bear - ingn.1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4pl. comprehension of one's position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
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 enough fats and oils, and not too much protein, will alleviate the famous unpleasant side effects of low-carb diets.
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.
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.
Don't waste so damn much food, especially protein. Avoidable food waste is the most shameful portion of our environmental impact.
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).
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!".
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?"
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."
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.
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?
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.
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
first, fast for many hours
then, hungry, be ushered into a waiting room filled with the smell of baking cookies
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"
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.)
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.
So I have this problem: I don't actually need very many calories per day. This means that I should have smaller portions than are typically served. Logically, then, I should not eat all of most sandwiches, which are standardized to maintain (or, realistically, to fatten) a person much larger than me. And yet, the sandwich is a sort of a quantized food. Except in restaurants that do the half-sandwich, cup-of-soup lunch thing, you generally get an integer of sandwiches on your plate. And there's a strong visual cue there that says "eat the whole thing."
For a little while, in trying to maintain my new weight, I was trying out sandwiches that promised to be low in calories. Take the Subway "fresh fit menu," for example. I happen to like turkey, so I thought: Well, maybe I will go ahead and have all of a nominally-six-inch turkey sub, with lots of pickles and hot peppers and spinach on it. Indeed, as fast food goes, it's pretty good. Truthfully, though, I probably would have been more satisfied with half a nominally-six-inch Spicy Italian loaded with cheese and oil. Fat is satiating, after all.
But the real problem with the whole six-inch sub is that it is huge-looking; it reinforces the habit that says it's normal and good for me to eat huge-looking sandwiches; and next time I meet a huge sandwich, it might not be as innocuous as turkey on wheat. Given that many restaurant sandwiches are huge-looking because they are, in fact, huge, it is a much better strategy for me, the terminally calorically challenged, to default to half sandwiches.
But when I started off on a mission to eat only half sandwiches, I was forced to probe my emotional obstacles to restrained eating yet again, and I discovered this:
I have serious reservations about eating only half of a sandwich.
Even if the sandwich is twice as big as what I actually want to eat, I am disturbed by the asymmetry of the undertaking.
The data suggests that aspect ratio matters. I don't mind so much if the sandwich is long and skinny (aspect ratio >> 1), so that by cutting it in half it is transformed into two sandwiches that are still long and skinny (aspect ratio reduced, but still noticeably > 1).
Take a submarine sandwich, for example, such as the nominally eight-inch versions produced by Milio's, which delivers to my house.
A nominally eight-inch sub (and yes, that is not half a sandwich already, that is a whole sandwich; a sixteen-inch sub counts as two sandwiches, I don't care how many calories you are allowed to eat per day) is pretty skinny and long (actually it's more than eight inches), and even after you cut it in half it's still longer than it is wide. It is still, in other words, sub-shaped. It has preserved the essence of sub-sandwich-hood. I can eat it and say, "This is a sub." I am supported in this intuitive conclusion by inductive reasoning: if there are sixteen-inch subs, and there are eight-inch subs, then logically there should be no reason why there cannot be a nominally four-inch sub, and so on and so on -- too bad this name is already taken.
So I don't have any problems with those.
And I don't have too much trouble with wrapping up half of a sandwich made on wide-pan bread that is wider than it ought to be. Such sandwiches usually arrive already cut in half, the better to artfully arrange the halves so that they are embracing a cup of soup or a bowl of salad or perhaps a pile of potato chips. There, you're taking an aspect ratio that is approximately 2 and reducing it to approximately 1, which is really the appropriate aspect ratio for food that comes between sliced bread.
So easy just to wrap up one of those halves and take it home.
But I find I have this horrible resistance to, for example, half cheeseburgers. Now I love a good cheeseburger as much as anyone, and I'm not very fond of little cheeseburgers. When I want a cheeseburger, I don't want the kid's-menu version. I want a thick medium-rare patty and a lot of lettuce and tomato and pickles and mayo and maybe some bacon. I would rather have half a grownup cheeseburger than all of a kids' cheeseburger...
... at least till it is time to cut my big grownup cheeseburger in half. And then I am daunted by the prospect of sawing to pieces something so beautiful and complete, the Platonic ideal of a sandwich in all its circular perfection. I just know that the tomatoes and lettuce will slip to one side, lubricated by the mayonnaise, and the bun will be shredded to crumbs, and I'll be left picking through the pickles and trying to distribute them equitably between two sort-of semicircular half-patties, no longer crisp all around a lacy edge, rapidly cooling and drying out as the juices run all out of the center, its tender pink cross-sectional area now exposed to the ambient environment, and to the disapproving eyes of any nearby E. coli researchers.
This is where Mark points out to me, "You never have any trouble eating the second half of a whole cheeseburger."
(Too, too true. But cheeseburgers are about love and geometry, not reason and rhetoric.)
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N. B.: The above rant also applies to bagels.
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And then there's the prospect of making one's own half sandwiches from scratch, by which I mean cutting a slice of bread in half and then putting the fillings on one half and topping it with the other half slice of bread. Do I even need to explain why this is so abhorrent?
Nigel Tufnel can do it for me:
It's okay to make a whole sandwich and cut it in half and share the other half with someone. But if there is no someone in sight, I have to make a half sandwich. And that is just wrong. Perhaps if I laid in a store of frilly-ended wooden picks.
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Mark: "Perhaps if it is the aspect ratio that bothers you, you should cut circles out of the middle of your sandwiches with a cutter, and eat those."
Me: "Ummmm... I can't drive and calculate at the same time... what's the diameter of a circle that is half the area of a square of side 1?"
Mark (pulls out iPhone, calculates): "Approximately zero point eight."
Me: "So I could eat a half sandwich that looks round if I cut off the edges, a tenth of the width on each side, and trimmed the corners, and only ate the middle."
Mark: "Sure, why wouldn't that work?"
Me: "Mark, I already eat all the children's sandwich crusts. What makes you think I will be able to resist my own? Duh."
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So this month, I decided to try to beat my irrational resistance to half sandwiches by making and ordering a lot of half sandwiches.
My first homemade half sandwich was a grilled ham and brie on pumpernickel rye with wedges of green apple melted inside it. There was no hope of getting anyone else in the family to share this with me, so I was unwilling to grill a normal sandwich and cut it in half. Nor did I wish to waste brie. So I carefully took half a slice of bread, cut the rectangular way (since the cross-section of my brie was rectangular) and folded up the ham, a little more deftly than Nigel up there. I kept the ham from unfolding by weighting it down with the three little pieces of brie. Then I propped my apple slices among them, and balanced the other half-slice of pumpernickel on top, and smacked it down with my spatula when it threatened to topple over. How am I going to butter the bottom of this mess? I wondered, but then remembered that I could put butter on the skillet instead. Somehow I managed to transport the whole topheavy mess to the skillet where it sizzled away, and by employing tongs as well as spatula I managed to turn it over to brown on the other side, only having to stuff one stray piece of apple back in between the chinks.
Once the sandwich had cooled it was pleasant and fragrant as any whole sandwich, and of course the brie had fused it all together so it didn't want to come unfolded anymore. So that was a success story, though not without its trials.
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It has been slightly easier navigating restaurants, where I vowed to order sandwiches and only eat half until I had firmly established the half-sandwich habit.
Along the way I amended the rules somewhat: some naturally-small sandwiches, such as gourmet sliders or Skyline chili dogs, can count as halves (at least if normal people might ordinarily eat two or more of them).
But most of the time I stuck to it. On a recent road trip, I asked for my Subway six-inch Italian BMT to be cut in half, and I put the other half in front of the baby, who likes salami. I asked for a plastic knife at Chick-Fil-A and bisected my #1, hiding one half in the foil-and-paper sack (after harvesting the pickles from it) and consuming the other with a side salad. Once the sandwiches were safely gone, I found, I no longer felt anxious about their aspect ratios.
With practice, and a lot of sandwiches, I am optimistic that I will beat this thing. I'm learning all the time, and that gives me hope. The other day, at "Moe's Almost World Famous Diner" in Osseo, WI with the kids (en route from Madison), I ordered a patty melt.
What a revelation: A patty melt is a cheeseburger on square bread that comes already cut in half! And here I have been eating patty melts on occasion my whole life, and never noticed that they break the don't-cut-a-cheeseburger principle, and they still taste good.
I gave the other half to the baby (yes, it was cooked through, I checked), and I ate my half patty melt, savoring the taste of triumph.
I was going to blog about Tara Parker-Pope's recent article "The Fat Trap," but then I noticed a lively discussion at Megan McArdle's blog. I participated as "bearing." You may find that comment section interesting if you follow the weight loss/gluttony threads here.
Pope's article is about how hard it is for people to keep the weight off, when they have lost weight through medically supervised severe calorie restriction. Some people do it through obsessive calorie counting and abnormally high exercise regimes.
I am pinning my hopes on the "sustainable, real-life habit" approach to weight control, something that is almost the antithesis of the medically supervised fasting. But I still find articles like Ms. Pope's article depressing -- and frightening. It's not that I can't keep my weight within a good range now. It's that I fear I will somehow lose the will to keep working on it.
It is resolution season, folks, and this is post two in a series...
Yesterday I wrote a post about distinguishing desirable habits from interventions, that is, from temporary deprivations. Habits are like puppies: if you like them and can live with them, you adopt them for the long haul. "Compensatory deprivations" are like spare furniture you get out only when necessary. They can be useful temporary fixes, but they are not something you want to live with permanently.
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 habits list is surprisingly short. Remember that yours are not the same as mine...
I. Well-established habits I want to be sure to keep.
- One egg is enough eggs for breakfast. I wrote about this and other "mantras" here. - Keep the gym bag packed at all times. It has been a little trickier to juggle the schedule lately such that I get to the pool or treadmill, and so it is even more important now that I remain always ready to take the opportunity when it comes. - The right-size plate is 8-1/2 inches, which means the inner rim of a larger one. Switching to "luncheon plates" has been the easiest way I've tried to fight mealtime gluttony -- it has totally been worth the cost of replacing our family dinnerware. Full-size dinner plates are do-able, though, because they often have an "inner" plate that is 9 inches or so; I just pretend the decorative rim is not there. - A "normal" plate has four quarters: two vegetables, one protein, one starch. I don't mean to say that I always divide my meals up like this; I don't, for example, dissect a portion of lasagna. It's more of a mental habit for eyeballing the relative proportions of the main dish and the side dishes. I do follow it pretty frequently at lunch.
II. New habits I am excited about, to begin trying immediately.
- "Half a sandwich is enough sandwich for me." This is potentially a new mantra to add to the ones at the link I mentioned above. I won't go into it now, but I actually have a lot to say about how I came to this one and why I am excited (I know, weird word to use) about trying it. I will write a whole post about half sandwiches coming up soon. - A "normal" portion of sweets or dessert, for me, is a two-thumbs-sized slice or 1/3 cup. I would like to have sweets every day if I want them, and that only works if I keep the portions small, which is fine with me. I would rather have a little ice cream every day than a giant bowl on the weekends. This habit is not exactly new, as I also used it when I was losing weight in 2008, but I think I would like to make it permanent in order to eat ice cream more frequently (I have been cyclically denying myself dessert, and I am tired of it). - If I have alcohol with dinner or before dinner, it should be only a little: half a beer, or a quarter glass of wine. I can have more after I have finished eating and the plate is removed. I don't want to give up wine or beer with dinner, but I have to face reality: alcohol makes me eat more. Keeping the amount small until the food is gone may just be the habit I need to establish to let me enjoy both in moderation.
III. Habits to try later on.
- Refuse to eat quickly. Everybody knows the conventional wisdom, that eating slowly and being sure to savor your food is good for portion control. I have never really mastered it -- I am usually the first one done with any meal. This is a direct challenge to gluttony, so it's a habit I really want to try -- but I am saving it for later because I expect it will be rather difficult to establish. - Skip bedtime snack as normal practice. I had this habit before, but have fallen out of it. It needs a trial period; it might not be right for me at this time. - Notice my hunger level at the start of the meal, and adjust my plate accordingly. Up till now, I have tried to load plates consistently, each dinner about the same size, because for so many years my hunger signals were not reliable. I think they are more reliable now, and the way to test that is to carefully try serving myself larger helpings if I am hungry and smaller ones if I am not. - Strictly practice "no seconds" to see if it becomes a comfortable habit. I more or less eschew seconds at meals, but it is not really a habit; I feel a little deprived by it. I want to give it a good continuous try for a while to see if it can become something I can get used to.
- Reinforce the "no seconds" habit by serving dishes in the kitchen. This is something that might or might not work; because we have small children who cannot serve themselves, I will have to go back to the kitchen anyway, which could backfire. Maybe I will think of a way to set this one up so that it works in our family.
- Portion grains, soups, and breads to moderate carbohydrate intake. It isn't sustainable to measure them every time, but maybe I can use a handy comparison to keep myself relatively honest, the way I use "two thumbs" to set the size of sweet desserts -- perhaps stay below a fist-size volume of bread and grains or a two-fist volume of soup.
I haven't actually made any New Year's resolutions, but 'tis the season for reflecting on good and bad habits, no? So get ready for a couple of anti-gluttony posts, starting with this one.
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As part of marking my weight goal anniversary (three years this past November -- can you believe it?) I took a step back and surveyed my eating and exercise habits: what was working? What wasn't? Were there any good habits I had abandoned out of sloth and gluttony? Had I discovered any new ones, or thought of any potential new ones that might counteract problem areas?
It is a bit hard to tell if my anxiety is ill-founded (this being the nature of anxiety), but I still feel as if I only barely can keep my weight down. Probably I have an unhealthy obsession with it -- but, to put it bluntly, I do not wish to let go of my possibly unhealthy obsession because I would rather be obsessed than put the weight back on again. The story of the last three years has been the story of trying to externalize the obsession, find ways to live and to see myself that are balanced less precariously. I think of wrapping little packages of anxiety up in my mind and transferring them somehow outside myself, one at a time, into tidy little stacks. Turning this balance into something that is maintained by things I simply do and forget about, rather than things I turn over and over in my mind. From head to hands.
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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.)
We all know some person (a lot of us seem to be married to one) who decides he needs to take off a few pounds, gives up ice cream for a couple weeks and bam, problem solved,the lucky bastard. That is the idea we are going for. A useful compensatory deprivation is something that's at least a little painful, but is temporary and effective. If it works but hurts, the working should be enough motivation to keep going just until it isn't needed anymore. If it works and doesn't hurt (or you find you get used to it eventually), maybe it should be nurtured as a long-term habit after all. If it hurts and doesn't help, then there's no point, now, is there?
One way to begin turning your life around is to temporarily foster new habits, patiently nurturing them and giving them a chance to take root and thrive. Not all will be good matches, it is true, but you must be careful not to let the trying and discarding become the habit itself; the end is adoption, the testing only the means. Compensatory deprivations don't even need to enter the picture until a number of good habits are thriving comfortably.
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After I realized the crucial distinction between potential habits and potential compensatory deprivations, it was fairly easy to sort the items into two lists: one list of behaviors that either are already habits, or that I thought I might enjoy if I adopted them permanently; and a second list of behaviors that I thought would be helpful interventions from time to time but that I didn't want to become my constant companions... something to store in my basement, so to speak.
Which behaviors are your potential puppies, and which are your potential turkey roasters? Tune in next time and I will share my lists. Just in time for the new year.
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