I just read a CDC report on obesity. It poses the question "Why [do] people continue to consume more calories than they need when the consequences are so apparent, stigmatizing, and widely understood to be unhealthy?”
If you look at what we've done as a nation up to now (education about nutrition, better labeling on food products), there's a clear assumption at work: eating is a conscious choice people make. If that's true, then educating Americans should allow them to make better choices for themselves. In the light of day, it doesn't sound all that plausible, and indeed it doesn't seem to be working.
This report suggests that eating (as Americans practice it, anyway) isn't mainly something we deliberately choose to do. It suggests instead that it's an "automatic behavior"; a behavior that's more controlled by environmental factors than individual choices. The report cites various studies which show that we will eat more whenever food is more visible, more available, or given in larger portions. Not only that, but those who eat more due to these environmental factors are unaware they've eaten more or of the cause. In short, we're usually not in control when we eat, even if we think we are.
We're used to thinking of ourselves as controlling what we do; of thinking, deciding, and choosing. In other words, we think of ourselves in exactly the way the CDC report suggests we aren't insofar as our eating is concerned. What if it's more than just eating? My understanding is that research for a wide variety of our everyday behavior are coming to the same conclusions. I think this research also accords with experience. Most of what I do most of the time is "automatic"--I respond without deliberate thought.
Obviously, with enough effort we can overturn any particular automatic behavior; we can refuse dessert. But it does take an effort, and that effort is hard to sustain (the term of art for this in psych. studies is "ego depletion"). This is no surprise to dieters. Fighting constant environmental temptations is difficult, and often a loosing battle.
Dieters also have a familiar alternative strategy: don't tempt yourself. If you know you're tempted by unhealthy foods, make sure you don't have any in the house; or, better yet, make sure there's a healthy alternative readily available so you won't feel a craving and drive to get some.
This seems obvious, but the way of thinking about yourself that makes it work seems to be restricted to a few types of behavior (like eating). A college friend of mine was living alone, and in a long-distance relationship. He took care to put lots of pictures of his girlfriend in his room, and told me at the time that they would make it virtually impossible for him to "make a mistake" that he, presumably, was worried was possible without them (they're now married). I don't know if he ever explained his reasoning to his girlfriend, but I can image the scene turning out badly. Why? Because, if he really loved her (she might say to herself), he wouldn't be tempted, or he would be strong enough to resist.
What seems obvious when dieting may seem very counter-intuitive in other situations, but the same point applies. Her imagined response would be like saying to the dieter that if he really wanted to be thin, he wouldn't be tempted, or he would be strong enough to resist. Clearly someone's weakness for chocolate doesn't show they don't want to be thin; and my friend's weakness for women doesn't show that he doesn't want to be faithful. All it shows in both cases is that they're weak. We all have our weaknesses, and, if we're honest with ourselves, I think we all have levels of temptation that we can't say with certainty we could resist.
The lesson I take from this is that people think of themselves as behaving automatically sometimes (like when they're snacking), but think of themselves as in control most of the time. We need to switch those. We behave automatically *most* of the time, and can only sometimes be in control.
Most of us have a daily routine that is, with some minor variations, consistent. One metaphor I use is to imagine the daily routine of my life as going down the same stretch of rapids, day after day. From the moment my day starts, the currents of the river determines the course my day will take, and I can only have small, local influences over it.
Imagine that one day, I become unhappy with my course, and every day try paddling with all my might to reach a different, parallel, current. Maybe some days I make it, but the effort is always exhausting, and I feel disappointed and generally terrible on the days I don't.
This is what dieting is like for some people. Their daily effort is spent in resisting the draw of what's around them every day. Some days they make it, some days they don't; but it's hard, inconsistent, and seemingly endless.
Now imagine that, one day, right before I head in the direction I try daily to avoid, I notice a rock that's dividing the current at that point. The next day I kick it, and it budges. The day after that, I bring a rock of my own to drop beside the first. On the third day, I notice that the rock I brought has shifted the currents, and now it's easy for me to divert my course.
After I discovered where to apply my effort, it seemed foolish to struggle with the prevailing current every day. All I needed to do was to direct my effort to change my environment so I didn't have to struggle. The more we can think about our lives this way, I believe, the better we will be able to effect change.
The other metaphor I like is thinking of myself as a broken robot. Most of the time I'm not me; I'm a robot that's more or less competent, but can definitely go astray. At the end of each day, I need to review the robots logs (where it records everything that happened to it), and find the places where it didn't behave as I would have wanted. I can't really fix my robot, but I can tell it to do specific things; so I have it add and remove things from its daily surroundings, and I tell it to change the order it does things, or the lengths of time it does things, until it's behaving more the way I want.
The trick, either way, is to stop struggling so hard with something that's not working, and start watching yourself. Try to figure out exactly when you start to go wrong, and how you might avoid it. It may not work the first time, but if it doesn't, you don't need to feel bad because you were too weak to resist temptation again. You just know that you need to adjust your environment even more.
I'd like to end with a few examples that Jen and I have noticed from our lives:
* When we have a tv, we both can't stop watching it. Our solution was to get rid of it entirely. Had that seemed to extreme, I might have considered looking into a way to lock ourselves out of watching after a fixed time-limit.
* I have a hard time starting something that seems too big, or that I don't want to do. Recently I've begun to "trick myself". I'll set a 10-minute timer and tell myself that I'll only work for 10 minutes. I don't need to get to any particular benchmark in the work; only to work, however fast or slow, for 10 minutes. Usually this is enough to "divert the current" of my attention and comfort to keep me working effectively far past the 10 minutes.
* Jen noticed that sometimes when she's programming, she'll just start to surf the internet, and has a hard time stopping. We thought of having a hard rule never to have a browser open, but she realized she often needs to look things up, so that was out. Then she noticed that this tended to happen when she wasn't sure what to do next. Now she's able to recognize when she's getting to a sticking point, and call me over so we can discuss it. Then we can identify next steps together, and she's back on track.
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