The mental part of losing weight

GauchoMark

I friend of mine recently gave me a book to read titled "Switch" about how to influence people to change. In the beginning, there is a discussion of a mental model presented by Johnathan Haidt that basically suggests that the human brain is divided into two parts - a conscious and unconscious persona. He likens the two sides as a rider and an elephant, where the rider is the conscious brain and controls the elephant, who is the unconscious. However, the elephant is much stronger than the rider, so the rider can't control by force - he must control the elephant by making the elephant WANT to do the thing the rider wants. Additionally, the rider can only force the elephant to do so much before he becomes exhausted and just gives in to the elephants desires.

As soon as I read this, I thought of the mental struggle we face to try to control diet. We know that we want to control diet, but if we try to force the issue, we become exhausted and either binge or just quit all together.

At any rate, its just a mental model that I thought I would share. Here is a wiki article about the theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happiness_Hypothesis