So I've been reading about this for awhile, self-control takes a mental resource we have in limited supply. So stop beating yourself up when you run out, and I have some tips for when it is in short supply.
Avoidance instead of self-control
If you are constantly in situations where you have to exercise self-control, then you're going to run out of self-control eventually. So modify your environment and habits so you don't even have to exercise it. Get the garbage out of your house, or at least out of your sight. You might need to enlist the cooperation of those you live with, but I assure you this makes everything much easier.
Substituting
Perhaps one can substitute one bad thing for something either not-so-bad or not-at-all bad. This is my reasoning behind using non-caloric sweeteners (rarely). I'd be much better for me to have a tasty, sweet treat that avoids sugar or high fructose corn syrup that would send my blood sugar to the moon or damage my liver. As my years eating low carb have progressed, I have come to rely on these sweet treats less and less, but they were very useful for me to make the transition to a low carb lifestyle, versus a temporary low carb diet.
Other things, those that fall under the, "Better than the alternative" could be something like very dark chocolate. It has a little caloric sweetener in it, but overall it's quite low if you get the 70-85% cocoa solids. And it is usually extremely satisfying for those who love dark chocolate. The bitterness takes a bit of getting used to, but most of us end up liking it. In fact, I had a commercial chocolate bar awhile back and it tasted very weird to me. I could barely taste anything chocolate in it, sure it smelled like chocolate but it was way too sweet, cloyingly sweet! I wondered why I ever liked it.
There have been other things that seem to soothe the craving beast. Bacon, chicken wings, a bowl of hot chili. A "burrito bowl" at Chipotle (without rice, maybe keep the beans, depends) with a big dollop of guacamole.
Maybe "treats" restore some of the will-power reserve. But I also think they can be misused. You can set up brain circuitry to start expecting treats on a regular basis. So don't abuse them!
References
Freakonomics blog
Making choices impairs subsequent self-control
Association for Psychological Science (2009, April 7). You Wear Me Out: Thinking Of Others Causes Lapses In Our Self-control. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 23, 2010, from You Wear Me Out
Showing posts with label binge eating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label binge eating. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Monday, December 28, 2009
More about binge eating
Just ran across this article today: Why some continue to eat when full. It basically describes how ghrelin, a hormone connected to eating and appetite, works to keep us eating.
Scientists previously have linked increased levels of ghrelin to intensifying the rewarding or pleasurable feelings one gets from cocaine or alcohol. Dr. Zigman said his team speculated that ghrelin might also increase specific rewarding aspects of eating.
Are we helpless in the face of all this biology working against us? No, we should be able to outwit Mr. Lizard Brain, as I discussed in that posting.
Dr. Mario Perello, postdoctoral researcher in internal medicine and lead author of the current study, said the idea was to determine "why someone who is stuffed from lunch still eats -- and wants to eat -- that high-calorie dessert."
Any over-eater worth their salt already knew about the "dessert box". That's the portion of your stomach that never gets full when presented with delicious things you want to eat. Dinner food is great and all, but I can get full on meat and veggies and not want to eat more. However, the "dessert box" is always empty (or almost always).
Scientists previously have linked increased levels of ghrelin to intensifying the rewarding or pleasurable feelings one gets from cocaine or alcohol. Dr. Zigman said his team speculated that ghrelin might also increase specific rewarding aspects of eating.
Are we helpless in the face of all this biology working against us? No, we should be able to outwit Mr. Lizard Brain, as I discussed in that posting.
Dr. Mario Perello, postdoctoral researcher in internal medicine and lead author of the current study, said the idea was to determine "why someone who is stuffed from lunch still eats -- and wants to eat -- that high-calorie dessert."
Any over-eater worth their salt already knew about the "dessert box". That's the portion of your stomach that never gets full when presented with delicious things you want to eat. Dinner food is great and all, but I can get full on meat and veggies and not want to eat more. However, the "dessert box" is always empty (or almost always).
Sunday, November 1, 2009
More Tips for Changing Eating Habits -- Part I
Once upon a time...
I decided to go on a diet. I had dieted before and lost even almost 70 pounds once, but always the weight came back. Why? Because I hadn't made any permanent change to my eating habits. So finally this last time, which I started about 7 years ago, I finally realized I had to make changes permanent. Along the way I've discovered how to make these changes permanent and I encountered a lot of obstacles, within myself but also in our society, that I had to learn to deal with.
Anyway, the diet worked as they usually do and I lost 40 pounds. I've kept it off. I'm not at my goal and perhaps I will always have that extra 15-20 pounds but I'm in a much healthier place.
The Biggest Obstacle: Me
For reasons I detailed in Outwitting the Lizard there are all kinds of things going on in the brain that I had to figure out. I had to figure out the seeming unexplicable motivation behind why I was failing to stick to my diet that had to do with addiction and cravings and rewiring my brain. But along the way there were some simple things that really made it doable for me.
Diet or Way of Eating?
First off is you need to change from "I'm on a diet" to "This is how I eat". That's a really tough transition to make because dieting is, as we all know, a temporary state of deprivation. If you can just tough it out long enough you'll be slim and live happily ever after... or so we all think. Actually you'll be slim (maybe) for a few weeks, a few months but eventually you will almost certainly regain everything you lost and perhaps find a few extra. Why is that?
Well, there are probably a host of psyiological reasons including things like your sensitivity to leptin is all screwed up so your energy requirements are much less (I've heard 25% less), however your brain is still wired to want the old energy levels. Bleh, not much we can do about that at this point. However there are lots of things under your control.
What you did to lose the weight you must continue to do afterward. Well that sort of makes sense right? Yet most people fail to do this. Why? I think they haven't really come to terms with two things: Sustainability and Permanent Eating Changes.
Sustainability
Have you ever watched the Biggest Loser? Those folks are exercising hours and hours a day and eating next to nothing to win a contents. People admire them for their perseverence but is this real? No, they're in a protected environment where their only job is to lose weight. For most people, we have jobs and families and we can't dedicate hours a day to exercise and we need to nourish ourselves properly. So what I am suggesting is that any measures you take to lose weight will have to be sustained for the rest of your life.
This is why I think relying on exercise is not terribly practical. Changes to your schedule or an injury that takes a long time to heal can completely derail you. Your brain adjusts to a certain amount of energy input (food) and when the energy output suddenly changes, I can guarantee you your energy input is unlikely to change to compensate.
My own experience was with martial arts. I decided to get involved in that. I had 2-3 nights a week of multi-hour long sessions and I became extremely fit. I could eat almost anything and not gain weight. Eventually my arthritis got pretty bad and I had to stop, my knees just weren't going to let me continue. So my energy output decreased dramatically but I still had the brain wiring that made me want to eat more. Result: Weight gain!
I've seen this pattern repeat with lots of friends. They all believe what they've been told over the years that you must exercise like a maniac to lose weight. So they do and it works to some extent, but it's just not sustainable. And if you don't sustain it, you won't maintain it.
Science is starting to catch up to the media perpetuated myths now and more and more articles are being published that exercise is only modestly, if at all, helpful for weight loss. It is great for your health though, so don't look at this as tacit permission to not exercise. You should, but get a regimine that isn't going to injure you and that you can stick with. Something you enjoy doing.
Sustainable also applies to the diet itself. Some people go on those medically supervised protein fasts and lose a lot of weight. But they've learned nothing about how to sustain that weight loss. Again, it's a temporary measure and I guarantee that for most of these folks, the results will be temporary too. You have to change your eating habits permanently.
I decided to go on a diet. I had dieted before and lost even almost 70 pounds once, but always the weight came back. Why? Because I hadn't made any permanent change to my eating habits. So finally this last time, which I started about 7 years ago, I finally realized I had to make changes permanent. Along the way I've discovered how to make these changes permanent and I encountered a lot of obstacles, within myself but also in our society, that I had to learn to deal with.
Anyway, the diet worked as they usually do and I lost 40 pounds. I've kept it off. I'm not at my goal and perhaps I will always have that extra 15-20 pounds but I'm in a much healthier place.
The Biggest Obstacle: Me
For reasons I detailed in Outwitting the Lizard there are all kinds of things going on in the brain that I had to figure out. I had to figure out the seeming unexplicable motivation behind why I was failing to stick to my diet that had to do with addiction and cravings and rewiring my brain. But along the way there were some simple things that really made it doable for me.
Diet or Way of Eating?
First off is you need to change from "I'm on a diet" to "This is how I eat". That's a really tough transition to make because dieting is, as we all know, a temporary state of deprivation. If you can just tough it out long enough you'll be slim and live happily ever after... or so we all think. Actually you'll be slim (maybe) for a few weeks, a few months but eventually you will almost certainly regain everything you lost and perhaps find a few extra. Why is that?
Well, there are probably a host of psyiological reasons including things like your sensitivity to leptin is all screwed up so your energy requirements are much less (I've heard 25% less), however your brain is still wired to want the old energy levels. Bleh, not much we can do about that at this point. However there are lots of things under your control.
What you did to lose the weight you must continue to do afterward. Well that sort of makes sense right? Yet most people fail to do this. Why? I think they haven't really come to terms with two things: Sustainability and Permanent Eating Changes.
Sustainability
Have you ever watched the Biggest Loser? Those folks are exercising hours and hours a day and eating next to nothing to win a contents. People admire them for their perseverence but is this real? No, they're in a protected environment where their only job is to lose weight. For most people, we have jobs and families and we can't dedicate hours a day to exercise and we need to nourish ourselves properly. So what I am suggesting is that any measures you take to lose weight will have to be sustained for the rest of your life.
This is why I think relying on exercise is not terribly practical. Changes to your schedule or an injury that takes a long time to heal can completely derail you. Your brain adjusts to a certain amount of energy input (food) and when the energy output suddenly changes, I can guarantee you your energy input is unlikely to change to compensate.
My own experience was with martial arts. I decided to get involved in that. I had 2-3 nights a week of multi-hour long sessions and I became extremely fit. I could eat almost anything and not gain weight. Eventually my arthritis got pretty bad and I had to stop, my knees just weren't going to let me continue. So my energy output decreased dramatically but I still had the brain wiring that made me want to eat more. Result: Weight gain!
I've seen this pattern repeat with lots of friends. They all believe what they've been told over the years that you must exercise like a maniac to lose weight. So they do and it works to some extent, but it's just not sustainable. And if you don't sustain it, you won't maintain it.
Science is starting to catch up to the media perpetuated myths now and more and more articles are being published that exercise is only modestly, if at all, helpful for weight loss. It is great for your health though, so don't look at this as tacit permission to not exercise. You should, but get a regimine that isn't going to injure you and that you can stick with. Something you enjoy doing.
Sustainable also applies to the diet itself. Some people go on those medically supervised protein fasts and lose a lot of weight. But they've learned nothing about how to sustain that weight loss. Again, it's a temporary measure and I guarantee that for most of these folks, the results will be temporary too. You have to change your eating habits permanently.
More tools for Outwitting the Lizard
I just thought of another book that taught me a lot about how the mind works. The name is rather deceptive, Stumbling on Happiness, as it didn't seem to really tell you how to stumble onto happiness however it sure explained a lot about how our brains work and it gave me a lot of insight into my own behavior and ideas on how to change things.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Outwitting the Lizard
Update: When I initially wrote this it was about binge eating, but I think there are a lot of good tips one could apply to those times when you don't binge, but you eat a food you know you shouldn't eat.
I wrote something recently on a message forum that people seemed to respond to. Over the last several years I've read a bit about what I call "neural psychology", or the way the brain wires itself and how it makes us behave the way we do.
The books that provided, for me, a lot of insight into this was Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell and another good one was The End of Overeating, by David Kessler. Also I've seen a spate of articles on Science Daily and New Scientist about whether or not we actually have free will. Both books talk about how the brain works and how we struggle to understand or even verbalize why we do what we do and why we seem to have so little control over certain behaviors. Anyone who has been a food binger has probably learned one thing, it's almost impossible to stop a binge once you start one.
Why do we binge?
I think a lot of people waste a lot of time trying to find the reason behind this behavior. They attribute it to emotions, or a bad childhood, or something else. They flog themselves with guilt and shame over it and in the end that's very counterproductive. Feeling out of control makes you stop thinking rationally and you do all kinds of stuff, including more of the bad behavior you're trying to fix.
Lizard In Your Brain
The reason for your problem now is because at some point you rewired your brain such that binging sets off some kind of reward. Oh yes, you feel lousy AFTER you binge, but during your binge all kinds of great things are happening, lovely chemicals your brain absolutely craves are being created and released, in much the same way that anyone who is an addict can tell you about. Whether they're an addict on heroin or addicted to gambling, the results are the same. The brain has strong neural circuitry that causes you to want to indulge in the behavior. I won't get into the science, you can pick that up from the books I mentioned, or other science sources.
This brain rewiring probably begins to happen the first time we eat too much of something yummy. We feel great and want to have another ice cream cone. In days gone by, having a keen interest in opportunistic eating like that would be a great survival trait. If you lost interest in high calorie, high sugar food before it was consumed, you wouldn't have the fat stores to reproduce. But we were built for living as we lived 1,000's of years ago, not in the current age where extremely tasty food is super cheap and always available with very, very little effort.
By the way, if you're not wired to binge, as David Kessler's book points out, you will never in a million years understand a binge eater. It is like trying to explain a color to someone who can't see. Your brain just isn't wired that way. Consider yourself lucky.
So these neural circuits get established and we strengthen them every time we binge. These things are very primitive and in my opinion, don't really have much to do with our higher reasoning. So when we're being pushed around by the lizard-like parts of our brain we're completely at a loss when we try to describe using our higher reasoning why we did what we did. So are we helpless? Absolutely not! Our only blame in all this is if we can't use our higher reasoning powers to out-wit the stupid lizard-like portions of our mind that operate purely on impulse. But repeating to yourself "I will not binge" is probably not going to be helpful, or punishing yourself, etc. Stupid neural circuits are going to fire, you just have to engage other circuits to weaken them... and most importantly you need to break the constant reinforcement.
I have lots of things that trigger my "inner lizard". Going into 7/11 or other convenience stores and working in an office with a vending machine are my two biggest ones. While my Mom's health was failing it seemed like I could do almost nothing to resist the lure of Cheetos, or Doritos. But I did finally figure out a few things and got control of the binges. Here's my arsenal of tips:
Time: Every time you binge you reinforce the behavior and the trigger. For me, just walking past a vending machine can trigger an urge. The more I do the behavior (and the more recently) the harder it is to avoid triggering again. Some people think they'll cut down, or somehow control the behavior by indulging in it just a little. They're kidding themselves. The longer you don't binge, the easier it gets to continue to not binge.
Remove triggers: Take the stuff you binge on out of your environment as much as possible. Try to convince the people you live with to respect your need for a trigger free environment. If you can't, you'll have to figure out a way to store those triggers so you don't see them all the time (if at all). This was easy for me because I live alone. But frankly, even if I didn't live alone, I'd probably be pretty insistent that my family remove these things from the house.
Avoid external triggers: If walking past Cinnabun or a 7/11 is a strong trigger, you might need to pick a different walking route, or not step inside a 7/11, until you've had enough time pass for your triggers to lessen, and have gotten some techniques for dealing with what happens when you're around your triggers.
Deflection: I find it very useful to have something else when I trigger on something. For instance, I walk into a 7/11 and badly want some chips, I can usually a cup of coffee with cream, which I don't ordinarily drink the cream so that's a pretty nice treat for me. Or a fresh piece of gum. When eating at a friend's house I will offer to bring the dessert and make sure it is something sugar-free (like a low carb cheesecake with a nut crust) and as paleo as possible. Everyone always loves these desserts by the way.
When I eat X I crave Y: So don't eat X. This is really simple yet I run into people that would rather lose an arm than stop eating something. Come on people, use your higher reasoning skills, stop being lizards!
Avoid triggers when your defenses are low: Stress can make our higher reasoning shut off and let Mr. Lizard make all the decisions. So if you are very stressed, even just hungry, avoid the people, places and things that are likely to trigger you.
Understand the consequences of failure: Understand that failing right now is going to make it more likely that you fail in the future. From personal experience I can tell you it's a lot more difficult to stop a pattern of binging than it is to resist this one triggering moment. When you fail you're just reinforcing the neural circuitry that causes you to trigger.
Understand the health consequences of failure: Learn about how eating this crappy food could cause you to end up with Type 2 diabetes, cause premature aging (look up Advanced Glycation End Products or AGEs), read the book "Good Calories, Bad Calories", or read it again. Think about the consequences 10 or 20 years from now. How do you want to be living then? As an invalid? Buy a glucose meter and see how eating crap affects your blood glucose. Did you know that at levels over 140 damage is happening all over your body? Damage that can lead to kidney failure, blindness, nerve damage, even limb amputation.
Hormones: Eating sugary, starchy crap food is going to push your blood glucose and insulin around and make you hungry and further increase your cravings. Don't get that cycle started!
Me and Chips
So, few years back I started bingeing on cheetos and doritos. I'd buy one bag from the vending machine and I couldn't stop until I consumed at least 1 or two more bags. It was terrible. The vending machine was like a ghost haunting me nibbling away at the corners of my consciousness, forever intruding on my thoughts. Finally I went cold turkey and after about 6 days of total abstinence the haunting stopped and 6 days turned into a much longer period.
I never had any major relapses but I did have minor ones. Every time I had a minor relapse I could feel the urges strenghtening and the chips would come nibble away at my consciousness. "Hello Nancy! We're so delicious... you know you want us." Even now if I'm at a party I know I cannot eat one chip. If one goes in the mouth, the entire bowl goes in. So don't even put the first one in makes it much easier.
When I'm about to set foot in a triggering environment I walk myself through it a little. "Ok, I'm going to have strong impulses when I walk in this store, but I'm going to focus on the diet soda section and leave." Or I treat myself to that coffee with cream. Or if the impulses are really bad, I walk myself through it like this:
"If I eat these I'm going to want them even more than I do now when tomorrow rolls around. I'm going to mess up my blood sugar for days. Who knows how much damage is happening to me due to my blood sugar skyrocketing above 140? I'm 50 years old, I don't need more AGEs to wrinkle my skin, hurt my heart and make me old!"
Aversion Training
When I found out gluten was causing me problems I knew I was going to have problems not craving wheat products like bread, cookies, bagels and so on. So I consciously set out to train myself to find those foods repulsive. Every time I smelled or saw those yummy wheat-y, gluten-y things I said to myself "poison". It was pretty low key and subtle but the message sunk in. People can eat that stuff around me and all that happens is I feel sorry that they're eating poison. I don't feel envious or feel like I'm missing anything, except perhaps a bad bellyache and days of diarrhea.
Can you ever eat your triggers in moderation?
I think it takes a long, long time to destroy a deeply etched neural circuit. I'm not sure one can ever unlearn the binge behavior. Even though it has been years since I've binged on chips I still feel those tuggings. I don't believe I can eat just a few and stop if there's more in front of me. I think this might need to be for life.
As a binge eater, this might sound depressing, but I think that's a bit of our wiring that causes that reaction. You're going to find other foods to replace these binge triggers that you will enjoy to satiety that don't cause you to binge. In fact, you should make that your goal, it will help alleviate whatever sadness and mourning you have over eliminating those triggers.
Good luck!
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