ready to psychoanalyze me yet?  Look, you can call it "gluttony" if you want.  I won't shy away from that term.  It is a self-centered way to be, I'm tired of it, and I'd be a better person if I overcame it.

Obviously I long ago "named and claimed" it as gluttony.  But looking at it deeper, what I was trying to do -- the reason I behaved as a glutton -- was "securing my food supply."

Even though, as I said, my food supply was not. ever. at. risk.

It's a little bit crazy.

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I could quite readily believe that the need to secure my food supply originated in my brain or body chemistry, and that it had something to do with the hypoglycemia and the insulin resistance that I pretty clearly experienced.  It's the hormones that drive hunger and cravings, most notably insulin; maybe there are more yet to be discovered (after all, ghrelin and leptin were only discovered in the mid-1990s).  Maybe there's some hormone that drives food-supply-securing behavior, some kind of hunting and gathering and storing away.     Something that drives you to stab people with your salad fork when they try to steal your French fries.  Something that drives you to hide your favorite ice cream in the back of the freezer where no one else can get it.  Something that drives you to eat "so you won't get hungry later" even if you're not hungry.  Something that drives you to fret all the time about whether you made enough food for everyone.

(What should we call this hypothetical hormone?  I vote for "squirrelin.")

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This isn't the only body-brain mismatch I've experienced.  Here's a bit from (believe it or not) a 2009 meditation on Holy Thursday:

Have you ever had a genuine panic attack?  I have.  I had a string of maybe five panic attacks over a period of about six months when I was in college.  I never knew why they appeared, and I never knew why they went away again -- I've never had any since.    I remember it vividly though, one of the most surreal things ever to happen to me.

It was surreal because at every moment I knew exactly what was happening to me.  I recognized the sensation as a panic attack.  I knew I was, in fact, safe.  I knew there was no thing that could have triggered a legitimate fear response.  And yet my body was behaving as if I was in terrible danger.  My heart was pounding, my skin was sweating, the prickly hairs were standing up on my neck and arms, my blood was dumping adrenaline into my muscles, my breath came swift and panting, the lights brightened as my pupils dilated.  

I suffered.  Not because I knew fear but because I felt it in my body.  My physical response created an unbearable restlessness -- my very cells shrieked, Run! Fight!  And in a way that made it even worse, because I knew there was, in fact, no point in running and nothing to fight.  And yet my body urged me to do something -- I kept having this urge to leave the house I was in, to run away into the night.  But since I knew I was safe, I had to bring all the strength of my will to bear against the irrational urges of my body to flee.   I told myself "This is a panic attack, it will pass," but the one thing I did not know was how long it would last.   In the end I sought help, called a friend (to my embarrassment, waking up his parents in the middle of the night) and begged him to keep me company on the phone until the terrible sensations passed.  

 It wasn't very nice of me to wake up my friend's parents, because I knew perfectly well that I had no "real" reason to seek help.  I put it off and put it off and finally my will snapped and I couldn't bear to be alone anymore.

I wonder now if this is a little bit analogous to resisting the cravings for unhelpful food at the wrong times.  I wrote that gluttony comes in once you know when and what you're supposed to eat, and once you've put the plan in place to get rid of all the obvious external barriers to doing "the right thing" by your endocrine system.    Gluttony's what's you're up against when you know what you are supposed to eat and you know why and there's nothing stopping you except your own lack of will.  

But that's sort of like saying that I was up against uncharity, selfishness, that night that I was sweating by the phone, wanting to call, knowing that I wasn't in any true danger, knowing that I would wake my friend's parents up and ruin their sleep if I called.  I knew if I called I would inconvenience several people and if I didn't call until morning the only thing that would happen was I would suffer for a few hours.   Oh, but it was hard, and in the end selfishness won out; I rationalized that I needed to call, and that they would not be so inconvenienced, and that was the end of that.

Yes, I was selfish.  But in part it's because I managed to convince myself "What I'm about to do isn't nearly as bad as what I'm going through now."

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So I wonder about that.  

I can point to my panic attack and say, "Well, I had this ideopathic reaction in my sympathetic nervous system, and it created an illusion that I needed something, and that I could get that thing (another person's voice) only by inconveniencing another person.  Even though I knew rationally I had no real need, ultimately I rationalized that my perceived need superseded another person's real need, and that is why I behaved uncharitably."

Can I point to my bingeing and hoarding and say, "Well, something in my endocrine system created this constant, low-level illusion that my food supply was endangered.   Even though I knew rationally that I would never really go hungry or even miss a meal, I rationalized that this constant need to secure my personal food supply superseded my obligations to my health and to others, and that is why I developed my habit of gluttony."

It is not an excuse.  It is more of a diagnosis.  A "motivation" for gluttony.  And I think that understanding that motivation, understanding that I had a fear of hunger, was something that helped me, finally, tear it out (if incompletely) by the roots.

I think there can be other motivations in other people.  I'll speculate about some possibilities in another post.  

In the meantime, if you think you might be a glutton, but it has nothing to do with securing your food supply, tell your story in the combox.

Why, even if illness causes obesity, you've still got to deal with gluttony to get well.

In my post Untangling the Threads of Gluttony I asserted that none of the prevailing obesity narratives correctly account for the role of gluttony in weight gain and weight loss.  

In a subsequent post, I defended the notion that gluttony isn't typically the cause of obesity, on the grounds that a quite-ordinary, moderate-looking American diet seems, for many, to begin the slide into metabolic syndrome -- frequently, starting in childhood, when moral culpability is low -- and once it starts, it's self-perpetuating because the individual so afflicted supposedly perceives normal hunger signals, but the signals are actually driving abnormal eating.  As Aquinas wrote, "The sin of gluttony is... extenuated... on account of the difficulty of discerning and regulating what is suitable."  Metabolic syndrome destroys the body's ability to discern and regulate what to eat. 

Then I considered whether insulin resistance can cause gluttony.  I proposed that it can, because (even if metabolic syndrome destroys the body's innate ability to discern and regulate what to eat) it is possible to become, out of habit, so psychologically deranged with respect to food that one begins unnecessarily violating social norms and the demands of duty and charity in order to secure one's food supply (when in fact the food necessary to support health is not at risk).  The same thing can happen in a person who doesn't suffer from metabolic syndrome, but I suggest that metabolic syndrome can be a trigger.

Now I want to write about gluttony as the barrier to weight loss.

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It almost sounds as if I have come back around to the calorie-is-a-calorie theory.  First I said "No, gluttony isn't why people gain weight."  Now I'm basically saying "Yes, but you have to overcome gluttony in order to lose weight."

(It isn't a contradiction, any more than saying "Nicotine cravings don't cause people to become smokers, but to stop smoking, people have to learn to resist cravings for nicotine.") 

Metabolic syndrome -- insulin resistance -- destroys or severely damages the body's innate means of discerning and regulating what is suitable.  But we do have another means of discerning and regulating what is suitable, and that is our own intellect and willpower.  It's a shoddy substitute for a working endocrine system.  But it is what we have.  And we have to get it working, at least in a rudimentary fashion,  before we run up against our gluttony.

The control-system patch that we jerry-rig from our intellect and willpower is glitchy and buggy.  

Bug #1:  Discernment.  Our intellect can have the wrong theory about what to eat, how much, and when.  Gotta get that right first.

Bug #2:  Regulation.  Our intellect can have the wrong ideas about how to arrange the details (who will shop?  where will I store food?  what will I do if I get hungry?) so that we don't have to rely as much on our willpower.  

But once you can discern what to eat (thanks to a working theory of what to eat, how much, and when) and regulate what to eat (thanks to a working plan of arranging your life so you can, theoretically, easily do what you're supposed to do) you don't get your "extenuating pass" from the sin of gluttony anymore.  

You are now ready to deal with...

...Bug #3:  Willpower is weak. In other words:  Here is where the gluttony comes in.  If you are a glutton, now is when you will discover it.

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 OK.  So, let's suppose that it turns out that the Taubes folks are right, that the answer to "what to eat" is "sharply reduce carbohydrates."  

And let's suppose that you have worked out the most feasible specific diet to do that.   This is going to vary person to person, from "total elimination of all carbs but a few bites of green leafy vegetables a day," through "cut back everything across the board and that will decrease my carb load," all the way up to "fairly normal diet, except I try not to eat a lot of sugar, bread, or pasta."  Because some people have to cut back a little, and others have to cut back a lot, to see results.  It's not fair, but it appears to be true.

And let's suppose that you have some strategies in place to overcome obvious external barriers:  you're planning menus, and you're getting the shopping done, and you've removed unnecessary temptations from your environment, and you have a plan for what to do when you eat out, etc.

You still might have to say no to things you want to have.

And if you find that it's really really hard to do this... you may be dealing with gluttony.

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Back to the definition of gluttony I came up with:

Gluttony is eating behavior that flouts the restraints

of charity, obedience, resources, health, duty, or manners.

Now that you know that you should avoid (say) sugar for the sake of your health, if you refuse to be bound by this constraint, if you keep saying "Gosh darn it, I don't care about my blood sugar, I want a handful of gummy bears,"  you are dealing with gluttony.

(I'm not talking about the rational decision in advance to allow yourself a portion of chocolate every day because you judge it's a permissible pleasure, or a plan to have small desserts on the weekends so you can learn to enjoy them in moderation.  I'm talking about the decision, in the moment, to ignore the plan you've already set for yourself because you want cake NOW.)

It's understandable that it will be difficult to follow your plan in the face of real hunger signals that urge you to eat, or drive cravings for something that you know you shouldn't have, at least not now.  But if you really know you really should resist them, then it's gluttony that you have to resist.

Disobeying the rules you've set for yourself is probably the biggest problem, but you may discover other depths of gluttony that you didn't know you had.  Take charity, for instance.  If you suddenly become seriously stressed out and scream at everyone because the children ate your special sugar-free breath mints and you have to have those breath mints to keep from eating between meals then you are exhibiting what is basically a gluttony problem.  You are letting your food issues interfere with your generosity and kindness.

And manners.  If you are invited to someone's house for dinner and you have to pointedly scrape all the breading off your chicken, where they can see it, because they are  ruining your diet and they should know better, then you are letting your food issues interfere with your manners.  You may have never been this kind of a dinner guest before.  Having an eating plan that you are trying to stick to may bring this hidden gluttony out.

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The good news is that it's supposed to get easier as you go, because the more you heal your blood sugar problem, the less you'll have to deal with hunger and cravings.  But to start to heal, you have to work to resist the hunger and cravings.  There is not much way around this.  You will want cake, and there will be cake, and you will have to make a lot of individual decisions not to eat the cake that's right there and that you really want.

If you cannot -- will not -- make a lot of those decisions go in the right direction, you won't get better and it won't get physiologically easier.

You also have to deal with the force of habit, which is not so physiological, but still a strong force keeping you in that rut.  This is another thing that gets easier as you go -- provided you are not asking too much of yourself at once.  One step at a time, one small change at a time, may be more effective in the long run for the mind.

There's a certain tension here.  The physiology will react more quickly to a drastic change (the more carb-load you can remove at once, the quicker your blood sugar and insulin resistance will start to heal).  But the psychology, it seems, does not change quickly, and more-incremental changes may be more likely to stick.

Which just reinforces the notion that the path to healing (or redemption, depending on how you look at gluttony) is excruciatingly individual.

 

Can insulin resistance cause gluttony?

Before we consider whether people who are sick with insulin resistance develop gluttony as a symptom -- let's consider gluttony in healthy, non-obese, non-insulin-resistant people.

"Pure" gluttony, in other words.  Gluttony that's not mitigated by illness.

And we'll use my own definition of gluttony.  Which, by the way, doesn't contradict Aquinas's definitions of "too much, too soon, too eagerly, too daintily (pickily), too expensively" -- it's more that it attempts to clarify them, to show what's meant by "too..." in these clauses.  That is,

 

Gluttony is eating behavior that flouts the restraints

of charity, obedience, resources, health, duty, or manners.

First let's consider a physically healthy person with normal hunger pangs.  When his body runs short on fuel, generally close to mealtime, he starts to get hungry and think about food.

If the healthy, hungry person is not a glutton:

• he is willing to share some of his food with other people
• he is willing to follow household rules such as "don't spoil your dinner" or "don't eat those crackers I'm saving for the party" or institutional rules such as "employees may not eat at their desks"
• he is willing to resist desires for food that doesn't fit into his budget
• he is willing to resist desires for meals that he believes won't promote health  -- even if what he wants is to eat a big bag of chips, he can choose to eat (say) a few chips and some fruit or nuts instead; he knows to stop eating or drinking when he's had so much that he'll feel sick
• he is willing to resist eating if it's not "permitted" -- he is willing to fast from meat on Lenten Fridays, or he is willing to resist eating factory-farmed meat if he believes it's not ethical, or to fast for a number of hours before a medical test, etc.
• he is willing to eat with attention to social norms, e.g., slowly enough to carry on a conversation and to keep from making a mess, and observing cultural norms of graceful dining.

If the healthy, hungry person is a glutton:

• he may say "No, I don't have enough to share; get your own" and may even steal food
• he may not care about rules for when, where, and what may be eaten, and may sneak food 
• he may spend too much money so he can eat the food he wants to eat, when he wants to eat it
• he may care more about eating what he wants to eat than about eating food that will support his health, and may eat or drink so much that he feels physically ill later
• he may complain that it's unbearable to observe required fasts or to abstain from proscribed foods
• he may be focused so narrowly on eating and drinking that he doesn't care if he spills, slurps, belches, or ignores his dining companions

Healthy people, who know better and have free will, commit all these acts from time to time -- and I name these acts "gluttony."  You have seen one balancing a cheeseburger on his steering wheel while he changes lanes.  You have read one griping about Ash Wednesday on her mommyblog.  You have caught one taking the last helping of mashed potatoes without asking if anyone else wants some. One has eaten the cookie dough out of the bowl even though it has raw eggs in it.  Another has said "yes, please" to that tasty stuff that gives him heartburn.   Another has woken up with a terrible hangover.  

Who hasn't done this kind of thing, once in a while? 

But some healthy people do this a lot, and I name them "gluttons."

What is it that turns a healthy person into a glutton?  Concupiscence.  Selfishness.  Narcissism.  Short-term thinking.  Habit.  Mistaking other people's reasonable desires and needs for unreasonable demands.    Mistaking his own wants for needs that must be gratified.  Deciding that the rules don't apply to him, or that it's okay as long as he doesn't get caught.  

Most of us do this at least once in a while, but some do it constantly.  Some have fallen into a habit of gluttony.

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It's important to note that the gluttonous behaviors listed above are gluttonous no matter how hungry the person happens to feel.  They would be gluttonous if the person was only feeling a bit peckish.  They would also be gluttonous if the person had missed a meal and felt positively ravenous.  The culpability of gluttony is mitigated somewhat when hunger feels unbearable, but the behavior is still gluttonous.  

This happened to me the other day.  I came home from church at 12:45 and was feeling woozy from low blood sugar.  (Something about the timing of the eleven o'clock Mass ruins me.  I can't quite figure it out.)  Mark went upstairs to take care of something or other and left me searching  irritably in the kitchen; while children clung to my legs and whined for food and milk, I whined back at them that I had to eat my own lunch first and then I could take care of them.  In one sense, I really did need to eat first, and my judgment was impaired.  But I could at least have asked Mark or an older child for help instead of just yelling.  So, yeah.  Gluttonous, even when very hungry.  But it's not too surprising that I got gluttonous just then, because I was in a weakened state.

So.  Gluttony is more likely when you're weak from feelings of hunger.  It's also mitigated  -- we're less culpable when we're in a weakened state.  

But it's more likely.

And if the insulin-resistance crowd is to be believed, then people with insulin resistance spend a lot of time in that weakened state.  They get hungrier, and they get hungry more often.  So they're maybe more often tempted to behave gluttonously:  eating uncharitably, breaking rules, ignoring manners.

Their guilt is mitigated because they are weak.  God knows they are weak.  God knows that illness makes it harder for them.

But they still have to live with the consequences imposed by nature.

And one of the natural consequences of frequently indulging in abnormal behavior is that it becomes its own new norm.  It becomes a habit.

Just as a healthy person who ignores constraints too often can develop a habit of gluttony, a sick person, giving in frequently to strong temptations that overcome the "shoulds" and "oughts," can develop a habit of gluttony.  

And after a while, the sick person might start to believe that hunger is not resistable under any circumstances.  The sick person might start to fear the discomfort of hunger.  And isn't so much sin grounded in an unreasonable fear of suffering -- even slight suffering?

She can't give some of her French fries to her children, because she might be too hungry later.  She can't resist storing some snacks in a desk drawer, though it's against workplace rules, and she rationalizes that she (unlike those others) really needs it.  She can't wait to get home for lunch even though she and her husband agreed to curtail the restaurant budget.  She always has to finish the first plate of food before she comes up for air and conversation.  She must taste the soup one more time to make sure it's good enough before she serves it.  

Frequent out-of-line behavior, in response to frequent understandable weakness, becomes frequent out-of-line behavior, in response to... less and less.   Habit reinforces habit.  And many gluttonous indulgences makes one glutton.

Years of insulin resistance, of unrestrained eating in response to physiological weakness, can -- I think -- generate more unrestrained eating in response to the force of habit.  That habit may stand between the sickness and the cure, and I suspect it can even persist after physiological "cure" has been achieved.

Gluttony doesn't (typically) cause obesity.

A couple of days ago, I wrote that the existing competing narratives of obesity don't really "get" the role of gluttony right, because they lack philosophical grounding in the nature of gluttony.  

The calorie-is-a-calorie crowd say that gluttony -- eating too much -- is the whole problem, with some contribution from sloth, and if people would just eat less they'd get thin.  They've got the biochemistry wrong, and have unfairly accused fat people of causing their own disease by being gluttons.  

The insulin-resistance people (think Gary Taubes) have the chemistry right, in my opinion, but they reject the idea of gluttony playing a part at all.  I think that's wrong too.  Even though I'm convinced that metabolic syndrome exists and is caused by a diet high in refined carbohydrates and sugar and that it perpetuates a vicious cycle of eating and craving, I think gluttony is involved, and beating gluttony is part of the cure.

In this post (and a couple more) I want to explore the role of gluttony in obesity.  Starting with the question:  Does gluttony -- technically defined gluttony -- cause obesity?

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The insulin-resistance crowd, whom I think is correct as regards the biochemistry, says No:  Gluttony, or "eating too much," does not cause obesity; obesity is caused by eating the wrong things, not too much of everything.  Eating more than you burn doesn't cause weight gain; weight gain causes eating more than you burn.

But we aren't actually interested in that answer, because it's the answer to the wrong question.  The common, ordinary meaning of "glutton" is just "someone who eats too much."  That's the definition they are using.  But moral philosophers have defined "gluttony" more broadly than that for hundreds of years.  Recall that Aquinas subdivided gluttony into five categories:  eating too expensively, too daintily, too much, too soon, or too eagerly. Aquinas was also perfectly aware that it didn't count as a sin if you didn't realize you were eating out of order, or if you had doctor's orders, or something like that.  

More recently, I proposed an alternate definition of gluttony that drew brighter lines:   Gluttony, I wrote, is eating behavior that flouts the restraints of charity, obedience, resources, health, duty, or manners.  These sound more promising ways to pin the blame on gluttony, especially when it comes to the "health" bit.  But I agree with Aquinas that it can't count as a sin if you don't know your eating is wrong -- if you think you need the food. 

If we use Aquinas's definitions, the following are obvious:

1. Gluttony could  be a cause of obesity, if eating too much causes obesity.  
2. But even if eating too much did cause obesity,  gluttony wouldn't necessarily be the problem because eating too much doesn't qualify as gluttony if the eater has good reason to believe it wasn't too much.  For example, if he was truly experiencing feelings of hunger.

Seeking out food when you're hungry is not gluttonous behavior; it's normal behavior.

And guess what?  One of the things that metabolic syndrome causes is hunger and carbohydrate cravings.  This is from Why We Get Fat:

Even before we begin eating, insulin works to increase our feeling of hunger.... we begin secreting insulin just by thinking about eating... and this insulin secretion then increases within seconds of taking our first bite.  It happens even before we begin to digest the meal, and before any glucose appears in the bloodstream.  This insulin serves to prepare our bodies for the upcoming flood of glucose by storing away other nutrients in the circulation -- particularly fatty acids. ...

...The insulin makes us hungry by temporarily diverting nutrients out of the circulation and into storage... The greater the blood sugar and insulin response to a particular food, the more we like it -- the better we think it tastes....

[T]he fatter [predisposed people] get, the more they'll crave carbohydrate-rich foods, because their insulin will be more effective at stashing fat and protein in their muscle and fat tissue, where they can't be used for fuel.

Once we get resistant to insulin... we'll ... have longer periods during every twenty-four hours when the only fuel we can burn is the glucose from carbohydrates.  The insulin, remember, is working to keep protein and fat and even glycogen... safely stashed away for later.  It's telling our cellls that there is blood sugar in excess to be burned, but there's not.  So it's glucose we crave.

Grossly oversimplified, elevated insulin is supposed to make you hungry, makes you want to eat carbs in particular, and makes you store fat at the same time.  So even though from the outside, a heavy person may appear to be eating too much, from the inside the person may be experiencing unbearable hunger.  And hunger is the normal drive to eat.  

I live with one of those weird, always-lean people:

Mostly he eats pretty moderately:  oatmeal for breakfast, soup and salad at lunch, maybe a couple helpings at dinner, a little ice cream at bedtime.  On occasion, however, I have seen him put away what looks to me like an enormous amount of food.  The equivalent of two or three cheeseburgers or something like that in the space of a few minutes.  Is he a closet, occasional glutton?  Perhaps suffering from binge disorder?

No.  The "binges" happen after a day of skiing, or hiking at altitude, or heavy yard work, or maybe rock climbing.  When he exerts himself, he needs to eat more.

As astonishing as it is to people like me who have had to think about food their whole lives, I hear that this is what actually happens in metabolically healthy people.  They don't need to think "Does that workout mean I get to eat more?" because their body tells them to eat more.  So they do.  And we never accuse those people of gluttony -- because they don't look fat.

Anyway, there is no moral difference between a fat person who gets extra-hungry and therefore eats extra food, and a thin person who gets extra-hungry and therefore eats extra food.  Even if the reason for the hunger is different -- in one person, excess insulin, and in the other person, excess physical activity -- the subjective experience of the need for food may be the same.

 Look, Aquinas knows this:

 ...[T]he sin of gluttony is rather extenuated than aggravated...in consideration of the necessity of taking food, as also on account of the difficulty of discerning and regulating what is suitable on such occasions.

Gluttony is mitigated insofar as it is difficult to "discern" and "regulate" what is suitable.  Metabolic syndrome creates a feeling of hunger, and that is exactly what makes it difficult to discern and regulate what is suitable to eat.

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So, if it's true that eating the wrong things (too much sugar and white flour and potatoes, for instance) creates metabolic syndrome, can that count as gluttony?  Maybe under the "too expensively" or "too daintily" categories?  

It might, if a person (before they developed the syndrome) knew that they were eating too much of the wrong things and obstinately persisted.  

Culpability is hard to establish, though, because in many cases it isn't an entirely free choice to do so:

•  many people begin to develop metabolic syndrome while they are still children, being fed by parents and institutions; 
• government policy has been giving us counterproductive advice for more than a generation;
• the low-fat doctrine is still pushed heavily by schools and physicians; 
• we seemingly reasonably assume that if we're not visibly obese yet, we must be doing okay;
•  the food that promotes metabolic syndrome is ubiquitous, widely advertised, and cheap.

It isn't impossible for gluttony to cause obesity.  But for that to happen you'd have to posit an apparently healthy individual who, as an adult, and knowing that it was bad for him, made a free choice to begin consuming large portions of sugar and white flour until he wrecked his metabolism.

 I think this might happen sometimes.  It's the sort of thing that people say will happen to kids who are raised in homes barren of soda pop and sugary cereal:  As soon as they're out on their own, they'll go crazy, subsisting on fast food, Cheez Whiz, and Captain Crunch.  (One of my friends in grad school claimed to have known a guy in her college dorm who actually got scurvy his freshman year.)

Most of the time, though, I think we just sort of slide into metabolic syndrome, not by eating a diet that is obviously unhealthy, but by eating... the normal American diet.  Normal Americans drink soda, eat white bread and white rice, and consume a lot of sugar in the course of an ordinary day.  Some are more susceptible than others, and those people develop metabolic syndrome, gain weight, and get hungrier -- so they begin to eat regularly in a way that looks like gluttony, from the outside.  But because of the subjective experience of hunger, we can't automatically call it that.

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The next question I want to consider is whether metabolic syndrome causes gluttony, of any of the types that Aquinas identified or that I reclassified.  I've already written that eating in response to real hunger isn't, I think, gluttonous.  But is that the only kind of behavior change created by metabolic syndrome?  

I'm going to cover that in another post.

Where to start with gluttony: some links back to my archives.

Christine, in the comments to the last posts, asked "Where to start with gluttony?"

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I reviewed Gary Taubes's book some time ago in three parts, and I think these are some of my best gluttony posts, especially the second and third one.

•  here is an introduction, 
• here is where I explain why the book lacks the necessary real-life context to be considered a "diet book," 
• here is where I start to explore why gluttony isn't off the hook -- even if it doesn't cause fatness.

 

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Here is the part where I cheekily suggest a definition of gluttony, complete with new categories, that I prefer to Thomas Aquinas's.  (Yes, I really am claiming to have improved on the Summa Theologica.) Here's my new post-Summa definition of gluttony:

The sin of gluttony is the refusal to eat within the restraints imposed on us by charity, obedience, resources, health, religious/ethical duties, and manners.   

(The weakness of gluttony is the inability to eat within those restraints.)

 

Aquinas's definition of gluttony seems to have one glaring problem:  it lacks a bright-line rule.  "Gluttony means inordinate appetite in eating," he tells us, and we rightly ask:  What do you mean, "inordinate?"  Out of accord with the natural order of things, one supposes....

We've been over this before:   we can be a glutton by eating too expensively, too daintily ("pickily"), too much, too soon, or too eagerly.  

This is a nice categorization because it expands the usual definition of gluttony, but it still leaves us asking:  But Thomas, what do you mean by "too" anything?  If one can eat "too" expensively, then surely one can eat "just expensively enough," and so forth.  Where is the line?  How do we know when we've crossed over from eating promptly, to eating "too soon?"  Eating with relish, and eating "too eagerly?"   Selecting good food and being a glutton of pickiness?

I think the answer is that gluttony, like most concupiscence, abhors restraint; what makes gluttony different from other vices, such as sloth or lust, is that the restraints it abhors all have to do with food.  

Different people live under different sets of restraints, some more stringent than others; and different times call for different restraints; so the boundaries of gluttony cannot be defined clearly as a set of rules that are appropriate for everyone.   And so eating quite a lot of food, or eating expensive food, or eating at odd times, isn't inherently gluttonous; what makes it gluttonous is if the eater is supposed to be exercising restraint, but isn't.

If I may say so myself, I think it's worth reading the whole thing.  Rather than Aquinas's categories of gluttony as eating "too expensively, too pickily, too much, too soon, or too eagerly" my categories -- stripped of the vague modifier "too" -- could be phrased as 

• eating inconsiderately
• eating disobediently
• eating wastefully
• eating unhealthfully
• eating irreligiously (or, if you are not religious, substitute "unethically")
• eating rudely.

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Oh, and for the people who would like to eat low-carb but feel bad about the environmental impact of consuming so many more animal products:   here are some things to keep in mind for improving the sustainability of lower-carb eating.  I am rather fond of this article.  The short of it is:

1. Eating enough fats and oils, and not too much protein, will alleviate the famous unpleasant side effects of low-carb diets. 
2. Don't overestimate your daily protein requirements.  Three grams for each ten pounds you weigh is a good rule of thumb for the minimum.  You could eat more, of course, but you don't necessarily need more.
3. Eat your veggies, and eat them with plenty of tasty, tasty fats and oils -- enough to give you all the energy you require over and above your calories from protein.
4. Don't waste so damn much food, especially protein.  Avoidable food waste is the most shameful portion of our environmental impact.  
5. Choose animal products that make efficient use of agricultural protein.  In order, the most efficient "ordinary" sources from the grocery store are dairy; eggs, tied with aquacultured fish; chickens; pork; beef.  (Wholly grass-fed beef, or beef fed on non-human-edible agricultural residue, is great if you can get it, but not everyone can get it).

Fasting in Paradise.

Melanie has dug up a quote that suggests the Genesis "don't eat that fruit" rule amounted to a prescribed fast:

"Fasting restores to those who practice it the father’s house from which Adam was cast out… God himself, the friend of man (Wsd 1,6), first entrusted to fasting the man he had created, as to a loving mother, as to a teacher. He had forbidden him to taste of one tree only (Gn 2,17) and if the man had observed this fast he would have dwelt with angels. But he rejected it and so found anguish and death, the sharpness of thorns and thistles and the sorrow of a miserable life (Gn 3,17f.) Now, if fasting is shown to be of value in Paradise, how much more must it be so here below to win us life eternal!". 

(Link: http://thewinedarksea.com/index.php/weblog/on_fasting/ )

It is a fruitful meditation. I wrote about a similar theme some time ago, only I identified the forbidding of the Edenic fruit as a "dietary law" rather than a fast:

"Which takes me to the Garden of Eden. How many times have you read or heard a non-Christian, non-Jewish person complaining of the arbitrariness of that whole "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" nonsense? Why would God care if they ate this one fruit? There's no good reason for it -- whoever wrote it down even made a point of mentioning that the stuff was good to eat, so what's the big deal? Alternatively, you'll occasionally see a well-meaning believer defending the don't-eat-that rule on some practical ground of healthfulness or learning obedience or some such thing.
I think it's easier to understand the story -- and this works both if you take the story as something that really happened, or if you take it as a useful teaching story passed down by one of the world's most influential cultures -- as the story of the first dietary law. The first "We eat this, not that. Just because."Pointing at the fruit of the tree while uttering "In the day you eat of it you shall surely die" is not, inherently, any nuttier than pointing at your tablemate's cheeseburger while muttering, "That shit'll kill you." It doesn't matter that the modern health nut thinks that science is on his side -- it's still a prediction of religious significance -- because in reality the connection between any given cheeseburger and the untimely death of the cheeseburger-eater is practically zero, unless the eater chokes on it, I suppose. And even if a lifetime diet of cheeseburgers will shorten your life, who's to say that's not a reasonable choice for someone who likes cheeseburgers?But let's go back to dietary laws for a minute. It's significant that the breaking of a dietary law should play such a crucial role in the stories I'm speaking of. And it's not something that's alien to human nature either. There are many layers to the story, but I can't help but think that it's in part a lesson that there are limits to our natural inclinations. The tree's fruit was "good to eat," and there is no reason to assume the senses of the man and woman couldn't be trusted. Yet, as the story goes, it was better, in that place and in that time, to choose not to eat it. Resisting, if only on occasion, what we naturally want and can see is a good thing, must itself be something good. And doesn't that fit with our ordinary experience?"

(link: http://arlinghaus.typepad.com/blog/2010/04/dietary-laws.html )

One difference between a dietary law and a fast is that a dietary law is generally lifelong -- see the regulations of keeping kosher or halal, or the philosophy of an ethically committed vegetarian. Fasts, on the other hand, are generally temporary. In Jewish history, the permanence and complexity of the dietary law served many purposes -- among other things, to provide a concrete manifestation of identity among the chosen people, to clearly demarcate them from the peoples that surrounded them.  

Another difference is that fasting can be regarded as a positive act, and when prescribed, as a positive duty similar to the duties of prayer and almsgiving. To adhere to a dietary law is more like a negative duty, a "thou shalt not." Negative duties are by their nature more binding than positive ones.

Does it matter whether we identify the forbidding of the fruit as a dietary law or as a fast? Or is it simply a third example of the same sort of class of commandments? Either way it is instructive to meditate upon the words, "for in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death."

   

I take it back, that on-off habits thing.

All right, I said I was going to handle weight maintenance in a certain way, and I'm officially going back on my word.  

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So when I first got near my goal weight, you may remember, I was going to chart my weight on a little chart that Mark made for me modeled after a statistical process control chart.  Cue the theramin music as we go back, back in time to early 2009...

Mark made up the chart, and the "rules" at the top.  

It's like this:  I am supposed to begin doing something to bring my weight back to the middle whenever any of the conditions described in the rules are met.  I cannot return to normal behavior until the running average of five measurements in a row crosses the midline again.

This is great, except that I have not gotten around to defining "normal behavior," nor the positive and negative types of "doing something."  Right now "normal behavior" is "more or less eat what I want" and "doing something" is "eat less than I want."  (I have only slipped into the land of underweight-must-eat-more once.)

Yes, that was the plan.  Watch the weight wiggle back and forth between the control limits, and if it creeps up too far, add "habits" until it creeps back down again.

After many months of frustrated struggling at an average weight a few pounds higher than my target, I am now officially renouncing this strategy.

It looks too much like "going on a diet" and "going off a diet" and "going on a diet again."  It messes with my head.  

On the surface it seemed like a good idea:  toggle habits on and off, to turn the balance one way or another, and keep the weight under control just exactly as if I were a manufacturing process.  But I, unlike a collection of heat exchangers and reactors, have a psychology, and you know what?  It kind of sucks to tell myself, "Well, I won't have any wine, or desserts, until I get five weight readings in a row below such-and-such a weight."  It makes me feel deprived and dejected, and do you know what?  Once I got the five weight readings in a row, and toggled my "habits" back to "maintenance level," the weight did not stay down.   I was not aware of it, but I must have been overreacting in the other direction:  indulging to pay myself back for the deprivation.

This is not the way I want to do things.

And anyway, the terminology should have been a clue.  Hello -- "toggle" habits on and off?  If you do that with a behavior, it isn't a habit!  I don't want to be in an endless cycle of deprivation and indulgence.  That's what I tried to give up.  

I want sustainable living at a sustainable weight.  

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So, right around Thanksgiving, I abandoned that approach (though I'm still making the weight chart, and it's still important, as you will see.)  And remarkably, as soon as I did, my weight returned down to the target level, and I've been maintaining it with much LESS effort since then.

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Here's my new strategy:

Watch the scale, and if the weight begins to creep out of the comfort zone, re-evaluate habits and eating behaviors, through trial and error -- one or a few at a time.  But adopt and evaluate habits as potentially permanent lifestyle adaptations.  If I do not think I could sustain a habit for the rest of my life, it probably is not a good habit for me.

No more of this "I only have to do it until my weight comes back under control."  Only:  What I do, I do from now until it doesn't make sense for me anymore.

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A caveat:  A habit "for the rest of my life" doesn't mean "every single time."  If I am in the habit of not having bedtime snacks, it doesn't mean that I never choose to have one.  It's more of an "almost always."  Let's take it as a given that occasionally I will splurge.  But not often enough to make a new, not-so-good habit.

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Another thing that's kind of weird about this is that it requires a little bit of double think.  Because I have to be open to changing the habits if necessary.  See, my environment constantly changes:  my children are growing, the seasons are turning, my schedule is different every semester, my own body is aging from year to year.  It stands to reason that the helpful habits of today might be less helpful in a future time.  So I know that it's not really true that any given habit is being adopted "for the rest of my life."

But I cannot work with a habit that I wouldn't be okay with "for the rest of my life."  If it's too hard to do "for the rest of my life" then it's going to make me suffer, and long for release, even in the short term.

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So what did I do back then around Thanksgiving?  Well, this sort-of-New-Year's post about the turkey roasters and the puppies is getting at the distinction:

Here is my husband's idea, which has merit: "Make a list of habits that you can add or subtract as necessary. Put them in order from the easiest and most painless to the most difficult and annoying. Then, if your weight spikes up, start adding habits in order, only one or two at a time. If that doesn't help, add more until your weight goes down again, and then you can stop the habits, starting with the most annoying ones."

The idea of ranking behaviors by annoyance level was a new one, and I thought I would give that a try. I started making a list of things like "don't eat sweets" and "keep the serving dishes in the kitchen" and "put a stick of gum by my plate at dinner" and "one egg is enough eggs for breakfast" and the like.

But as my list of former and current and potential weight-controlling strategies grew longer, I began to feel uneasy about calling them all "habits." And as I began to shuffle them around to figure out which ones I enjoy the least ("no wine with dinner" and "pre-count every calorie" are two examples of behaviors that work extremely well but that exemplify the life I do NOT want to lead), I became even more sure that "habit" is absolutely the wrong word for many of these behaviors.

What Mark is suggesting is not a ranking of habits, but a hierarchy of compensatory deprivations.

A habit is not like a toggle switch; it is more like a houseplant or a tropical fish or a puppy. It requires care. Yes-no choices do go into it, though. Choose often enough to feed it and it thrives; choose often enough to neglect it and it withers. Useful habits are habits to live with: not necessarily permanently, but for long periods. They can be tried for a while to see if they are pleasant to live with and if they have desirable effects, but this is not the same as toggling them on and off; it is more like a temporary adoption, to see if an attachment will deepen.

Compensatory deprivations are less like a companion pet and more like a spare folding table or a turkey roaster: an unwieldy, occasionally used piece of furniture or appliance that you get out of the basement from time to time when necessary. (e.g., at the holidays.)

What I've decided is that I'm done with turkey-roaster dieting, for the most part. 

Anyway, I went on the next day to spell out some of the habits I was thinking about trying on:

I think a lot of people slip up by resolving to deprive themselves permanently or indefinitely of something they really enjoy that is ordinarily harmless, or at least it is harmless in moderation. It would be better to identify habits that are really desirable, and try to set yourself up to fall into them, so to speak.

As for me, my biggest problem right now is that I have slipped into an indulge-gain-deprive-lose cycle, and I really need to get out of it and into a more balanced pattern. That calls for a look at habits I would like to re-establish for the new year: permanent changes that I really want to have.

So I made a long list of potential behaviors, and then I carefully considered each one. If I found it appealing, I put it on my list of "habits to try." If I didn't, I put it on the list of "compensatory deprivations" -- and I don't intend to touch those except on rare occasions, such as the morning after a day full of bad food, or as a needed kick start.

The three habits I started trying were very simple:

• "Half a sandwich is enough sandwich for me."  When faced with a sandwich, only eat half.
• A normal portion of sweets is a two-thumbs-sized rectangle, or (if it's scoopable) 1/3 cup.
• Have only a small portion of alcohol with dinner; have more only after I've pushed my plate away.

I quit trying to deprive myself based on the scale numbers plotted on the chart; instead it was more like, "Well, the chart shows me that my current habits aren't keeping my weight well in control; I need to adopt a different set of habits that will, indefinitely, keep my weight well in control.  When I find them, I will keep them, not quit as soon as I see happier numbers."

And when I stopped the panic, stopped depriving myself of all manner of things, and switched instead to reinforcing those three habits, I noticed, other habits became easier.  For example, it became easier to stick to one plateful at dinner, rather than helping myself to unnecessary seconds.  And the half-sandwich reminder made it easier for me to have balanced meals when I ate at restaurants.

A month later, my weight is back in control.  It's in better control than it's been in for the last YEAR, I think.  (Maybe I'll post the data later to show you.)

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Permanent, not temporary, change.  That is what it is all about.  Why do I have to keep learning this over and over again?

Book review, part 2: Glucose and willpower.

(Part 1 of my review of  Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney is here)

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Sometimes, at the end of what feels like a long day, or a long mental effort, I have a feeling that I often describe as "brain-fried."  I've been struggling not to yell at the kids, I've been thinking about a blog post I need to write, I've been trying not to procrastinate the million things I need to do, and I have an inexplicable craving for things like mashed potatoes or chocolate -- and solitude.  Tierney and Baumeister use a different term, but I immediately recognized it.  They call it "ego depletion," and it is the state of having used up all your willpower.

Yes, "used up."  Here are what they have to say about it, based on the research described in the book:

1. Resisting temptation is only one way we use willpower. Three others are

• controlling display of emotion or emotional outburst; 
• making decisions; 
• and performing physical tasks that require skill, e.g., balancing speed and accuracy.

2.  You have a limited supply of willpower. Repeated effort at any of the willpower-using activities depletes it.  After trying to control yourself for long enough, you lack the self-control to do any of them.  It becomes more difficult to restrain your displays of emotion, to think about decisions you have to make, to practice your skills, or -- yes -- to resist temptations and urges.

3.  It's trying to control yourself, not succeeding, that depletes willpower.   Even if you give in, you're left with less willpower to work with.

4. When your blood glucose levels drop, your willpower depletes faster.  

5. Accordingly, raising your blood sugar (i.e., by consuming food) restores your willpower supply.  The fastest way to do this is, of course, easily digestible carbohydrates, but protein and more-healthful, more-slowly digestible carbohydrates also work, albeit more slowly.

6. At low glucose and low willpower, your brain turns its effort to other things.  It keeps working and consuming fuel at the same rate, but it gives up on the willpower-consuming activities.

7.  One of the things it turns to is trying to get you to raise your blood sugar.  Hello, carb cravings!

Tierney and Baumeister point out the obvious "Catch-22" for people who struggle with food cravings here:  You need willpower in order not to eat, and you need to eat in order to have willpower.  

Just as obvious is that, if what they are saying is true, then folks with impaired glucose tolerance -- insulin resistance, hypoglycemia, diabetes and prediabetes (even, they suggest, premenstrual syndrome!)  -- will frequently be in a state of (relatively) impaired impulse control and decisionmaking skills.  

We can get a little overfocused on overeating here at bearing blog.  Remember that impulse control applies to a lot of different areas of life (and indeed Tierney and Baumeister mention many):  drinking and drug abuse, procrastination, violent outbursts, child discipline, studying and schoolwork, performance at a variety of difficult tasks.

I have to go now (procrastinating long enough) but I'll post again with more insights about willpower, not so glucose related, and then try to tie them into some practical tips for behavioral change.

Book review, part 1: Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

This past week I finished reading Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney.  I recommend it.  

As nonfiction goes, it's a fairly light and quick read, and interesting:  I would rank it with Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating in the pop psychology genre.  Like those Wansink describes, some of the psychological experiments that Tierney and Baumeister recount (most of which were designed and executed by others) are interesting and creative.  Interesting, creative, and cruel:  I really, really felt bad for some of the experimental subjects, who had to do things like

1. first, fast for many hours
2. then, hungry, be ushered into a waiting room filled with the smell of baking cookies
3. sit next to a bowl of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and be told "Those aren't for you, here, have one of these nice crunchy radishes instead"
4. finally be given "intelligence tests" which consisted of puzzles that, in fact, had no solution, the point being to measure how long the subjects sweated over them before they gave up trying.

The book also includes material gleaned from a handful of celebrities, either from interviews or from excerpts from memoirs.  Not sure why they had to be celebrities, but they do make for interesting stories.  How Drew Carey looked at his messy desk, said "Shit, man, I'm rich," and hired David Allen (of Getting Things Done) to work with him as a personal organizer for a year.  How Eric Clapton stopped drinking, and speculations as to how AA's "abandon yourself to a higher power" thing can work even for atheists.  How performance artist Amanda Palmer maintained composure as a living statue, standing perfectly still for three hours a day even in the face of people trying to anger or amuse her, and how it affected her for hours afterward.  There's also a historical discussion of Henry Stanley (he of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?") and how his memoirs hint that he could maintain discipline -- both of himself and of the men under his command -- through truly horrific conditions.

But the real gem of Willpower is the insights it suggests from research, some of which are surprising -- but which explain a lot.  I hinted at this in a blog post I wrote  about sticking to your resolutions, which drew on an article written by Tierney, and also you can see a New York Times review of the book here which summarizes it pretty well.

Before getting into the specific insights, though, let's talk about the problem posed by the very idea of "willpower" itself.   Some people, to be blunt, believe there is no such thing, pointing to various research findings that convincingly show that we are so often driven by forces of which we are not conscious.  Others are wary of bringing up the possibility because it smacks so much of blaming people for the situation they find themselves in, which may largely be because of forces outside their control.  

In the obesity research world, there is a lot of evidence out there that "lack of willpower" is not the root reason for much of the obesity problem.  Take Gary Taubes's two books, Good Calories, Bad Calories (I reviewed it here) and Why We Get Fat (I reviewed it here, here, here).  Both of them make a very convincing case that intractable obesity is caused by a biochemical vicious cycle that is triggered by exposure -- maybe even as early as in utero! -- to a diet of sugars and other refined carbohydrates.   The cravings and the difficulty resisting them are both products of broken hormonal signals, according to this model, and so you simply cannot say that obesity can be "fixed" through application of willpower alone to resist the temptation to overeat.  From Good Calories, Bad Calories:  "Though the traditional response to the failure of semi-starvation diets to produce long-term weight loss has been to blame the fat person for a lack of willpower... [some] have argued that this failure is precisely the evidence that tells us positive caloric balance or overeating is not the underlying disorder in obesity."

So let's stipulate for the purposes that this is true:  our decisions to give in, or not to give in, very often come from unconscious processes, or biochemical urges, or explicable impulses.  How do Tierney and Baumeister deal with that?  And the answer is that they  do it through a careful -- and useful -- definition of the terms "will" and "willpower."

The will is to be found in connecting units across time.... Will involves treating the current situation as part of a general pattern... You must treat (almost) every episode [of temptation] as a reflection of a general need to resist these temptations.

That's where conscious self-control comes in, and that's why it makes the difference between success and failure in just about every aspect of life.

The way I read it is this:  We may have no conscious and immediate control over the impulses that overtake us, the urges and cravings and temptations.  They may come from our environment or from chemical signals inside us.  And we may have little conscious and immediate control over the strength of our resistance against those impulses:  once the impulse has begun, if we are "caught out," there may be little we can do to fight against them.  

 

But we do have power to predict the impulses that may overtake us in the future, and we can take steps to prepare.  We can shape our environment so that they meet us on a battleground we have chosen, or we can avoid meeting them at all.  We can also whip ourselves into shape so that we have a better chance at resisting even if we are surprised by our impulses.

That is where the "will" part of "willpower" comes in.

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In a future post, I'll list some of the insights from the book that resonated with me.  Some of them, I met with a sense of recognition, as a general form of the specific insights that I discovered for myself during my weight loss and subsequent struggles with maintenance.  Finally, I'll discuss how I think people can harness these insights to hammer out a plan of action for personal change.

(I think I can write with some conviction and experience about how to harness willpower to overcome the specific fault of gluttony.  What I'd really like to do, though, is figure out how to harness it to overcome faults I'm still mired in.  Maybe, through continued writing about gluttony, I can see a way to draw analogies that will create a map to escape from those other faults as well.)

 

Well, this is a timely article: How to stick to your resolutions.

I was talking to Mark this evening about trying to nail down the general principles of behavioral change -- not the list of "handy weight loss tips," but the general principles that I've followed to choose my new, permanent habits and to make them stick.  

All right, I'm fessing up:  I've been tossing around the idea of putting these disconnected eating-and-exercise blog posts into a longer and more organized form.  What I'm not yet sure about is focus:  gluttony?  personal change in general?  willpower defeating?  straight-up weight loss?

Anyway, I was amused tonight to encounter this article from the NYT's John Tierney, "Be It Resolved," which is very much like the sort of thing I was envisioning writing.

IT’S still early in 2012, so let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume you have made a New Year’s resolution and have not yet broken it. Based on studies of past resolutions, here are some uplifting predictions:

1) Whatever you hope for this year — to lose weight, to exercise more, to spend less money — you’re much more likely to make improvements than someone who hasn’t made a formal resolution.

2) If you can make it through the rest of January, you have a good chance of lasting a lot longer.

3) With a few relatively painless strategies and new digital tools, you can significantly boost your odds of success.

Now for a not-so-uplifting prediction: Most people are not going to keep their resolutions all year long. They’ll start out with the best of intentions but the worst of strategies, expecting that they’ll somehow find the willpower to resist temptation after temptation. By the end of January, a third will have broken their resolutions, and by July more than half will have lapsed.

They’ll fail because they’ll eventually run out of willpower, which social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control.

Well, that explains a lot.  Dieting is hard because low blood sugar depletes your willpower!  

But this is the paragraph in the article that really resonated with me (emphasis mine):

One of their newest studies, published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tracked people’s reactions to temptations throughout the day. The study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago, showed that the people with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can.

This.  This.  A thousand times this.  Using willpower sucks, so you have to exert it in advance.  So much of what worked for me is about this very principle.

The article goes on to give a somewhat outlandish anecdote and then from it derives some strategies that ring very true to me:

• Set one clear goal at a time
• Precommit (like Odysseus lashing himself  to the mast, remove your options to break your resolution)
• Be accountable to someone else, and plan to pay a real penalty if you don't reach your goal
• Keep track of how you are doing
• Don't overreact to a lapse by saying "what the hell" and figuring the day's already ruined
• Tell yourself you can have some later (rather than swearing off pleasures for good)
• Reward yourself, or find reward in your actions, often.

I will have to spend some time thinking about this -- but maybe the first step is to read the book about willpower that is referenced in the article.