Unsafe at Any Size

There was a great panel discussion on KQED’s Talk of the Nation that is definitely worth a listen.  Two of the panelists discussed research in rats that indicate that sugar is addictive, in a similar manner though milder than alcohol and other addictions.  The third panelist discussed Buddhism and conquering food addiction, which I found less compelling.

The upshot was that our foods contain more sugar than ever, and it’s harder to get sugar out of our environment.  Eating sugar does help us feel better for a short amount of time, but ultimately an addictive cycle sets in that requires us to eat more sugar to get the same effect.  And sugar substitutes might produce the same effects.

It’s taken me a loooong time to pull out of my sugar addiction; really, I can’t say that I have totally.  But it’s a far cry from what it used to be.  I used to make homemade fudge (and it was damn good!).

Making my own food has definitely helped; I’m not getting a dose of corn syrup at every meal.  But I still want some sugar after lunch, and I usually have a Skinny Cow bar after dinner.  Not much, but I wonder if I’m keeping the addiction alive.

How do you deal with sugar?

We have such great intentions.  Eat well!  Exercise!

But somehow, those good intentions sometimes fly out the window.  Eat well!  But that brownie looks so good.  Exercise!  But it’s more fun to watch TV.

Why do we trip up?  Why can’t we follow through?  Are we just weak people who can’t make up our mind?

Actually, we’re many different people, according to an article, “First Person Plural” by Paul Bloom in the November 2008 Atlantic (yes, you read that right, I’m a little behind).

According to Bloom, the reason why it often feels like we are at war with ourselves is because we are.  Instead of a unified “I” who makes decisions and then acts on them, we have a multiplicity of selves who are constantly jostling.  One self may say, “no more brownies!”, but another self may say, “ooo, but brownies are many kinds of awesomeness, and there is one right here.”

Drawing on the research of the psychiatrist George Ainslie, we can make sense of the interaction of these selves by plotting their relative strengths over time, starting with one (the cake eater) being weaker than the other (the dieter). For most of the day, the dieter hums along at his regular power (a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10, say), motivated by the long-term goal of weight loss, and is stronger than the cake eater (a 2). Your consciousness tracks whichever self is winning, so you are deciding not to eat the cake. But as you get closer and closer to the cake, the power of the cake eater rises (3 … 4 …), the lines cross, the cake eater takes over (6), and that becomes the conscious you; at this point, you decide to eat the cake. It’s as if a baton is passed from one self to another.

Furthermore, these selves may try to self-bind, meaning they try to prevent other selves from getting ahead by setting things up against them.  For example, a healthy eating self might try to prevent the compulsive eater self from getting the upper hand by throwing away the brownies, or not walking by the bakery with brownies.  If the healthy eating self is really sharp, it would probably refrain from writing or reading about brownies.

So if each of us is actually a multiplicity of selves, some thinking long-term and some thinking just as far as the brownie in front of us, how do we win?  The answer is to do as much self-binding as we can.  Make it hard for that brownie eater to get what it wants, and use productive self-talk to keep that long-term thinking self on top.

Does this kind of research help you stay focused?

Did you know that exercise is not only good for your body, but for your brain, too?  In Tara Parker-Pope’s Well blog, she outlines the research on both animals and people that shows that aerobic exercise improves cognitive function.

It makes intuitive sense: the brain is an organ, and increased blood flow to it will help it work.  But how many of us “knowledge workers” spend our days on our tushies, getting the bulk of our exercise walking from the parking garage to the office elevator.

Kids intuitively know that they need to move their bodies, and get squirmy when asked to sit for too long.  My kids (twins in 1st grade) get THREE recesses in school.

As we get older, we lose sight of our real physical need to move our bodies, thinking of it as a nice-to-have or something we do when we have time (which is never) as we sit and sit and sit in front of our computers (yes, I’m talking to you!).

Yes, my job is important, and I’ll do it even better if I take a few 10 minute walking breaks.  My exercise classes aren’t only an investment in my appearance (which frankly I gave up on so long ago it’s hard to consider it again) but in my ability to be smart and work smart.

So how about you?  Have you taken a recess today?

Great interview in Salon with Dr. David Kessler, author of The End of Overeating.  In this interview, he discusses how people who have problems overeating have problems with hyperpalatable foods–foods designed to be like “adult babyfood” as he calls it–because of their heightened reactions to environmental cues.  Ambivalence about the food creates a preoccupation, heightening the reaction to the food once it’s eaten and setting the stage for the cycle to repeat itself.

He advocates rules to help dampen the ambivalence we feel around these foods.  I’ve tried that with success, setting rules for myself about what I eat; for example, I have a rule that I won’t eat the junk people bring in to work, and I work on reenvisioning it not as yummy, but as revolting.

He also discusses how it’s harder to resist these foods when we’re tired or stressed, and how we need to plan for these times.

When we’re stressed, when we’re cued, the reward value of food increases. In some instances, we’re eating just to calm ourselves down. It’s very real.

What people need to do is to recognize what’s driving their behavior. It’s not that they can be perfect and never engage in that behavior, but if they know what’s driving that behavior, then they can at least take steps to plan for it and make it less harmful.

It’s this last part I need to work on.  Anyone else read this book/interview and find it helpful?

During the recent swine flu pandemic scare, many observers noted we would be doing a lot more toward improving public health if instead of wigging out on the swine flu we spent the same energy addressing the obesity epidemic.  I found the comparison between the two epidemics thought provoking.  The problem with the obesity epidemic is that we know more people are getting fatter than ever, but do we really treat it like it is a public health issue?

If someone ends up with swine flu, do we blame her for not washing her hands enough?  Or for going to flu-infested areas?  No; we usually don’t blame people for diseases (unless it’s lung cancer, and even then we don’t say it out loud).  But the Obesity Epidemic is different.  Why?  Because you don’t catch obesity from sneezing (at least we don’t think so, but there might be an obesity virus).  It might be caused by hanging around the wrong people (because people need more reasons to ostracize the obese).

But we definitely know one reason why people become obese:  they eat more than their body uses.  Follow any article or comment thread, and sooner or later there’s some jerk who brings up that obvious fact, with the implication (if not outright statement) that obesity is a personal failure, and the cause of the disease is a lack of willpower, laziness, gluttony, fill-in-your-favorite vice.

So if obesity is caused by individuals lacking willpower, how can it be an epidemic?  We can either believe that we are going to nutritional hell in a handbasket because people are weaker and more ignorant today than they were twenty years ago, or we have to believe that there really is something more to obesity that makes it a little less a matter of individual willpower and a little more about how our society has changed.

We’ve been tinkering around the edges of this kind of thinking when we try things like banning soft drinks in school or limiting fast food restaurants, but this kind of action strikes many (including me) as faintly ludicrous.  Don’t want it?  Don’t drink it!  Don’t prevent other people from getting those drinks just because you’re fat.

My thinking on the wisdom of limiting access has changed by reading The End of Overeating.  Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David A. Kessler, MD.  A former commissioner of the FDA, he was also the dean of the medical schools at Yale and the University of California, San Francisco.  Despite all of this expertise, he too has had problems controlling his weight, so it’s clear it’s not being stupid or misinformed that is causing his problem.

His approach is to look at the marketing forces that figuratively pushes food on people (and I mean “pushing” in the drug-using sense).  Food is deliberately made irresistible and habit-forming, a trap for those who are prone to it.  Although there are larger forces that are making sensible eating difficult, he promotes the solution to the conditioned hypereating pushed by these companies to not be banning such foods, but to take steps to make eating a conscious activity.

Naturally, there’s a lot more to it than that…  If you don’t want to wait for my future posts on it I’d recommend getting and devouring (figuratively) this book.