Why I Insist on Complexity

It likely would surprise no one who has been reading my blog to know that I studied psychology. While it may be logical (and certainly would be understandable) to believe that this was a choice made by a fat girl raised by very messed up parents (alcoholic father, mood disordered-mother) to explore why she was such a mess as well, that actually was not the case. When I entered college, I didn't know for certain what I wanted to study. In fact, psychology wasn't even on the list at first.

Initially, I was torn between choosing math, biology, chemistry, or art as a major. Because I wasn't certain which path to pursue, I spent my first year and a half at college taking a variety of courses to see what felt right. Oddly enough, I wasn't a fan of psychology until I took my second course and read a few books on my own. In the end, it was not my desire to fix anyone, particularly not myself, that made me choose that major. It was the multitude of theories that abounded to explain the complex puzzle of human behavior. Though I was interested in hard sciences and was not the least bit intimidated by them (as many women supposedly are), I liked the fact that psychology was part science and part philosophy and that the answers were more elusive.

Unlike hard sciences, psychology is not dependent upon the accuracy and technology of the instruments being used in its practices to find answers. For example, in biological experiments, our understanding is only as good as the accuracy of our instruments when measuring cell activity. Expansion of knowledge is more dependent upon better instrumentality rather than on theory, observation, or intuition. Psychology relies much more on individuals, and the debate and depth of understanding required to really understand human behavior is more challenging.

Ironically, though I was drawn to psychology based on the potential for ambiguity and inability to measure precisely, I found myself more attracted to the theories that were most easily proven. I embraced Behaviorism, which is a philosophy that is based on the idea that behaviors are learned or conditioned. It's a tidy philosophy which is easy to create experiments for and to measure. We'd do things like put rats in Skinner boxes and teach them to press a bar for a food pellet and generalized that humans in the same way would act for rewards or not act because of punishment.

My "hard science" approach to psychology in school further included intense study of the biology of behavior and the chemistry of the brain in particular. The way we studied it, it all seemed so cut and dry. We read that schizophrenia was caused by increased levels of Dopamine in the brain, so something which inhibited the uptake of that particular neurotransmitter was the "cure". While I was in college, the entire process seemed so tidy and neat. Behaviors were conditioned (learned) in or out of existence. Chemical imbalances were corrected with medication.

After graduating from college, I got a job in a mental health-related non-profit agency. I worked with people who were seriously mentally ill. In fact, I dealt with people who had had psychotic breaks and had been placed in a psychiatric ward or a mental institution, but had gotten well enough to leave those facilities. My entire worldview based on my studies in college radically altered. All of that tidy explaining and curing meant nothing in the real world. People are so much more complex than Behaviorism with its rats and controlled learning situations could explain. Human brains are so much more delicate than the books made us believe. You couldn't just pour medication into people and balance their brains like some lab experiment. Every chemical interaction caused some sort of negative reaction. People couldn't be tuned like machines. Even when the right chemical cocktail was applied to a psychotic mind and worked for some time, something would change and that very same cocktail would cease to keep their hallucinations at bay eventually.

Learning also is not as tidy as many behavioral theories would lead you to believe. My poor hungry little rat in his box did learn to press the bar for a food pellet, but he also picked up a superstitious behavior. The first time he made the mental connection between the bar and food, he happened to turn around in a circle in the box. Because of this, he circled around every time before he pressed the bar even though it had nothing to do with getting the reward. Like my rat, we similarly make connections between things that aren't related when we learn things. For some who grew up with abusive parents, that might be a connection between abuse and love which causes them to seek out partners who are cruel because they think love and pain are as interconnected as my rat's turning around and pressing the bar in his box (note: I do not speak of myself - I was not abused physically).

These connections aren't formed cleanly, simply, or obviously, so we need to scrutinize carefully to develop an understanding and untangle the destructive from the constructive and be mindful of the fact that there is comfort in following even destructive or useless actions. My rat would almost certainly have experienced anxiety if not allowed to perform his little turn around before hitting the bar because he would have felt that the reward may not have been forthcoming. It would have taken many successful attempts to lose the stress associated with abandoning the superstitious behavior. Similarly, people who find comfort in some destructive behavior (such as eating up food they don't want rather than throwing it away) are going to find it hard to simply abandon that behavior for "rational" reasons.

How does all of my back story apply to this blog, which is about losing weight? Well, I offer this information for two reasons. First of all, I want it to be understood that all of my talk about psychology in this blog isn't idle speculation or mere navel gazing. I do know what I'm talking about to some extent (at least). I have a professional interest and education and experience in behavioral science.

The other reason is that I want to provide some insight into why I am so adamant about seeing weight problems or issues in a manner which embraces complexity rather than simplicity. Human behavior is not simple. Interactions with our environment whether it be food, other people, the stuffed toys which we form odd attachments to, or that favorite tree outside our window, are never something which are simple to change. Just as giving a pill to a psychotic person to stop the way their brain caused them to hear voices caused other aspects to change in unfavorable ways, changing your lifestyle to lose weight will cause other changes as well.

Behaviors all happen for a reason, whether it is emotional or physical, and changing one area will create a shortcoming or change in another. You can't simply choose to alter your course from unhealthy habits and fly the path of health and virtuous living without some sort of fall-out, and you didn't follow your original course capriciously or because of character flaws. You were either inclined to do so biologically or conditioned to do so psychologically (or both). So, I insist on complexity, because everything in my life that I have learned and experienced to date have shown me that that is the reality of our existence.

The Lack of Diet Tips

If you're stumbled across this blog, you'll note that I don't give diet tips. There are several reasons for this. One is that I don't think there is a magic formula for losing weight which can be administered to anyone with a high chance of success. Another is that I don't need to duplicate the efforts of literally thousands of sites in this regard. And finally, I believe that losing weight is not about following tips so much as a large number of slow changes and adjustments to lifestyle which will build up your capacity to live more healthily and maintain that lifestyle.

I know that all sounds really ambiguous, but the truth is that this is my second go at losing weight. A long time ago, about a year and a half before I graduated from college, I had great success with precisely that sort of change in my habits. I stopped eating anything with fat, exercised one and a half hours a day 4-5 days a week, ate only whole grains and lean meats, and completely gave up anything with sugar. At that time, I lost almost certainly over 100 lbs. Through the years, I've gained that back and more.

That transition in lifestyle was not instant, but it was a lot faster than my current one has been. Part of the reason for that is that I'm older now and cannot do the sort of exercise I once did. Another part is that working life interferes with a lot of the freedom I once had in terms of food preparation and exercising. It was easy to exercise on my college schedule.

A former alcoholic who I worked with once told me that she felt I couldn't sustain my weight loss in the fashion that I had been because there was no way I could lose weight and eat as I did then without keeping up the exercise schedule, and that schedule would surely be broken in the future by other responsibilities. She was partially correct, though the fact of the matter was that my destruction was linked more to changing back to bad habits and integrating even worse ones when my life got stressful. The truth was that the psychological changes that needed to take place to help me maintain my good habits hadn't even started. I had the energy and drive, and that propelled me, but I had no understanding of why I ate or had a weight problem. I did not have complete control over my eating by any stretch of the imagination.

When I say "even worse ones," I mean that I started to eat the sort of things that I never ate growing up like candy, ice cream, cakes, etc. Because I grew up poor, cheap food, not sweets, got me fat for the most part. After college, I maintained and kept losing for about two years, then stress related to various changes in my circumstances (including marriage and a disastrous relationship with my new in-laws) drove me to sugar for comfort. It didn't help that my relatively thin husband ate such things with almost no negative consequences. I started to think of myself as "normal" instead of a big fat person and normal people can eat such things, right?

The longer I stayed in my bad habits, the further I got away from who I was during about 4 or so years of successful healthy living and losing weight. After awhile, I couldn't find the place in me where I was able to muster up the right place psychologically to even start such a change. I completely lost touch with the young woman who almost effortlessly made that transition. I'm guessing she had it easier than me because she hadn't been gobbling down sweets for years as a stress release valve, not to mention the fact that she had less stress.

At any rate, the road back to that place in my life where I made better choices and was better for it has only just begun, and the early journey was quite difficult. The path is getting a lot less bumpy now, but it's an incredibly long road ahead.