Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Unscience of Dieting

The Unscience of dieting

The only defense we have against overeating is the conscious exercise of will. If we respond to the urgings of our bodies, weight gain is inevitable.

My wife used to feed the dogs and she kept their bowls full all the time. Guess what….they gained weight. It was only after we changed that routine that our lab started losing weight. People however are not dogs…. If we were slaves like in days of old maybe our masters could impose a regimen through fear and insist we regulate our intake of food. (Like the Government) However, since that option does not exist for the present, it rests solely on the individual to discipline themselves and regulate the food that goes into their mouths. Some have a metabolism that makes this easy and some don’t and some have the ability to discipline themselves and some don’t.

What is interesting about weight gain is that we can understand the science and still be unable to summon the inner strength to keep it in check. Hunger is a chronic and nagging compulsion. The more overweight we become the more cells screaming for nourishment have to be kept in check . My wife and I beat smoking after many years of addiction. We liken our present diet challenge to what it took to quit. While there are similarities there are also some marked differences.

The similarities are that it takes a long term commitment and an unrelenting vigilance. In the smoking struggle we would often give up after giving in to the temptation for another cigarette. “Oh goodness,” we would reflect…. “I had a cigarette and I was doing so good. Guess that shows I can’t quit… might as well give up and smoke the whole pack.“ To get past the tendency to capitulate after a lapse we decided to push though these failures as if they never occurred, telling ourselves there would be setbacks, however we would continue to persevere. It finally worked for us as the durations grew longer between smokes and our resolve stiffened. (And the smoke started to stink.)

Food is different. You're never going to get past a hunger for food. It is not an addiction like smoking but, rather a bodily function. It goes to the core of our being and the search for food is hard wired into our genome and it isn’t going to go away.

Most of us understand the science of weight control but fail when it comes to dealing with it. My wife and a blog buddy, Karen, point out for example that it is better to eat more often than just three meals a day…. That more often excites the metabolism and actually causes you to burn more calories…. Or that going into the “Starvation mode isn’t good either.. because the body begins shutting down non essential metabolic functions. I believe the science of all this however, there is a human component to dieting that trumps the scientific one. Eating six times a day instead of three is a whole lot like snacking and the distinction begins to blur the more often you go into the refueling mode. For that reason I stick to three meals a day.

Dieters like to weigh themselves in order to measure progress. The less they weigh the reasoning goes the better the diet is working. Naturally the scale is an important tool but it is not the only one. The mirror is a good tool as well and if you become more active a redistribution will begin to take place that will not necessarily show immediately on the scale.. There is also the “Socks” test. The ease with which this morning task is accomplished is also a good indicator. But the biggest test is a state of mind that insists that dieting must become a part of your daily routein and life style.... that it's so important that a person has no choice but exercise greater leadership and discipline over this bodily function.

I imagine my body as a Starship.….Inside my mind, like the crew of the Enterprise, are minions of little people. They operate our bodies. They see the life we are experiencing on the video screen of our minds. The senses feed a stream of images onto the screen and the sensors on the bridge show data on the mirad of gauges. These minions have no concept of tomorrow and live only for the present. All they know is what the control room instrumentation tells them and what the will (like some powerful and omnipotent voice over the loudspeaker tells them) If a good looking girl walks by they hit the testosterone lever. The will must often intervene to avoid a bad situation. If its gets hot they remind you of the fridge and a cool beer that waits invitingly on the shelf. If your bladder is full they send you skipping to the bathroom and so on and so forth.

Our creator, however, has provided us with a manual override to these automatic functions taking place within us; A Captain Kirk. That is our will. Through the exercise of will we can make our bodies do things it doesn’t want to. Like a spoiled child the flesh hates us when we exercise the override option but it has no choice but to comply…(Well almost no choice). As an alternative it waits until we’re distracted with other things and sends a low level chronic compulsion through our being that is constant and relenting and which slowly wears us down until we're caught in a weak moment and capitulate.

With eating, unlike a substance addiction, the struggle is unending and we must have simple and nonnegotiable barriers in place… and just because there is a breach from time to time... so what? We must gird our will to a life-time struggle and keep that delicious poison we call food from ruining our quality of life and killing us prematurely.