Self
Regulation of Body Weight
In response to fear of
becoming overweight 75% of young women start dieting before age 13, and at any one time
more than half of college age women are on a diet to lose weight.
Sadly, the intention to lose weight by calorie restriction begins an exquisitely
perverse sequence of events that works a bit like the Chinese Finger Trap. This
novelty for children is composed of interwoven strips with openings for the index finger
of each hand. Once the fingers are in, attempting to remove them by pulling in opposite
directions causes the trap to tighten. The harder one pulls the stronger is the grip
preventing escape. The solution to the problem is relatively obvious, and few people
other than young children are actually entrapped by this device. Dieting sets up a
trap that is far more subtle and dangerous. The vast majority of people who fall
into it never escape.
The unfortunate reality is well stated in a recent review paper1:
- "Dieting seldom results in significant or lasting weight loss, and
the majority of individuals who begin dieting will experience dietary failure. A
common reaction to diet failure is to blame the failure of not having had enough
will-power, with a simultaneous commitment to starting the diet again, but this time
promising to try harder. Indeed the weight loss industry is a profitable industry
because most customers are return customers. However, these repeated failures may
eventually wreak havoc with the self-regulation of eating."
It is important to change unhealthy habits, but you are advised to
consider the following observations:
- Deprivation increases the magnitude of reward. Eating is more rewarding when
hungry than when full.
- Deprivation of food produces desire for food. Continued deprivation can
produce a fixation or a desperation.
- A man lost in the dessert is fixated on thoughts and images of water.
Deprived of water he has greater passion for water than for women. He would
gladly trade large quantities of money for modest quantities of water.
- The attachment of success and failure to a deceptively difficult to achieve outcome
sets in motion a chain of events that perversely produces loss of control. See
The Imp of the Perverse
- Adhering to a plan rather than being controlled by local conditions requires
sufficient cognitive resources to override the local influences. Anything that
diminishes cognitive resources [e.g., fatigue, negative emotions] makes one vulnerable to
a lapse of control.
- A lapse once it occurs can be can have irreversible consequences. There is a
ballistic quality to a automatic behavior; once initiated it has a trajectory of its
own. A binge, once begun, is extremely difficult to regulate.
Eating to escape from self-awareness
Heatherton and Baumeister2 present considerable evidence to support the
notion that people use binge to escape from self-awareness. According to this
view, some people use food the way other people use alcohol - to numb out, escape, to
become mindless - so they can be free of the pain of self-criticism.
When dieters experience failure to achieve their high standards, they experience
negative emotional states. They often seek escape by avoiding meaningful
thought and focusing on direct experience. While doing so temporarily improves mood,
it also interferes with mindful control of behavior. An unintended consequence of
the escape from awareness into mindlessness is the loss of the ability to
self-regulate. This becomes a recursive trap, because the resulting failure
produces negative emotional states . . . leading to the desire to escape into
mindlessness.3
Some examples of the relationship between mindlessness and eating:
- Dieters ate much more popcorn when watching an intensely absorbing film then when
watching a film that produced less absorption of attention.4
- Overweight shoppers purchase less food when they are hungry than when they had
recently eaten. This is the opposite of normal weight
individuals.4
- Bulimic are more likely to binge and purge after drinking alcohol - presumably
because alcohol produces mindlessness causing people to cease to monitor what they are
doing.4
- Dieters were assigned to two groups. In one, the dieters were forced to break
their diet by participating in a taste test comparing high calorie foods. The other
group of dieters tasted low calorie food and thus did break their diet. Both
groups were then given free access to sandwich quarters to "thank them" for
their participation. Later subjects were asked to state how many sandwich quarters
they ate. Dieters in the high preload condition had error rates almost 50 times as large
as dieters in the low preload condition!5
No one can maintain an eating style that requires constant effort.
In fact since dieting requires one to override a motivation to eat, we would
expect failure to be most likely when one is fatigued or when cognitive
resources are taxed by other demands. Indeed, this is the case.
Dieters are most likely to lapse at night when tired, and to relapse when
they are experiencing serious life stressors.4
Failure - the predictable outcome of dieting - has bad consequences for the
dieter, including weight gain, depression, anxiety, and decreased
self-esteem. Repeated exposure to failure is harmful. This web
site is designed to help people escape the iatrogenic*
consequences of the dieting spiral.
Toward Mindfulness
If it is true that a decrease in self-awareness leads to self regulatory failure,
then does an increase self-awareness lead to self regulatory success?
- When people think that someone is watching them eat, their behavior conforms to
their stated intention.5
- When dieters are told to monitor their eating - e.g., count each cookie, or measure
portions] their restraints become stronger and they become relatively immune to
disinhibited eating.6
Self-monitoring of food intake is the cornerstone of behavioral treatment.
Several studies have shown that those who regularly monitored the food intake
lost more weight than those who failed to self-monitor. Moreover, subjects tend to
lose more weight in the weeks that they self-monitored than during the weeks that the did
not.7
Tactics to increase self-awareness of food intake so that you can engage in
self-regulatory, mindful, non-automatic behavior:
- Eat only when seated
- Eat only from a plate
- Take medium sized portions
- Leave some food on plate
- Use hunger cues as a reminder that you are on track
- Do not eat while watching TV!
Hypnotherapy and Treatment for Obesity
Hypnosis enhances the effectiveness of
psychotherapy. Kirsh et al8 note:
"Excluding Treatments for obesity, the mean effect size for adding hypnosis
to [cognitive-behavioral] treatment protocols was 0.53 standard deviations,
indicating that the average client receiving cognitive-behavioral
hypnotherapy showed greater improvement than 70% of clients given the same
treatment without hypnosis. The effect of adding hypnosis to the treatment
of obesity was even greater. Across studies, the mean weight loss was 6.03
pounds without hypnosis and 14.88 pounds with hypnosis. The effect size for
this difference was 0.98 standard deviations. Mort important, correlational
analysis indicated that the benefits of hypnosis in the treatment of obesity
increased substantially over time [r=.74]. The importance of this is
underscored by the typical finding of substantial relapse after nonhypnotic
treatment. These data justify the recommendation that hypnosis be adopted as
a standard component of therapeutic interventions." [page 4]
Suggested starting points:
Footnotes. * Iatrogenic = a pathological condition caused by a misguided
attempt to treat a problem.
1. Baumeister, Heatherton and Tice. "Eating Too Much" in Losing
Control: Why People Fail at Self-Regulation - San Diego: Academic Press 1994. p. 190
2. Heatherton, T. F. & Baumeister, R. F. (1991). Binge eating as an
escape from self-awareness. Psychological Bulletin, 110, 86—108.)
3. Polivy, J. & Herman, C. P. (1987). Diagnosis and treatment of
normal eating.( Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 55, 635—644.)
4. Baumeister, Heatherton and Tice. "Eeating Too Much"
in Losing Control: Why People Fail at Self-Regulation - San Diego: Academic Press
1994
5. Herman, C. P. & Polivy, J. (1980). Restrained eating.(In A. Stunkard
(Ed.), Eating and its disorders (pp. 141—156). Philadelphia: Saunders.)
6.Polivy, J. & Herman, C. P. (1985). Dieting and bingeing: A causal
analysis. American Psychologist, 40, 193-201.
7. Baumeister, Heatherton and Tice. "Eating Too Much"
in Losing Control: Why People Fail at Self-Regulation - San Diego: Academic Press
1994
8. Clinical Hypnosis and
Self-regulation: Cognitive-Behavioral Perspectives. I. Kirsch, A Capafons E.
Carena-Buelna, S. Amigo. [Eds]. APA: Washington. 1999.
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The second day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the
second day you're off it.
-Jackie Gleason
It is often possible to discern a structure to people's difficulites in which
internal states and external events continually recreate the conditions for the
reoccurrence of each other.
- Paul Wachtel
If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you've never tried before.
- Steve Wright
Observation, not old age, brings wisdom.
- Syrus
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice,
there is.
- Jan van de Snepscheut |
