No Gyroscope

A few days ago, I was doing an online chat with a long-time friend of mine. She is a lovely person both inside and out. She once dreamed of modeling and has always had the figure for it. Food has never been an issue for her, though she eats abysmally. What I mean by that is that she eats fast food, instant food, and frozen prepared meals. She never cooks, and eats two meals per day. Much of the time, she selects from the 99 cent menus of various fast food places.

The thing that my friend does not do is overeat. She eats enough to be satisfied, and then she has no interest in food. In fact, the reason she doesn't cook is that the effort simply isn't worth it for her. She loves certain kinds of food, but she has an internal mechanism which tells her to stop well short of ingesting enough to put on weight.

She and I were chatting about addiction and I told her that I believe that I am a food addict and forever would be. She is a (recovered) alcoholic and former smoker, so she understands my situation well and has empathy for me. In fact, she's the most compassionate thin woman I have ever known and has never judged me or her other overweight friends for their problems with food.

While talking to her, I told her that I think that I will have to spend the rest of my life weighing, measuring, and counting calories for food that I eat because I have no internal gyroscope that serves to stop me from overeating. I don't know if I never had the type of mechanism that she and many other thin people have, or if it was destroyed over the years by my eating habits and psychological situation. Either way, it's a bit like a disability that I have to compensate for. I don't know how much I need to eat to survive and I can't properly read my body's cues (or my body cues me incorrectly because its tuned improperly or "broken" in this regard).

I think that this is the case for a lot of people who end up morbidly obese. Our GPS when it comes to food simply does not work correctly. We're like people who can't hear who cope by reading lips. They can't hear, but they can communicate and understand, so they cope. We can't know how much to eat, but we can monitor and regulate. Of course, it's no where in the vicinity of "easy", but there's not much choice if you want to feel better about yourself. I'm guessing no "disability" is easy to work around, and not knowing when to stop eating and therefore having to work hard to control your behavior is no different than any other problem in this regard.

Food Cues

Like many people, I've been enjoying watching "Mad Men" and it has got me thinking about advertising and the effect it has on us. However, it has also made me think about the way in which the world has changed since the early 60's (as that is the period the show is set in) and how lifestyles have changed. The combination of the show being about Madison Avenue advertisers and the time it is set in makes me thing about the combination of these two elements in a manner I don't know that I otherwise might have in terms of how they affect obesity.

In the early 60's, several things didn't happen that happen now. One is that people spent a lot less time watching television because there were fewer channels and not everyone had a T.V. That not only relates to sedentary living but food cues. Food cues are when you are reminded to eat by something other than your body. Seeing a Pizza Hut commercial with a gooey piece of a deep dish pie might spur you to crave pizza, or seeing someone eating an ice cream cone on a T.V. show might make you want some, too. In the past, people ate when their bodies told them to do so rather than when they were cued to do so by external prodding.

What is more, the type of advertising that is done these days is honed to a perfect craft. You can't say that of ads 30 or 40 years ago where there weren't experts figuring out the best way to make food look great in every picture. Cookbooks from the 40's-70's not only contained fewer color pictures (because color printing was so expensive), but they also featured fairly bad color adjustment and unappetizing looking food.

I'm not suggesting that people are mindless vessels that can't ignore advertising, but we are highly susceptible to being cued. The old saying, "out of sight, out of mind" is definitely valid. This is why we forget to do things we should do if we put the items associated with the task in some out of the way place. Seeing food everywhere increases the chances that we'll want to eat more often. It's a reminder of a sensory stimulation that we enjoy.

Personally, I've been aware of how vulnerable to food cues that I am for some time. I respond with the desire that advertisers are hoping for when I see something really tasty on T.V. Since I've been trying to implement lifestyle changes, I try to not focus on the memory of the pleasure of eating the food, but on the fact that I'm being manipulated as a consumer. I didn't want that food a moment ago, and I shouldn't want it now because I saw a picture of it.

That being said, it's only to easy to talk about talking yourself out of such things. I'm guessing that smokers who want to quit smoking may similarly be cued to pick up their bad habit by watching people seemingly enjoy a cigarette on T.V. I think most people are aware that advertising is a cue to engage in certain behaviors, but they may not be aware of the aggregate effect it has on them. You may be able to push the urge away a 100 times, but when you're exposed to commercials or programming showing food (hence the appeal of paying for product placement in popular shows) at least 25 times a day, you're going to be shaped by what you see sooner rather than later.