bearing blog

The new ground rules.

For a couple of years, 2008 or so, I wrote frequently about exercise and eating strategies.   Sometimes I wrote about how those intersect with theology of the body, or Thomist morality.  I returned to the topic sporadically, but not steadily, since then.  It's been a while since I've written much.

I wrote all that because I was in the midst of two major life changes.

• First, that year when my third child was a toddler, I was prioritizing regular exercise for me for the first time.  Having taken lessons before that pregnancy, afterwards I started swimming twice a week, later adding running.   In order to keep it up, I thought, I had to be obsessive and inflexible; for better or worse, I was obsessive and inflexible, and I did keep it up.  Still am doing it today.

 

• Later, after the shock of having sustained this new habit for several months, I began restricting calories, and over the course of about six months I lost 27 percent of my initial body weight.    Having thought of myself as perpetually dumpy and sedentary since childhood, I found myself now active, and also, not fat.

Note the causality:  My writing about this didn't bring it about.  I wrote because I was having what I called success, and I was desperately trying to make sense of it.  I needed to understand why it was happening, was because I was afraid that if I didn't figure out why it was happening, I would not be able to keep from going back to "the way I was before."

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Ha.  As if I could slip back accidentally to "the way I was before."   Back to my early thirties?  I am older!  Human beings are not reversible.  For one thing, my windows of possibility have shifted.  For another, I understand more.

I've learned that the effort required to track calories closely enough to override the body's own cues is seriously intensive, tends to push out other satisfying activities, and requires a constant input of motivation.   And I've learned that I don't want to live in that kind of monomaniacal relationship with myself.

It may seem odd, but motivation itself is part of the problem.  I do lift myself up with messages that are true and encouraging, and celebrate with rewards that are both pleasant and good.    That's great when they work.  But if those don't do the job, I've often been tempted to use any mental means to the end of self-control:  shame, fear, dwelling on bad memories, threats of self-punishment; contempt for my body, contempt for other bodies.    Those thoughts still pop up, even though I understand better the damage they can do.

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Sometimes I betrayed those thoughts in my writing.

Writing has been a way to motivate myself, maybe spread a little motivation to others who might enjoy it.  I think this is, in principle, a worthy endeavor.   I've always used writing to to see if my ideas make sense and to improve them, and the promise (threat) of a small audience raises the stakes enough to make it meaningful.    I feel reward when a reader comments that something clicked, gave them an idea, helped.   

But when you write, in part, as a tool to root out error.... a corollary is that frequently, the error spends some time noodling around on the page.  And one might not catch them all.    It's not inherently wrong to try to work out ideas in public that way.  But there are limits. 

First of all, I have to be clear about what I'm doing (sometimes, literally, making it up as I go along).

Second:  when the topic is one that has been as historically fraught as exercise and diet and body image and fat loss, one about which many people carry a great deal of internalized harm... I need to be selective about setting down those first drafts of my thoughts. 

Because I also carry internalized messages that have power, and maybe not just over me.  Some of my thoughts are not great, especially some that in the intervening years I've learned to recognize as intrusive thoughts.  It might help me to exorcise them by giving voice to their content, but will it help anyone else?  If I'm going to straighten myself out by writing about those, best to write them longhand on one of the yellow pads I buy by the case, at least in first draft.  And maybe just keep them to myself, or share with a therapist instead.

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It's hard for me to precisely sort my previous writing about this stuff into "definitely okay, maybe even good" and "definitely problematic."  I've considered going back and editing, but the task is too overwhelming.  I've considered deleting stuff, but I think there are kernels of insight there worth rescuing.   For now it's still all there, waiting for me to decide what to do about it.

Meanwhile:  I'm changing up my lifestyle once again.  I'm committing myself to strengthen patterns of thinking that are much more compatible with good mental health and body care.   I would very much like to clarify them by setting them out on the blog. 

But:  when I blogged about fitness and nutrition before, expressing what I was going through 10-12 years ago, I wanted to write conversationally and frankly but that really amounted to being careless:  careless about language, careless about the words I used relative to the philosophy of the human person; careless about how pouring all my unfiltered thoughts out on the page might affect people who have a history of eating disorders, or of scrupulosity, or of difficulty caring for themselves.   I don't want to make the same mistakes again.

Would it be better just to... not write about this sort of thing at all?  I'm open to that possibility.  I'm not sure I can find out unless I give it a try.

What if I could write about it without making those mistakes?  What would it look like?  

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Ground rules.

 

1.  I will not conflate weight, fatness, or appearance with health.   

It's not just that these, as indicators of health, are poor and incomplete—though they are.   

It also means no more blithe writing about "desire for health" as a nobler-sounding euphemism for desires to look better, be less fat, or weigh less.  Pretended concern for "health" has justified many rude and abusive people.   Let me call things what they are.

A crucial reason to carefully acknowledge the difference:  Fat people frequently report that health care providers become fixated on fatness as the primary indicator of their health, the sole probable cause of pain or other symptoms, and the first problem that must be "fixed" before they are allowed to access other levels of care.  (See this recent commentary by Aubrey Gordon.)

 

2.  I will acknowledge other biomarkers of general health that are better-supported by evidence.  

Anyone can self-assess the time they spend physically active, the number of alcoholic drinks they have per week, the hours they sleep, the number of fruit/vegetable portions they are able to serve themselves each day.   These behavior-based markers are much more often under an individual's direct control (although the range of available choice varies).  Hydration can be assessed by checking if the urine is consistently a pale yellow color.  Blood pressure,  lipid panels, and blood glucose testing are accessible to those who can afford at least annual basic preventive care.   

As for body-size-related markers of general health, my understanding is that neither body-fat percentage, nor weight, nor BMI work well at all as a predictor of eventual development of cardiovascular or metabolic disease.  The one exception may be waist circumference.   If I find myself casting about for a NUMBER, perhaps that one will work; otherwise, maybe I need to write something else.

(Two examples of papers with this finding; two examples don't substitute for a careful literature review, of course.  Note that adjusting the results for BMI does appear to improve the correlation.  This is possibly because it brings in a dependence of height; naturally short stature is itself an attribute that raises the risk of developing these diseases.)    

 

3.  I am not a fitness professional.  I am not a health care provider.  I am not a registered dietician.

I have my own experience.  I have scientific training; it is not in this field, but I have good scientific literacy and am able to assess the general usefulness of papers and applicability of research.   I know where to go for more information, and I know how to identify the difference between a broad scientific consensus and a matter with competing viable theories.   I also know how to take a piece of popular science writing and pick it apart, if I want to, or use it for entertainment purposes, if I want to do that instead.  All these mean that I can form an educated and reasonable opinion (you will not catch me scoffing about "Dr. Google," any more than I would scoff at public access to medical libraries), and I can write commentary about it if I like.  These are not, however, substitutes for authority.  I'm an educated amateur, not an expert in any of these areas, and I have an academic responsibility to remain clear about that to anyone who stumbles across my blog.

(This isn't a ground rule about which I really needed a reminder.  I try hard to live by it anyway.  But I thought it worth mentioning for completeness.)

 

4.  No biomarker, and few health-related behaviors, imply a specific moral conclusion.

Yeah, I know myself (imperfectly).   I might be able to tell you when I've made a poor choice, or developed a poor habit, or experienced a consequence, for lack of some virtue.   I know where I have agency, and I have some ideas where my agency has been damaged by circumstances.  I don't know that about others.  I can't speak for everyone else.

Assumptions about real people are tricky at best, and at worst they are outright bad and harmful.

Moreover, the following ought to go without saying:  there are no bad foods, there are no bad bodies, there is no such thing as cheating.  There is room for rest, and room for feasting, and room for fun, and no one else gets to tell you how much; there is room for you.

 

5.  Nevertheless, I'll stand by this:  morality, theology, charity, the philosophy of the human person, the demands of justice, aren't off limits here.

Nothing that human beings do or decide is untouched by the disciplines and philosophy of my faith tradition, and there aren't many traditions that pretend otherwise for themselves.    I hope to explore them in a way that doesn't violate the very principles I'm seeking to understand.  I'm not certain that I can, but I hope to.  

It is good to use appropriate self-discipline to strengthen virtue.  It is good to consider how to use resources prudently.  It is good to exercise detachment from outcomes.  At the same time, discipline is personal, resources are personal, outcomes are definitely personal.  So I need to take care:  if I write about my discipline and my resources, I need to make clear that they are mine and no one else's.

 

6.  I will be explicit about the limits of hypothetical situations and imaginary characters.  

Ah, the hypothetical situation.  Much maligned for good reason, sometimes useful for illustration, always a bit tricky in their execution.

I love hypotheticals, but I must be more careful with them.  It is tempting to think that if I think up a hypothetical situation, decorate it with only those details that seem to me significant, and imagining human-like actors, I can treat it as my very own creature of pure reason.   Since it is mine, I can manipulate as I please and  judge with omniscience. 

In one sense it's true, I can do that.  But real human readers have a tendency to see in these hypothetical characters someone "like" themselves, or perhaps real people they know.  And I am not allowed to manipulate or to judge the real person based on my fan-fic. 

Even if I think up a hypothetical, and along comes a real person who embodies the imaginary one in every detail I created, I can't use my reason to reach deductive conclusions about the real person.   Why not?  After all, the hypothetical (in this hypothesis) is perfectly matched!  Well, the real human may possess every detail of my hypothetical, but the hypothetical on which I exercised my reason could not possibly possess every detail of the human.   Humans possess an infinite detail and and an infinite worth, far beyond the scope of any model problem.   So watch it.

Once again.  Watch out when you are tempted to make assumptions about real people.

 

7.  If I write about specific activities, I'll make room for modifications for different bodies, variations that make training plans more enjoyable, and goals unrelated to weight reduction.

That short wish list appears in this commentary piece by Rebecca Scritchfield.

 

8.  Athletic performance metrics are useful, far preferable to body-size metrics, but highly individual and unrelated to either value or virtue.

It's probably a step in the right direction to go from "my body's value comes from its appearance" to "my body's value comes from what it can do."   But it's still wrong.

Training is experiment, and experiment requires observation and measurement.  I can use performance metrics to evaluate whether my training is having the effect I desire.  I don't have to be clinical about everything, either:  I can celebrate when I meet the metric goals I've set, and I can express disappointment when I don't.   It's crucial not to connect the results to my value or my "good"-ness.   People do not, in fact, get what they deserve.

 

9.  "Quality of life" is a universal goal, but an individual measure:  how closely reality matches a person's hopes and expectations.

There are multiple ways of going about working for one's quality of life, too.  Much fitness writing is aimed at improving quality of life through hard work; but I also want to honor the effort to maintain quality of life in situations of increasing difficulty.  There is also the tough mirror process of re-adjusting those hopes and expectations to match an unlooked-for reality, maybe in the face of injury or illness, maybe other changes in circumstance, maybe after learning more about oneself.

 

10.  The big picture of what I'm getting at:  an authentically human understanding of self-care.  

Maybe that sounds like an overly grandiose aim.  Especially since, if history is any guide I'll probably be putting up posts like "here's what's in my gym bag these days!" and "I've discovered that it's a mistake for me to forget to eat breakfast before swimming a mile!"  I mean, some of that stuff is really just minutiae.  I might put it up because it's on my mind.

But all the little pieces add up to a bigger picture.  

The ground rules are here as a kind of checklist for the construction of those little pieces, so they're all align-able with the sort of big picture I want to have.  At the same time, there are questions that feel very open to me, so that I'm constructing that picture as I go along without really knowing what it will look like.  What boundaries are essential?  If vocation is about self-gift, what is the type and extent of self-investment that is appropriate for each vocation?  How do we write sensitively about practices that are health-promoting for many but not for some?   How about writing about practices that are accessible only to a few but might be interesting  to many?  How does a family distribute resources (time, effort, assets) among its members with different needs?   Can self-discipline be taught or only discovered?  What are the signs that health, wellness, even discipline has become an idol, or an obsession, and how can a person get their priorities back in order?

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Well, this post has been many days in the making, so don't be surprised if it takes me a while to get around to the actual writing.  But it was a necessary step to unclog the  pipes, so to speak.  I hope to follow up on it soon.

Here we go again.

The baby is eight weeks old, and that is how long I promised I would wait before buckling down to trying to lose the weight I put on to support my pregnancy.

Some people advise waiting six months. That does make sense -- often the work of mothering a baby takes the extra weight off without conscious effort, so why not enjoy that while it lasts? And self-starvation is not good for milk supply, itself doubleplusungood for newborns. I am not planning on self-starvation. I am planning on being intentional instead of mindless, and on attention to portion sizes, and room for ice cream after dinner and a beer with Mark after the kids go to bed, and on a great deal of roasted Brussels sprouts. Also on adapting as I go along.

One thing I have already figured out and adapted: the daily rhythm that felt best and most sustainable before I got pregnant (light breakfast, medium lunch, afternoon snack, hearty dinner) now makes my blood sugar go haywire. Distributing my calories more evenly throughout the day keeps me from falling over. I need medium breakfasts and medium lunches and medium dinners now.

And so -- I resisted it for a while -- I have had to hang up my good old mantra "one egg is enough eggs for breakfast." Two-egg veggie and cheese omelet, please. (Technically I hung that up while I was pregnant and eating a lot of steak and eggs specials. But I really thought I would be dusting it off again after the birth. Not quite yet, I guess.)

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I put on about 40 pounds while pregnant, and about 25 remain. Here at the outset, I feel fairly confident I can deal with the problem; already I am practicing waiting till mealtime, and hitting that happy spot where I feel confortably satisfied after a meal, but still reliably feel good and hungry a little while before the next one.

Getting hungry several times a day seems to be the key. Not "eat when you're hungry," as if hunger is a serious problem that must be immediately corrected; nor "hungry all the time," which probably isn't good for me or the baby; but periodically hungry for a little while before each meal.

I find that going to bed just a little bit hungry is effective, too, but it is possible to overshoot; if I am lying awake at 2 a.m. listening to my stomach growl, I probably need some peanut butter toast, and that is okay.

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So, what are the habits I am concentrating on right now?

• Watching portion size and sticking to one helping
• Vegetables or at least fruit at each meal
• A scoop of ice cream for dessert after dinner (instead of second and third helpings)
• A beer or a cocktail right before bed (instead of an endless Bedtime Snack Binge)
• Weighing in every five days or so "officially," but also weighing in the evening to strengthen my resolve against the Bedtime Snack Binge
• Preferring fruit, cheese, and nuts over bread- or cracker-based afternoon snacks
• Asking Mark to select snacks for the children that don't leave behind a quarter of a package of leftovers

I am generally aiming for 450-calorie meals, plus a smaller afternoon snack and the aforementioned ice cream and cocktails, but I am not really counting the calories up just yet. That is something to save for if I hit a plateau later on.

Here's a handy resource with 400-calorie meal plans in it. I ignore the word "low-fat" wherever it appears, so my meals are typically more than 400 calories, but they won't be crazy off the charts. It's 400 Calorie Fix by Liz Vacciarello and Mindy Hermann. It contains a refresher on estimating portion sizes, numerous recipes, a two-week meal plan, and suggested side dishes. This is particularly useful for a household that, like mine right now, is relying on shortcuts like packaged meals and takeout, because it rather nonjudgmentally makes suggestions for how to eat 400 calories' worth of movie theater junk or vending machine snacks or fast food burgers, right alongside 400-calorie homemade meals like Couscous and Vegetable Salad (with a side of tuna and mayo) or Speedy Fish Tacos or Lentils with Zesty Tomatoes (with a side of pita bread).

Not that I am saying one ought to substitute vending machine snacks (e.g., Wheat Thins and a Snapple) for a meal, but at least this particular book is light on the Good Food/Evil Food dichotomy, which I appreciate right now. And it's good for practicing the habit of learning to have reasonable portions of things, and for accepting tradeoffs like, "if I want extra meat, I will get more calories unless I take less rice." Which I am rusty on after the ravages* of pregnancy.

*ravages (n. pl.): state of having to eat cheeseburgers or steak-and-eggs whenever one wants, because iron.

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The psyche rebelled at first, but I am already remembering what it's like to have self-control, and that peculiar satisfaction of being able to notice that I am kind of hungry, while also knowing that Disaster will not befall me if I wait till lunchtime. It is satisfying because I know I did not always have that ability, and I learned it, and I still have it now when I wish to call on it.

I get hungry. I think to myself what I know from experience: "This is my body telling me it's about to switch over to burning the stored calories. In a little while the sensation will go away, and then after a while it will be time to eat again." And this message works, I find, as long as the things that I eat are generally real food with a decent amount of protein, fat, and fiber.

So, for example, today for breakfast I had

• Fresh-baked berry muffin
• A half cup of plain yogurt with a sliced banana and a bit of toasted coconut
• Coffee coffee coffee

And for lunch I had

• Homemade Niçoise salad with half a can of oil-packed tuna, a boiled egg, a potato, green beans, olives, tomato, and lemon-mustard dressing
• Another one of those muffins

And for dinner I plan to have

• Fajitas with chicken (3 oz) and peppers and onions and a bit of guacamole on 1 whole wheat tortilla and lettuce
• Some good pilsner

Hopefully we'll start to see some results before long, but for the time being I am going to try to simply enjoy having some control and predictability to my sensations of hunger and satiety again, and relax and feed myself (as well as the baby!) well and intentionally.

And try not to think about how in October I need to get a new drivers license.

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Quotable Ace on scientific overconfidence.

Here's Ace of Spades writing about the latest study to show, in the face of the establishment, that low-carb dieters burn more calories:

When evidence and data are thin, Narrative and Theory rushes in to take their place. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so too does natural science. Science -- or, I should say, scientists -- human beings with human flaws which science isn't actually burdened with -- do not like saying "I don't know." Even when "I don't know" is actually the proper, most scientifically-valid answer.

"I know" is much more satisfying. The funny thing is that we only hear "the science is settled" in the precise cases where it's not settled. No one ever says "the science is settled" as to whether the earth revolves around the sun. It is settled, of course; so no one has to attempt the Appeal to Authority to establish it.

A growing consensus says they know, you know.

So, for 50 years now, the medical establishment and the government have been telling fat people to do the exact opposite thing they should be doing.

Ace is also drawing a comparison to the overconfidence of much of the man-made artificial global warming crowd; it doesn't much matter the specific policies, though, as his point stands whatever the appeal to authority. It is a common logical flaw (or a very shrewd tactic, as it works so well on the gullible who don't see their own weakness), and the point is well put.

Every once in a while, when I write against... oh, what shall I call it... "scientism," perhaps... that belief that scientists are people with special moral authority to set policy... I wonder if I look like I suffer from sour grapes.

I trained for, and used to aspire to working in, academic scientific research (well, engineering, but to most folks it looks pretty much the same). I don't anymore, mostly because of a series of choices our family made to secure our overall happiness. So you could say that membership in the Authoritative Class was within my grasp, and I let it slip away, and now I have sort of a grumpy habit of poking at Oz's curtain.

I like to think that the training I did have prepared me to recognize the argument from authority in many of its guises, but perhaps that thought is just the argument-from-authority in another form.

Maybe if I were a working scientist instead of a nonworking one, I would be just as vulnerable to belief in the superrational powers of my own authority (at least in my own field) as journalists often are to belief in the powers of people whose work they don't understand.

 

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.

Taubes responds to "The Fat Trap," among other things.

In response to the NYT Well Blog post "The Fat Trap," which I mentioned briefly here, Gary Taubes has posted several items.

Taubes' post is here.  It includes links to:

• a letter to the NYT signed by 250 health professionals and researchers
• a new blog by a colleague of his entitled "The War on Insulin";
• and an announcement of a new weight loss registry for those who attempted to lose weight via the paleo/low carb route.  

Check it out.

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.)

 

Habits to try for the new year.

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.

Perspectives on temptation.

I plan to spend my lunchtime recess reading the new Neal Stephenson novel instead of blogging, so instead I'll link to The Mom's great post from today.  I haven't written about gluttony for a while (and am probably due) but I'll leave you with this instead.  

She writes about the difficulty of food restriction to suppress heartburn:

My eldest daughter asked me yesterday, "The carbs and sugars hurt you, but you still eat them.  If they were bad for the baby would you give them up?"  Of course, I told her, I love the baby.  "But you don't love yourself?"  I simply sat dumbfounded by her question.  If I were my child I would do a better job of protecting me.

I try not to sin because I love God and because I love the people my sin would harm.  I don't want to hurt anyone, and so I pray and ask for help with my areas of weakness.  I work and pray on it daily.

I've never asked anyone in my family to help me deal with the physical side effects of pregnancy.  I choose to carry this burden alone.  Why shouldn't I ask them for help?  They could be the food conscience I have obviously not formed well in myself.  Because these kids can nag like nobody's business.  I just have never wanted to ask the whole family to change the way they eat for me.  I've seen that as somehow selfish, which is ridiculous.

The food on my table is something which is completely within my control.  I am the master of the pantry, and yet I still fail daily to avoid temptation and the suffering which results from it.  How much more difficult it is to maintain my fear of the fires of Hell.  The truth of it all is that I am a weak human being and am not so great at avoiding temptation.  I couldn't even avoid the bite of doughnut my 2 year old offered me this morning.  Temptation doesn't come in ugly packaging, it comes wrapped in sweetness, covered with sprinkles and delivered with a smile.  The trick, I think, is to know our weaknesses and avoid them at all costs (like not buying the doughnuts to begin with) and to fight our failings not with fear but with love.

Read the whole thing.

Is foodie-ism a form of gluttony?

It can be, for sure.  Check out the article by B. R. Myers in the newest issue of The Atlantic, and discuss.

I admit that my shift away from foodie-ism has largely been out of necessity, as family pressures give me less time to indulge cooking-as-a-hobby.  Or maybe it's really a transformation:  you can be a foodie who exults variety and exotic ingredients and expensiveness, or you can be a foodie who works on the perfect homey comfort food, the best of all possible meatloaf and mashed potatoes.   I am ever in search of that elusive dish that everyone in the family raves about, after all. 

But, on the other hand, although I can do it less and less these days, I look forward to the occasional trip to the new fancy restaurant that's getting all the rave reviews.  I have some discretionary income; why not spend some of our entertainment dollars on foodie entertainment?  If I'd rather have sushi than a movie, well, what's wrong with that?

I assert:  Obsessiveness with locavore-ism or with only eating "sustainably" or with consuming only organic food or with only eating interesting food even, that sort of thing is, indeed, a form of gluttony.  Eating local, or sustainably, or organic, are preferences, just like a taste for pizza or meat or a sweet tooth, and there's nothing wrong with seeking out one's taste preferences, but it can go too far: demanding that those preferences be fulfilled at all times, or spending way too much money on them, or (here's the rub for the foodie writers) encouraging other people to be dissatisfied and unhappy with what they have -- those are real faults.  Sins even.  And gluttony is what it falls under.  Remember, it's not just "eating too much."  

Where do we draw the line?  How do we draw the line?  

I have some thoughts about this, but I would like to get a few comments first.  So check out the article, and tell me if you agree or disagree with the author.

And another one from the "other people's weight loss" department.

From Tobias Buckell:  How I lost 30 pounds while eating a donut every day.  He sounds like the same sort of trial-and-error type person that I am.  Some excerpts:

The nitty gritty is, I’ve come to believe after eight years of reading weight-lifting books, nutrition books, and eight years of self-experimentation and logging the results in detail on excel spreadsheets, that you have to figure out how much your body can take in calories a day without gaining weight, and that becomes your upper limit. You also need a lower limit, your ‘base metabolic rate’ so that your body is getting the calories it knows it needs to move you around for the day. These are rough calculations, based on large populations, so logging helps one refine and test one’s own upper and lower bounds (which also change with body composition.)

Using a BMR calculator sets my lower bound (about 1,800 calories a day for me). If I eat less than that, there are chances my body will slow my metabolism down because it thinks its starving. That’s also good because it stops me from falling into the trap that might lead to a failed diet: trying to simply starve yourself of calories. That leads to people who look ‘skinny fat’ and to bouncing diets. But those are the calories my body would like to have.

The same calculator lets me ballpark how many calories it will take before I start to gain weight, right now that’s ~2,500 calories a day.

So that’s my window: more than 1800 calories a day, less than 2500....

What’s missing here? Kinds of foods. After all the reading, everyone insists that eating a certain kind of food will cause weight loss. Vegetarians on one side. Atkins dieters on the other. I followed some of these carefully, but after reading about BMR, I quickly came to believe that the reason high protein diets helped slim me down weren’t magical science-y sounding justifications, but just simply that 300 calories of a steak fills you up and takes longer for your body to process than 300 calories of chips that leave you hungry again in half an hour. And stripping that bread off the burger gets rid of calories, often by a half. Tracking my calories in 2005 correlated this fairly effectively, I was eating 30% fewer calories by going high protein, and I was losing weight as a result....

I know that I can eat four apples for the price of one donut, and that I’m full to bursting after just two full apples.

But I also no longer deny myself *any* kind of food I like. I said I have achieved this weight loss and had a donut every day. I’m not half kidding. Every week day, at the coffee shop, I have a donut (creme-filled, 360 calories). If it doesn’t put me over the daily limit, I’ll have it. Three days ago I had one of my favorite high-calorie foods, a Li’l Debbie Nutty Bar (500 calories). There was no guilt. I really enjoy and love the good foods now, because I know exactly how much they cost me in calories and know that they’re not hurting me. However, I do steer clear of ‘high cost’ foods that would bloat the calorie budget for no reason.

Thought that might interest.