Rewiring Yourself

Recently, I was thinking about the process of rewiring myself to stop certain thought patterns from continuing to run roughshod over my emotions. This is the sort of thing that you do if you happen to be me. It's something I've done four times, but never really stopped to categorize and think about the stages. I don't know if it will be helpful to anyone else to talk about it broken into parts, but I'm going to do it anyway, because that is also the sort of thing one does if one lives with my particular brain.

The whole point of this process is to slowly change your response to a particular stimulus. Most people have an experience or thought and an automatic reaction. For example, you may hear a piece of news about the cost of oil possibly going up by 25% over the winter and immediately start to stress out and worry about affording to warm your home during the cold months. Worrying accomplishes nothing so you may want to have a response which is more level emotionally. This process would be one through which you eventually stopped having the unwanted reaction.

For me, the first time I did this was for temper. I was prone to immediate and intense anger. The second was about materialism. I wasn't especially into "stuff", but I did keep too many things around (though not like a hoarder). I had the idea that I couldn't "waste" things by throwing them away as long as they were theoretically useful. The third time was related to anxiety and spinning elaborate worst case scenarios over an isolated incident. I'd hear that my company was doing more poorly this year than last and would start to fret about my job security even though there was nothing I could do about it nor was there any direct or immediate threat to my employment status. Finally, I've been dealing with the biggest deal of all, my relationship with food.

The process is not easy and takes years for the changes to kick into "automatic". You have to work at it, but it is effective. Through time, what feels like you are playing the role of Sisyphus in your life starts to feel like you're pushing that boulder up the hill and it's not rolling back all of the time. Eventually, it feels lighter and easier. Finally, you're rolling along with only minor little pushes of a rock that is manageable in size. I won't say that tendencies and reactions vanish entirely, as we all have core character tendencies and they will never go away entirely, but "talking yourself down" from a response you don't want becomes much easier and much less frequent. It is worth the considerable effort.

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Stage 1: Reflection
Reflection is when you experience something, have a reaction in the manner which is typical for you, and then think back on what happened after the fact. Most people reflect with a heavy emphasis on regret and self-punishment, especially if they are dealing with food and eating something they think they should not. It is imperative that reflection be productive and supportive talk, not destructive self-punishing words. If you use reflection as a platform for self-flagellation rather than positive thinking, you will not be able to change effectively as the focus will be emotional, not rational. Also, you will be undermining your sense of capability by giving yourself negative messages instead of positive encouragement.

The purpose of reflection is to increase awareness of the effect a stimulus has on you. For example, if I look at cooking web sites or pictures of food late at night, I become incredibly hungry. If I don't look at the pictures, I may feel slightly hungry before bed, but I tend to be able to decide not to eat anyway. Clearly, I respond to food cues with less control than would be optimal for someone who is trying to lose weight. While there is an easy solution in this particular case (stop looking at cooking or food blogs late at night), the larger issue is the response to food cues. I do not endeavor to avoid such things as there will always be the potential for food cuing. My aim is to temper my reactions to all food cues.

When you reflect, it's important to consider what elicited the behavior, how strongly the behavior occurred (in this case, how much and what it causes one to eat), and what you may be able to do in the future to alter your response. Reflection improves recognition of stimulus and response which will in turn improve your ability to move on to the next stage. Note that it is perfectly natural to have the same reaction many, many times and reflect on it dozens, possibly hundreds of times, before being able to incorporate the next step.

The purpose of reflection is to go from this:
Stimulus ----> (unaware, spontaneous, undesirable) Response

to this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, undesirable) Response

At this point, you only need to understand your reactions, not change them.

Stage 2: Delay
Once you become aware that a given stimulus is going to elicit a certain response, you have the capacity to start controlling your reactions. The first step in that control is not to stop or alter the responses, but to simply delay having them. This is the mental equivalent of counting to 10 before having a reaction in order to form a cooler response.

When I was trying to control my temper, I knew I was getting incredibly angry and was about to have my usual hostile response. I would try to hold it at bay for a time. When it came to eating, things were a lot more concrete. When I craved a food and wanted to eat it, I resisted the urge in planned increments of time. At first, I would try to wait 5 minutes and then I would have it. If possible, I'd extend that wait another 5 minutes. When I "gave in", I didn't view it as failure, but rather felt that accomplishing the delay was a success. Extending the delays over time is an exercise in finding more control.

the move is from this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, undesirable) Response

to this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, delayed undesirable) Response


Stage 3: Recognize
Delaying is essentially having the same reaction, but having it occur later. It is far easier to put aside an immediate response to a stimulus than it is to change it. Concurrent with delaying is starting to work on recognition that a response is coming and what it means. If the stimulus is a food cue (such as a pizza commercial) and my response is to want to eat the food, I need to work on recognizing that I am not really hungry, but rather being cued. I can start a process of being mentally engaged with the stimuli rather than simply reacting to it. Emotional responses are a chemical rush which tends to take control of you and just happen. At this stage, you want to insert some mental processing of the experience.

People believe they are more cognizant of what is happening to them than they really are. In a discussion of food cuing and the effect of commercials, many people would recognize that they can have an influence, but they don't necessarily see their responses to it. Humans are not designed to attend actively to every single experience with great attention and consciousness. We tend to sleepwalk through a lot of our lives because we are over-stimulated and can't tune into each experience fully.

At the recognition stage, you will try to pay full attention to your mental responses to particular experiences and try to explore why they occur and consider how to minimize them. For my anger issues, I recognized that my raging responses were role modeling my mother's behavior toward me. I was automatically doing what she did when she was frustrated. I tried to understand that the response was not only unproductive, but destructive as it brought on a loss of control and responses which often exacerbated rather than solved problems. Inserting a dialog into my response which guided me to a calmer, more measured response tempered the anger through time.

When I was trying to stop being so anxious, I focussed on a variety of thoughts. I recognized that I was feeling stress about things that no one could control and it served no productive purpose. I also figured out that my free-floating anxiety was habitual. I was so accustomed to worrying about things that my mind would drift around to find things to grab onto and fret about. I recognized that this was a pattern which I needed to try and stop.

the move is from this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, delayed undesirable) Response

to this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, managed or mitigated, less undesirable) Response


Stage 4: Interrupt
Delaying a response means that you try to control when it starts. Interrupting it means that you try to stop it in its tracks. With food, that means stopping a binge before it reaches its ultimate conclusion. For me, this started with not "finishing the bag", even if that meant leaving just one piece of food in there. As time went by, I could interrupt earlier and delay longer. This squeezes the undesirable response at both ends.

Interrupting is a powerful stage at which you really start to feel in control. When I was dealing with anger, an interrupt would mean that I could silence my loud voice and come to my senses rather than vent and rant. When I was dealing with food, it meant I could stop eating compulsively at some point and therefore mitigate some of the damage I was doing to myself.

For anxiety, I tried to catch myself when ruminating and think about more positive things. In the simplest sense, I tried to distract myself because anxiety for me was like a runaway train that needed to be derailed. Interrupts were very hard at first as my mind would fall back into the groove it was comfortable with, but the more often I practiced them, the harder it was for them to get back on track. As time goes by, you can also find yourself capable of multiple interrupts. For food, this might mean eating something, stopping, and then eating it again, then stopping again. This is good progress in interrupting, even if you eat everything in the bag. The important point is practice stopping yourself.

the move is from this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, managed or mitigated, less undesirable) Response

to this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, managed or mitigated, truncated, less undesirable) Response


Stage 5: Minimize/Reshape
Depending on what sort of thinking you are trying to change, the next step is to minimize responses or reshape them. Minimizing means making them smaller. For food, this means eating less in response to stimuli. For anxiety for me, it meant spending less time ruminating about things I couldn't control. With the ability to interrupt in hand, I could start to break apart the patterns in multiple ways. That is, I could both shorten them further and alter them more often.

For this part, you can consider a visual in which you have a well-worn road that your mind has traveled down that you don't want it to go down any longer so you are smashing up sections of it here and there to make it increasingly impassible. "Reshaping" is setting a new path by finding a way to respond differently.

When I was dealing with anger, my way of reshaping was to stop and consider a calmer and more productive way of expressing my feelings. At first, pieces of my frustration would come out more calmly and I would lose control and get aggressive again. Later, I would move in and out of a calm and aggressive state. Finally, I could remain calm most of the time and express my feelings in a constructive and passionate, but not angry way.

the move is from this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, managed or mitigated, truncated, less undesirable) Response

 
to this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, mixture of  less undesirable and desirable) Response

Stage 6: Effective Elimination
It's important to understand that true elimination of a particular response to a stimuli is virtually impossible. Even a calm person will occasionally have an angry outburst. Even someone who generally does not overeat will pig-out at times. Even a mellow person will feel anxiety from time to time over things they shouldn't worry about. We are complex beings and you will never banish certain thoughts entirely because the variety of stimuli and conditions under which they can occur is too vast to completely eliminate unwanted reactions.

The purpose of "rewiring yourself" is to change your destructive mental patterns such that they no longer control your life to such a great extent that they cause you difficulty or misery. "Effective" means "enough" for a balanced life, not "perfection". If you think you can be "forever" about anything, then you are missing the point. Be happy with what you can achieve and focus on gradual movement toward a better place, not on being a robot that is programmed to do the same thing every time a particular input is received.

At the end of this, you are looking to be here:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, desirable) Response
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It's important to keep in mind that these "stages" blend into one another. You will find that you may be working on them simultaneously, but generally you will want to begin with trying them in sequence in order to ease yourself into each idea. It's also important not to "rush" the process. Trying to do it all at once is only going to make you feel like a failure when it doesn't work. "Cold turkey" isn't something that works with trying to remap the electrical and chemical responses in your brain. The goal isn't to make behavioral changes, but altering your thoughts so that it is easier to change your behavior.

Why You Press the Bar

Back when I was in college, I took a course in experimental psychology. As a part of the class, we had to do classic experiments with white rats, Skinner boxes, and mazes. For those who are blissfully ignorant in the jargon of psychology, "Skinner boxes" are little cages which have a bar that a rat can press to dispense a food pellet.

Many people know the basic details of these types of experiment, but they don't know what happens to the rats in order to encourage learning. Rats, like people, are lazy and will not feel motivated to learn or change without a compelling reason. In order to get the rats to care enough about the food pellet to go to the effort of searching the cage for food and stumbling on the fact that the bar relates to getting food, you have to make them pretty hungry. Without deprivation, the rat is indifferent to getting the food pellet and will just sit around in the box being happy and contemplating rat philosophy.

The rats that are trained in psychology classes are doomed to a short existence. After they have been trained, they are rendered useless and are usually destroyed. I was told, perhaps seriously, perhaps in jest, that the way this was done was to break their necks with a flick of the wrist. Since state colleges don't have a lot of funds or veterinary expertise, it is unlikely that they are chemically euthanized. When I was told this about my rat, who has taught me so much about life that I think she deserves a better name and memory than the one I tend to give her (I named her "Rat Rat"), I chose to adopt her as a pet rather than to have her head twisted around until she expired.

My rat, who I was actually not really fond of as a pet but merely saved out of humanistic impulse, was not a normal rat after the conditioning she went through. Because she was sometimes deprived of food in order to compel her to learn, she would eat as much as she could all of the time. Since I was no expert on rat health, I just fed her whenever it seemed she was hungry. Soon, she grew very fat. I tried to feed her less, but she seemed to become anxious and paced the cage nervously looking for food when her food was reduced.

Within about a year, my rat died. She wasn't very old even by rat standards, probably no more than one and a half years old. I sometimes pondered if I fed her to death or if she simply was not healthy because she was the result of too much white rat inbreeding. My professor told us that, to save money, he had to keep breeding the same pool of experimental rats until he felt it was no longer an option because fresh rats were terribly expensive. I'm guessing she may have suffered from both too much food and her bad genetic pedigree.

My rat's situation teaches some valuable lessons about behavior that can be applied to humans. As I mentioned in the linked post a few paragraphs back, she showed the power of habit, routine, and superstition. In the case I'm currently talking about, she shows the strong effect of deprivation. Had she not been made terribly hungry in order to motivate her to learn in the Skinner box, she probably would not have become so fat later. She also likely would not have grown so anxious at any food reduction. If this is starting to sound familiar, it is because it is a classic situation that human dieters go through.

Dieting requires food deprivation over an often prolonged period of time. The more severe the deprivation, the more likely one will be to develop psychological issues with food and a disordered relationship with it. That is not to say that people can't practice caloric reduction without resulting food issues, but there is little anecdotal evidence to support the idea that they don't and ample to say that they do. Just like with my rat, food deprivation fuels anxiety about eating and not eating. It encourages overeating, and creates irrational feelings about food such as attaching moral implications to the choice to eat certain things.

Because of my understanding of these issues, I decided early on not to decide that food or eating were "good" or "bad" and not to put any food out of bounds for me. While I certainly have "guideposts" that I would like to remain in, I don't get worked up if I step beyond the boundaries. I just try every day to roughly stay within them. I view choices broadly as moving in a direction I'd like them to or in one I would prefer they not go in. I realize that making a particular choice slows my progress while making another keeps it up. It's not the end of the world if I doddle a bit on the road by eating a few hundred more calories than I view as optimal.

It is perhaps a very difficult thing for people to accept that the greatest restriction they can possibly endure is not the best path to weight loss. You can explain again and again that there are complex psychological reactions at play and they will be rejected out of hand as "excuses". It generally takes multiple failures before people even begin to consider that they may not be able to tread a severe path without consequence. My poor rat didn't choose to not eat for a few days before training nor to only be able to eat what she was smart enough to earn, but we humans have the capacity and the power to do better by ourselves. Whether or not we choose to do so is an entirely different issue.

Hunger (Revisited)

You can't talk about your relationship with food and weight without addressing hunger, and it's a topic I've broached on more than one occasion in the past. For those who have not seen those posts (or have forgotten them), it's my feeling that humans were meant to deal with a little hunger and that part of modern living is that we've made it so easy to eat anytime, anyplace, and anywhere that we've increasingly lost the ability to tolerate even mild hunger. I feel that there is a "sweet spot" on hunger at which we are uncomfortable but not in actual deep discomfort and that is the time at which we should eat.

I've done hunger conditioning to help extend my ability to endure hunger, and, as I've said before, my goal is to not starve myself until I want to gnaw off an appendage, but simply to put up with feeling hungry for a little while. Ultimately, the goal is to eat when I feel concretely hungry rather than vaguely and mildly so. At best, I can tolerate (grudgingly and with difficulty) a rumbling stomach for a few hours before eating. At worst, I never even get past the "I'm a bit peckish, what's to nosh?" stage. More often than not, I'm landing on the latter and only doing the former when forced by circumstances. I don't see this as a failing, but it is something to keep in mind. The way in which I trained myself to deal with hunger is like a muscle. I haven't flexed it as much recently as I did initially, and it has grown weaker. My hunger tolerance was once stronger than it is now.

One of the things which continues to be a challenge for me is choosing to deal with hunger prophylactically. That is, I don't eat because I'm hungry, but I eat because I anticipate that I will be hungry later during a time when I have no access to food or no ability to eat (such as when I'm working). This relates to fear of hunger as I've written about before and a desire to deal with all stress in the most expeditious manner.

The discomfort for me as a lifelong fat person is acute when I feel hungry. To some extent, that has changed, but I still don't bear it as well as someone like my husband who has been thin or only moderately overweight for most of his life. He can delay his responses because the pain he suffers is less because his biochemical processes aren't screaming as loudly at him to eat. Despite weighing in the 170's-180's now, I'm hardly having skinny person reactions to food. I still have a fat person's response though not as strongly as I once did. I don't get headaches anymore or feel as weak as I did initially when hungry. I also don't have the same energy crashes, but my stomach still sends potent "pain" signals.

The reason I'm revisiting this topic isn't that I have been allowing my hunger tolerance to atrophy (though I have, to a small extent, and I feel it sometimes at work between lunch and dinner). I'm talking about it again because of a study I read about which suggests that there may be health benefits in eating only when hungry. This study, at least to me, also suggests that modern lifestyles with ready access to food may be a large contributor to insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes. If waiting to eat until hungry improves blood glucose numbers, then perhaps a lifelong ability to eat before one has actually become hungry is a piece of the higher incidence of diabetes puzzle.

I want to restate, quite emphatically, because so often people misinterpret the words of others, that I'm in no way advocating waiting until one is famished to eat. I do believe that waiting until one is feeling the actual discomfort of hunger is not a bad idea. Frankly, I think that waiting until you are ravaged by hunger to eat is an invitation to binge eat. Even now, I struggle when I come home from work and am very, very hungry (due to unavoidable delays based on a schedule I have zero input into) not to eat and eat and eat. It seems to take longer to gain satiety when I'm super hungry than when I'm modestly so. However, I do think that a little hunger is good, and the aforementioned study might go a tiny distance toward supporting that on a scientific level. I'm going to go back to making efforts to "stretch" my hunger tolerance, not just because of this study, but simply because I know it can be done and that it'll make my situation at work easier in the long run.

"Corrective" Action

Reading back over some of my techniques for altering my relationship with food, I sometimes wonder if it sounds fairly disordered and bizarre. Teaching myself to be hungry and live with it, developing a technique for eating tiny amounts of treats and being happy with 2 or 3 bites, and now, I've started to practice eating much more slowly. In fact, my current project is to eat my breakfast by waiting 5 minutes between bites.

To someone who hasn't spent the vast majority of their entire lives between 300 and 400 lbs., this may all seem obsessive and overly regimented rather than behavior meant to "normalize" my eating. It's important to keep in mind that "normal" is highly subjective, but also that over a lifetime, my dealings with food have been a couple of standard deviations away from the mean. In other words, these measures wouldn't be necessary if I was a little closer to doing what people with a healthy relationship with food are already doing.

My choices are akin to a compulsive hand-washer who washes his hands 100 times a day reducing the number of times he washes his hands slowly through time. It's not about cultivating abnormality, but normality, though sometimes I wonder if it comes across as quite the opposite.

Rigid exercises in waiting to eat, purposeful tasting, etc. are part of behavior modification techniques that I've been increasingly putting in place for myself. When I start such plans, I have to pay attention to the clock, portion sizes, etc. This purposeful effort is the only way to re-set the way I deal with food. Through time, my behavior more naturally falls into the sorts of patterns which assist in eating more modest portions and doing so more slowly and mindfully. The rigid structure falls away as the mind and body conform to the new patterns after having learned them through time using external constructs.

Those who don't have the same issues as me may find the rules I put in place for myself ridiculous and possibly even scary. However, this isn't about boxing myself into extremely restrictive behavior or limiting my enjoyment of food. It's about correcting life-long unrestricted behavior and prolonging the experience of enjoying food.

Recently, I decided to eat my breakfast (usually a homemade sugar-free muffin) by waiting five minutes between bites because I feel that I have a tendency to "rush through it" even though I'm eating mindfully. My husband eats the same food in the same quantity as me, but it takes him up to an hour sometimes. He is very casual about it.

Mind you, he often eats much later at night than me and in greater quantity as he's not trying to lose a lot of weight, so he isn't waking up as hungry as me. However, eating fast when you're hungry doesn't improve satiety. It just tends to increase the chances of eating more. Eating slowly gives the body a chance to recognize the food biologically as well as psychologically. There is no benefit in taking 5 minutes to eat my muffin as compared to 30 minutes. In fact, there are only drawbacks.

Eventually, I'm hoping this forced pattern will lead to my eating more slowly at every meal without any sort of external construct. There is no downside to this change in behavior. I'll be eating the same amount of food as before, but just savoring it over a longer period of time.

Conditioning Myself - Part 3 (Mental)

This is part 3 of a 3-part sequence. Here is part 1 and here is part 2. A detailed breakdown of the stages of changing your thinking is here at "rewiring yourself."

This is perhaps the hardest to summarize because mental conditioning which is deep and personal is like tossing a million tiny levers in your brain many times a day. Also, the things I had to tell myself may not be the things other people have to tell themselves. Nonetheless, this is about offering a thumbnail version of what I have done, not a recommendation for others to do so as well.

If you read what I have written here, you'll note that there are no punitive actions involved. There is no talking about "bad", "shouldn't", "can't" or "won't". There is no guilt. There is no beating myself up or berating myself as "weak" or "out of control". Mainly, there are conversations, considerations and choices. Sometimes, the main problem with people who overeat is that they never stop to think at all but rather just act and then reflect after the fact. When you decide to lose weight, the decision itself changes the dynamic because you start to question what you have been doing. You want to start asking the questions and considering before you act. Even if you choose to do the destructive thing the first time, the second, or the third, you may find you can stop yourself in the future (or reduce the potential "damage") once you grow accustomed to having the dialog before taking action.

Asking these questions each time you are pondering a destructive choice is very important, perhaps much more important than your response to them because repeatedly asking them will eventually change your thought processes. The types of questions you ask are very important and I encourage anyone who wants to make long-term and lasting changes to adopt a respectful, mature, nurturing and compassionate tone with themselves rather than a patronizing and punitive one. This is all about teaching yourself to gradually interact differently with food, not disciplining yourself like a misbehaving child. You deserve patience and kindness, and giving it to yourself will make the learning faster and more effective.

While I may seem to be asserting what I have done as a cut and dry process of asking a question or considering a situation and following up with the "best" response or the one which was most conducive toward repairing my damaged relationship with food, that is certainly not what happened in every case. It was much more uneven than that. There were times when I considered the situation, and still made a destructive choice. Through time though, repeated and consistent consideration resulted in the more constructive choice more and more often. After even more time, the more productive choice started to come without the accompanying mental dialog. So, if this seems like a maddening assortment of considerations to play through your head, consider that the dialogs fall away through time as you naturally reach better choices with less (and eventually no) resistance. Also, every item on the list was not going through my head every time I approached food. Only the relevant dialog was in play for each given situation.

Mental conditioning changed as each stage of physical conditioning changed. It is very important to keep in mind that these two things were synchronized based on the demands of the physical changes. What needed to be done at the beginning was quite different than what I'm doing now which is likely different than what I'll be doing a year from now.

Here is the short version of what I did as best I can summarize and recollect at this time:

1. When I reduced portion sizes, I often felt that I was missing something or was going to feel deprived. I asked myself why I felt I needed a huge cup of coffee. How did a third of a cup more liquid make the experience of a morning cup better? Did I need that large amount, or simply want it because I had become accustomed to it? I had these sorts of conversations with myself every time I had a reduced portion and felt I wanted more. This dialog eventually resulted in my satisfaction with very tiny portions of treats (like one or two bites). I conditioned myself to feel that a small amount was quite sufficient rather than to desire large amounts.
2. Since I wanted more "experience" with food and that was one of the reasons that I wanted large portions, I asked myself in what way "more" was making the experience "better". Would I really enjoy 8 bites of a candy bar more than 2 or 3? Was I even processing the experience of each and every bite on a sensory level or simply eating by rote? Every time I wanted more of a treat, I had this type of conversation with myself. These types of conversations were what caused me to eventually practice mindful eating in the future. These conversations promoted an attitude of valuing economy of experience in which I got the most sensory gratification from the fewest calories.
3. When I lapsed into mindless eating, I tried to recognize this behavior. At first, I did it after the fact. I thought about why I ate a huge pile of pretzels until I reached the bottom of the bag and reflected on why. If I was just stuffing food into my mouth without thinking about it, I tried to "catch" myself in this process and consider why I was doing it. Later, I could stop myself before eating it all. Later still, I recognized the impulse before I started. Now, I don't do it at all. I asked myself questions like: Was I really hungry? If so, was this the food to be eating to satiety? (Usually, it wasn't.) Was I tired or depressed? Was I just eating it out of habit because I put the bag in front of me? Was I deriving comfort or satisfaction from the mere act of putting food in my mouth and swallowing it and, if so, what would comfort me more constructively? (Often, that was the case.) This sort of reflection both stopped compulsive eating and got me into the habit of always serving myself portions on a plate which I add into the food log before I eat them so that I am aware of the impact of such things on my daily intake.
4. When I had a craving that was preoccupying me, I focused on the fact that food cravings are related to the memory of pleasurable experiences. Essentially, you want the pleasure because you remember having had it before. I asked myself how much was necessary to refresh that memory of a food I desired and focused on eating a little to relive the experience rather than eating a lot to fill my stomach. If I was genuinely hungry, then a craving wasn't the answer. The craving could be gratified, but I told myself that filling the belly was another issue entirely. I told myself that I could have both of these needs fulfilled, just not by the same food.
5. When I was hungry, I asked myself if it was because my stomach was empty, my blood sugar was low or if I simply wanted to eat because eating compulsively or impulsively was such a part of my routine life that I just felt an absence of something when I didn't just go and eat. This isn't the same as "boredom". It is more like having the T.V. on in the background for company and not watching it, and feeling something is amiss when it is turned off and quiet. Eating was a companion, and I was trying to become aware of that relationship.
6. Once I became aware of habitual eating, I sought to replace this habit with productive distraction. Note that this is not mere distraction, but an effort to implement useful, long-term, and more helpful habits into my daily routine. The easiest choice was to either do something creative like doing actual work or doing housework. As time went by, rather than being a forced activity, these new habits seamlessly replaced eating as part of my daily routine. This is a big part of why I think less about food in general. It has stopped being a companion activity that I engaged in out of habit and other actions have become the default that my mind wanders to.
7. When I had food in front of me and was eating it, I forced myself to be more aware of every bite of the food and to think about how my stomach felt. As someone who grew up poor, I am reluctant to throw away any food (my mother got angry if we "wasted food") and often cleaned my plate (and my husband's) by rote . When I felt like I should eat everything I had in front of me whether I was hungry or enjoyed it, I thought about how my eating more calories would not extract more value from the money I spent on the food and that I am worth more than a few cents worth of food. Sometimes I had to force myself to scrape the food into the bin, but it got easier the more I told myself that I was worth more than the cost of food.
8. I started to analyze the food I ate for pleasure for it's sensory value and asked myself if I was eating it all because it was "special", expensive, or because I felt I really enjoyed every bite. For example, when I wanted pizza, I considered which parts of the pizza I really enjoyed and which parts had limited pleasure associated with them. I didn't eat portions of food that didn't bring me sufficient pleasure and told myself that I am worthy of eating only the very best part of a dish. Later, I started to prepare food differently in accord with this thinking.
9. When I was genuinely hungry, I reminded myself that hunger is a part of losing weight and that the body is justifiably fighting back, but I am the master of my body. I started dealing with hunger and cravings by using delayed gratification techniques. That is, if I really wanted something, I'd try to put it off for 5 minutes, then 5 more, then 5 more if I could. If I really felt I couldn't delay any longer, I'd have a small amount of what I wanted and make myself wait 15 minutes before I had more.
10. I started practicing hunger conditioning where I tried to learn to tolerate hunger more effectively.
11. I started to practice restraint in the face of possibility. When I started out, I always ate as much of everything I could up to my calorie limits. If I wanted more and could "afford it", I had it. I think early on this was actually necessary, but as time went by, it became less important both physically and mentally and I started to not eat just because I "could". I saw saying "no" when I could "afford (the calories)" to say "yes" as a mental muscle worth exercising. This was the beginning of a practice which has lead to my not eating up to my calorie allotments every day when I'm not actually hungry. Essentially, practicing restraint became an end unto itself rather than a means to an end.
12. When I pined for some experience which I felt I enjoyed more because food was involved, like watching a movie and eating popcorn, I deconstructed the scenario and thought about how one experience actually detracted from the full enjoyment of the other. I thought about how coupling behaviors renders each of them more mindless rather than more enjoyable. I started to purposefully untangle experiences (even those unrelated to food) and to single task rather than multi-task as my default habit. I try to "live in the moment" more fully with everything, including food.
13. "You can have it later" has become a huge unforced mantra for me. In the beginning, this is how I managed to get through low-calorie days when I started calorie counting. I told myself that "tomorrow", I could eat anything I wanted (and I could) and I just had to endure today. This has gone from a forced mantra to a situation in which it comes rather more naturally and by desire. If I eat lunch and think I'd like to follow it up with a treat, I think that I'll enjoy it more after some time has passed. I don't even have to tell myself that anymore. It's just a natural response. Delaying gratification makes the satisfaction better because it is spacing out pleasurable experiences and making them more distinct. This practice has helped me not eat late at night when I'm hungry as well as not overeat because I want something and have eaten enough calories. After a year of saying, "it's okay if you want it because you can have it later," this has become a fairly effortless response.
14. When I was sad, upset, or depressed and wanted to eat to comfort myself, I thought about how eating would not fix the problem and forced myself to think about what would. I also pondered whether or not eating was related to what was bringing me down. More often than not in the early days, my depression was related to my weight or physical pain, so I'd think about how I had to break the cycle of suffering induced by eating. These days, I don't get as unhappy about my relationship with food (but still get sad about other things), but the way in which other changes have reshaped my thinking has stopped me from feeling driven to food for comfort. These days, I just try to tell myself that sadness happens and I have to just experience it. It doesn't have to be something that I have to slap a food-filled band-aid over to mask the feelings.
15. I remind myself that taking pleasure in food is a wonderful thing which humans are meant to experience, but it doesn't have to be achieved with volume and that more food actually undermines the taste experience as taste buds lose their sensitivity. I remind myself that "more is better" is a reflexive thought which is not based in the reality of the eating experience.
16. I question my desire to eat in terms of really being hungry or simply wanting the enjoyable experience of eating. This is one thing I still have to do on a semi-regular basis. Often I will be able to afford the calories or enough time has passed since the previous meal that I could eat if I wanted to, but I don't if the only reason I want to do it is to enjoy food. It's not overeating that I'm trying to avoid in this case, it is trying not to "entertain myself" randomly with food. I separate this type of desire to eat something pleasurable from the desire for a snack or a small dessert. It's also important to note that this is not boredom. It is simple pleasure-seeking via the sensory delight of food, and I brush this aside when it seems to be happening by telling myself that when I'm genuinely hungry, I can have the pleasure of eating what I want. This happens most often when I'm cooking or baking something for future consumption, but the food is appetizing now.
17. When I grew frustrated with the cumbersome nature of weighing, measuring, and logging in food, I remind myself that I have a physical disability that requires monitoring just like many other disabilities if I want to be healthy. My disability is that I have no idea how much I should be eating and must track my food or I will end up eating too much or too little. Resenting this disability or growing frustrated at the necessity of the process is unproductive. I see my lot in life in this regard as no different from that life-long diabetics must deal with. It is simply a task that I must do, like washing dishes, and I should just accept that it is necessary without attaching any value (either positive or negative) to the experience one way or another.

I'm not sure if this is "everything", but it's a big chunk of it. While compiling this list, I am struck by how doing so has clarified some of the links for me between my present mindset and the actions I took. In particular, it seemed at one point as if some magical transformation took place for me in terms of not being obsessed with food and weight loss, but it wasn't transcendent. It was progressive replacement of old thinking and acting with new thoughts and actions.

All of that thinking, questioning, acting, and conversing slowly and almost imperceptibly built a new path in my mental jungle that is now more comfortable to travel down than the one I had for many years. It was a slow arduous trail to create, but it has become the more natural one through time. I just had to keep (and still have to keep) pruning away at it when the weeds attempt to grow back over the path I've built.

Conditioning Myself - Part 2 (Physical)

This is part 2 of a 3-part sequence. Part one explains what conditioning is and is here. Part 3 pertains to mental conditioning and is here.

The point of conditioning rather than turning myself around 180 degrees and just making a lot of changes at once was to make the changes stick. It's a little like learning one new word a day instead of trying to memorize a list of 365 immediately. It's not impossible to learn that many new words in a short time, but the chances that you'll recall them well is improved if you learn them slowly and apply them in everyday use. The down side, of course, is that slow changing means slower results. If you're someone who has to be who you want to be tomorrow, then this is a horrible method for you. Fortunately, I'm not one of those people now (though I used to be much more like that).

The start of my conditioning focused on the physical. I believe that our bodies are used to the balance of food we give them and an abrupt change causes a physical "shock" to the system which makes it much harder to succeed. The body pushes the mind and the mind weakens its resolve. Essentially, you push your body and it pushes back. The more gently you push, the less it offers a counterforce.

In order to mitigate the difficulty and hopefully "ease" my body into these changes, I took the following steps over a period of many months. Note that I remained at each step until I reached a period in which my discomfort with that stage was not very high. I did not stay at a stage until I was entirely comfortable before moving ahead, just much less uncomfortable and mentally capable to making things more difficult for myself.

It's important to keep in mind that I did not start out as a consumer of appreciable amounts of junk food. I didn't eat fast food at all (pretty much dislike it, always have). I did eat potatoes, rice, and a mix of about half white bread and half whole wheat, though mainly I ate whole grains. I did eat food made with sugar (like muffins) and I ate salted snacks (generally not potato chips though), chocolate, and ice cream. That being said, I didn't eat the huge portions people imagine fat people eat. I didn't have a lot of terrible habits to begin with. I just ate too much of everything (especially cheese, bread, and dairy). Period.

After I felt minimal discomfort with the current step, I pushed ahead to the next step in this list:

1. I reduced portion sizes slightly. I ate about 3/4 of what I normally ate and even reduced the portions of liquids that contained calories by a similar amount. I did not guzzle large amounts of water as my aim was to reduce my stomach capacity on the whole, not to fill it with non-caloric liquids or low-calorie foods that would keep it stretched.
2. I reduced portions sizes to about half of what I used to eat for both caloric liquids and all food. I also started practicing the early stages of "mindful eating". That is, I started to pay attention to the taste and texture of every bite of food so that I could extract the most from each eating experience. This naturally slowed down my eating.
3. I reduced portions of carbohydrates and started to measure them out carefully to single portion servings. Seeing how small one serving of things like mashed potatoes really is would shock many people.
4. I started counting calories one day per week. I staved off craving and hunger pangs on that one day by promising that I could eat as much as I wanted of any food I wanted the next day. I meant it. I never "lied" to myself about what was possible.
5. I started counting calories two non-consecutive days per week. Again, I dealt with hunger by allowing myself to have what I wanted "tomorrow", and I meant it.
6. I started counting calories three non-consecutive days per week.
7. I started counting calories 4 days per week.
8. I started counting calories everyday.

The calorie counting days forced a reshaping of my eating habits in various ways. I started to see how I had to balance my choices to fit in enough food not to starve on those days. Knowing I only had to do this one day a week made the starting point easier, and gave my body a chance to recover from the shock of what felt like great deprivation. I had to plan carefully for the calorie counting days and learned slowly to prepare food in a certain manner in accord with those days. There was a learning process that I slowly was broken into in terms of food preparation and the cumbersome and odious nature of calorie counting.

This method didn't make it "easy" for my body to adjust to fewer calories, but I think it did make it easier to stick with it because I had time to adjust to the demands on my time for food planning and preparation and to figure out how to work with food. I wanted my body to go from ample energy to diminished amounts to reduced energy to under-powered in stages. Note that I never stepped back once I took a step forward because I never stepped ahead until the discomfort was relatively small. If you have to step back, you're probably moving ahead too quickly.

I did not fulfill my desired goals every single day, but I never changed the goals. If I "failed", I simply followed the plan at the present stage. I didn't "punish" myself for eating too much on a calorie counting day by curtailing the eating on the next day, for instance. I did the best I could every day regardless of the previous day's efforts.

The other half of the physical conditioning was movement oriented. My body was in a terrible state when I started and my body was weak and prone to much pain. I couldn't walk 5 minutes without excruciating back pain. Improvements came quite slowly, so I was very careful not to do too much too quickly. Sometimes I felt frustrated by the fact that I couldn't use exercise more to help me lose faster, but the truth is that I think it helped me focus more on food and that is really where the bigger challenge lies and where the most effective part of weight loss comes from.

Roughly, my path has been:

• I started walking as long as possible without pain and sitting down at regular intervals. In the beginning, I was in agony after about 3 minutes. I added about 5 minutes to that time every several weeks depending on pain levels. In the beginning, I sat down frequently and stopped a lot. Sometimes I'd have to stop every 20 steps or so and rest.
• I started trying to stand more when I did housework.
• I tried to make myself get up and do things more often rather than consolidating trips to other rooms.
• I bought plastic weights that are to be filled with water. When full, they weigh 2.2 lbs. (1 kg.). I started lifting them 5 times in one range of motion. I added reps little by little and then added other ranges of motion.
• I added in exercises that can be done from my computer chair like leg lifts and stomach muscle holding. I added reps to the original count of 5 when the muscles didn't become sore anymore.

Concurrent with the physical stages above, I went through mental conditioning techniques which I will summarize in the next part.

Conditioning, What it is - Part 1

In my posts these days, I mention having conditioned myself to not eat emotionally, to eat in moderation, and to not obsess about food now without going into details of what that means. While the steps I've taken are detailed in many previous posts, I'm becoming concerned that using it as a catch-all descriptor for what I've done may be confusing or appear to be cryptic jargon for new readers. Because of this, I'm going to write several summation posts to explain the processes or link to explanations of them in a thumbnail manner. Obviously, reading the archives is best for full details. This is something I'm doing merely as an overview.

There is a process in the treatment of phobias called "systematic desensitization" which I'm sure some of my readers are familiar with. This process helps people with crippling fear to slowly approach the thing which they are afraid of. Consider the example of someone with a severe snake phobia that is becoming generalized to other snake-like things (caterpillars, centipedes, etc.). To start to deal with the fear, the therapist may first discuss snakes with the person who fears them. When she becomes comfortable talking about them, the therapist may move on to looking at the pictures of snakes until anxiety is reduced. The next step may be looking at live snakes in a reptile zoo from a great distance which is slowly reduced. Finally, the phobic person may learn to touch snakes.

My process of conditioning is not too dissimilar from systematic desensitization. That is, I start small and slowly add or subtract behaviors and thinking patterns. This isn't the same as telling yourself "don't eat that" or "eating that cookie won't make you feel better", though it may eventually have a similar result. Most mental conditioning that people do with themselves tends to be punitive and shallow. My conditioning has been deep, thoughtful, and gradual. Though one might be able to say that I have accomplished what pat mantras and slogans encourage, I did not use them to get where I am today.

Frankly, I find the use of oft-repeated mantras to be of limited value relative to employing more reflective methods of graduated personalized conditioning. The mantras tend to encourage change in one fell-swoop and treat the person hearing them or saying them like a private being berated by a drill sergeant. I'm an adult woman. This is not what I need or want to motivate or promote lasting change in me. People have been barking at me punitively directly or indirectly all of my life and it only made things worse.

There are two "rough" parts to the conditioning I have done. One is physical and includes changes in how much and how often I eat as well as adding in exercise. The other is mental, and includes changes in how I think about food and my life outside of food. I will do the best I can to make my overviews comprehensive enough to be of value, but not exhaustive enough to be difficult to follow. I encourage anyone who needs more explanation to ask a question, or investigate my archives.

Part 2 regards physical conditioning and is here.

Part 3 regards mental conditioning and is here.

Discipline

Psychology isn't all about emotions or psychoses. There are aspects of it that have nothing to do with sadness, gladness, or distorted versions of reality. The current model of dealing with psychological problems is largely pharmacological, so it focuses excessively on seeing problems as something that can be solved with the right pill that can balance the chemicals in your body. Those chemical changes, in theory, should push your body's biological balance such that you are more likely to do, feel, and think the way that society (and you) think would be best.

One of the things which is increasingly being left behind in the rush to see the body as a biological machine is that psychology isn't shaped entirely by chemicals, and not every problem can be solved with a medical procedure or prescription. Of course, we like to believe that is so because it is a lot easier to go under the knife, get an injection, or take a pill then to do other types of behavioral change. I'm no stranger to wanting an easy answer. Frankly, there have been many occasions on which I wish science would simply invent a pill that'd kill my appetite or make me understand a foreign language without having to study it.

That being said, I think that one of the reasons we are so bad at food management in our lives is that we aren't pursuing the right potential solutions for our particular problems. Yes, people eat for emotional reasons. Yes, people are driven by biological forces to have difficulty losing weight. However, understanding and dealing with these issues is only a part of the process. I can understand that I eat when stressed, when bored, or because it is my habit and I feel anxiety when I have to change my habits, but that doesn't necessary fix the problem.

I have come to believe that the next stage after understanding, is conditioning behavior. In old-fashioned terms, this would be learning discipline or moderation. I have talked before about learning moderation, and I think it's something that Americans in particular are poor at it. We live in a culture which encourages indulgence and glorifies those who live lives of ostentatious excess. We mock those who practice sensible habits and sound lifestyles as being boring or joyless. One of the reasons many dieters go to extremes is that being "perfect" and being a person of pure virtue is an extreme.

I think that "the other side" of psychology is fading into the background, because people who are adults in particular are poor at conditioning their own behavior. They aren't necessarily all that great at doing so with their children either, as is evidenced by the British T.V. show "Supernanny". Real behavioral change, whether it applies to yourself or to those in your charge, requires constancy. If you've ever seen "Supernanny", you'll see how the titular star's actions start to turn things around and then the parents' inability to consistently apply the same techniques cause things to fall apart.

Conditioning adult behavior, and in particular conditioning your own behavior is quite an order of magnitude harder. Part of the problem is that being your own therapist (like being your own doctor or lawyer) is not very effective. None of us can see ourselves as we really are, nor can those around us. There are too many vested interests to get an accurate picture of ones own problems and needs. Generally speaking, the only effective way to understand your problems deeply is to get outside opinions, and unfortunately most therapists these days are more than likely to give you a bottle of pills then a prescription for behavioral changes.

That doesn't mean there is no hope. I think that successful long-term weight management can be acquired through a mixture of disciplines and considerations. First, you have to understand yourself mentally and your body. Then, you have to deal with any medical issues. Finally, you have to deal with conditioning your behavior.

The most critical manner in which I can put this is that we have to learn discipline. In no way do I mean to imply that fat people lack discipline. That being said, I think that we're fooling ourselves if we believe we are capable of exercising sufficient discipline to manage a healthy weight for our particular bodies. Someone else may be able to exercise far less discipline and not gain weight, but that is actually irrelevant to our choices. It may not be fair, but some of us have to work harder than others and apply greater discipline than they do to gain the same effect. This isn't uncommon in many areas of life but it is trickier when it comes to food.

Sometimes I wonder if one of the many reasons that we have more overweight people in the world today is that we emphasize discipline less now than at any other time in our cultural history. In a highly individualized culture in particular, discipline is often scoffed at and actively rebelled against. We cram for tests instead of studying gradually as we go. We join health clubs as part of New Year's resolutions and then stop attending by the end of May. We know we should regularly clean the toilet but let it go until it gets bad enough to notice. We don't prepare for dinner and end up eating whatever is fastest and easiest rather than what is healthy and nutritious.

I'm not holding myself up as a paragon of discipline. I'm not. However, I do feel that part of the key to maintaining my losses and (likely) future healthy weight will be rooted in discipline and conditioning. Once I get through all of the psychological crap that got me fat and helped keep me there, it's the discipline that will move me from a state of understanding why I overate to actually stopping me from overeating. I think that we're fooling ourselves if we think understanding the psychology or even the biology of our weight issues will magically make the desire to overeat disappear just as much as we'd be fooling ourselves to think that discipline alone without psychological understanding is enough to keep us at a healthy weight in the long run.

Hunger Conditioning

When I first started restricting my eating in the hopes of losing weight (as outlined in my plan linked on the right), hunger used to drive me nearly insane. Even now, with relatively moderate restriction (1400-1700 calories a day, mainly falling in the range of 1500-1600), there are times when hunger nags at me. Of course “nagging” is better than “gnawing”, which is what it used to be.

I’ve been thinking about hunger and my response to it quite a lot lately, and reached a few conclusions. Hunger is not a good feeling and it’s not supposed to be, but there was a time not too long ago when people simply ignored being hungry because they had no other choice. Before refrigeration and preservation methods, we couldn’t simply pick up what we wanted to eat and eat it. In fact, it’s my guess that even 50-75 years ago before so much processed and packaged food was around, people viewed food and being hungry quite differently than we do now.

I’ve concluded that people in developed countries have lost the ability to endure hunger effectively. It's a psychological muscle which has nearly completely atrophied. We have this urge and we are free to act on it any time, so we do not develop the mental capacity to simply tolerate an uncomfortable state. It’s something our ancestors (even our grandparents) probably did a much better job of than we do. Of course, it helps that our grandparents weren’t surrounded by food cues like television advertising, T.V. shows where people are eating pizzas and Chinese food, or internet ads. Seeing, smelling, and thinking about food just makes hunger worse.

In order to help normalize my responses to food and hunger, I’ve been “stretching” my capacity to endure hunger and attempting to alter my response to food cues. The main mental exercises I’ve been following are:

1. When I smell delicious food while walking around town, I consider that the aroma is actually better and more gratifying than the taste and texture of the food itself. I focus on the olfactory satisfaction alone and do not couple the consumption of the food with the lovely smell. In particular, when I walk past a bakery, I know the bread smells better than it tastes. If I feel tempted (and I actually haven’t been strongly so), I will think about relatively mundane experiences of eating that food like eating day-old bread, or bagged supermarket bread, or I will consider the times when I bought something based on smell and found it wasn’t as good as I’d expected. Attractive food almost always smells better than it tastes. I tell myself that when smell lures me to a food.
2. When I am hungry, I consider how long it has been since I have eaten and whether or not my stomach has food in it. More often than not, I ate not too long ago and should be able to wait. I’ll try to put off eating for at least 15 minutes and then see if I can add another 15 to that. If I know or can feel that my stomach is not empty, I will make that “wait” longer, likely at least a half hour. I will choose a task to become engaged in to distract me for a while.
3. When I eat and I’m really hungry, I often have the urge to eat a lot because I sometimes convince myself that being so empty means I need to be very full in response. The thing is that these factors are not related. Being very empty sometimes makes me ravenous (a normal physiological response), but a normally portioned meal (which is to say small and measured amounts of food) is going to satisfy me just fine. It’s extremely important to eat slowly and mindfully in these situations so that the experience of eating lasts and the mental need to spend time eating and to experience food is gratified when I’m very hungry. Wolfing down my food in response to strong hunger will not relieve the hunger any more rapidly.
4. I’m endeavoring to react to hunger as something that I can set aside for awhile. Yes, it is bad to be hungry, and it is a signal from your body. However, I am not actually a starving person. I’m an overfed person. My body has energy to survive on, but it will only use it if I force it to dig into its stored energy. That means that there are times when I’m going to have to be hungry. I’m trying to develop an emotional response to hunger the way that we all have developed emotional responses to sexual arousal that occurs at a time or place when it cannot be acted upon. The urge is there, but we set it aside and act on it when the time is appropriate.

One thing that I often read from people who are trying to lose weight is that “you shouldn’t be hungry.” This is a premise that I disagree with. I think that hunger is a normal part of life, and losing weight means you will sometimes be hungry. I’m not talking about a ravenously, insanely, “I-want-to-eat-my-shoe-leather” type of situation, but simply that there are times when you may want to eat when you would be better off resisting. I want to slowly condition myself to have better hunger impulse responses because I think it will curb compulsive eating or poor eating choices induced by food cues. The latter refers to such things as buying fast food or a candy bar because I’m hungry rather than waiting a half hour and eating when I get home (not that I do that, I don’t, but it I have come close to making poor choices in the throes of strong hunger).

At the moment, I feel like I’m in a “second phase” of my lifestyle changes. This second phase is a lot more comfortable than the initial ones that I went through, but it is still something which I have to actively work on and endure some physical and mental discomfort with. I’m much better and more adept at portion control, spend less time ruminating on food or daydreaming about eating, rarely eat mindlessly (I focus on the taste and texture as I eat and eat more slowly), and I’ve conquered about 75% of my emotional eating. I’ve also broken the bonding between activities and food. I rarely think things like, “It’d really enjoy making a big bowl of popcorn and watching a movie”. In fact, just a few weeks ago, I thought about how this happy pairing of food and fun had just vanished without my really pushing it out of the picture.

That being said, I’m still dealing with compulsive eating and cravings. It is these factors that I’m doing these mental hunger resistance exercises to for. I don’t wish to stop eating or lose the pleasure I take from food (which remains considerable), but I do want to have better impulse control. I believe this will work, but only time will tell.