Imagining Our Bodies as a Relational Construct: You and Me

shel80kg wrote: »

Ok...I trusted my body and the popcorn debacle "worked itself out"...or rather, my body did what it needed to do and I have actually lost more weight than I thought. So....the learnings "Grasshopper" is don't obsess when we take a deviation from the pulpit. We are human and need to make mistakes so we can learn about ourselves. I don't need to consume as much "naughty" food as I did a couple of days ago and my body does not deserve to be put on the spot to have to redeem me. It did a great job and I am thankful. But,,,,,,I must have put it in a bit of a pickle having to get rid of so much salt so I will try and be more mindful moving forward. Can't be all or nothing. Not a good idea.

I really enjoy your musings. I agree with your previous comments about strange concerns, because as individuals, we see what other people do as strange, but it’s not inherently strange when we do anything 😆.

When you were having a full blown conversation with yourself about popcorn, I thought, who cares? (As in, it’s no problem!). Sometimes you need to have popcorn in order to maintain some sort of equilibrium and to keep going. There is no naughty food or mistakes. There’s balance and harmony. When your body regulates hormones and temperature there’s a range for homeostasis. It’s not- be this exact ideal perfect number everyday or you will die! We have a range and the goal is to maintain balance over time. No need to create problems that don’t exist, that’s letting your old thinking get in your way.

Dieting doesn’t have to be an existential crisis, know what I mean? When I got back from vacation, and had gained 5 lbs, I wasn’t disappointed because I knew what happened and I knew what to do to autocorrect. If anything those lbs were permission to live my life. And, when I got back, I gave myself permission to settle into being home and get back on track. Have I always been this way? No. I had to learn I wasn’t an outlier, victim, or special snowflake, and touching food didn’t make me blow up and gain 1000 lbs. It took me using data to get the facts straight. And I, personally, can’t argue with the facts. Once I understood that, I could lean on data and not allow my low self-esteem or poor self-worth to tell me lies anymore.

I just wanted to tell you everything is going to be okay, you’re doing great. Put your trust into the science so it doesn’t have to be so personal. Will power, self-confidence, and motivation, wax and wane and can’t be trusted. Stick to your balanced plan and take as long as it takes. It’s not like we’re going anywhere 🩷.

shel80kg wrote: »

Dieting doesn’t have to be an existential crisis, know what I mean?

Love it. I sounded like "eldorko" making popcorn my biggest problem of the weekend. Thanks for making me laugh; but more seriously, put things in perspective. Now...potato chips....that's a different story. JUST KIDDING.

😆

I need that cat (trained for chocolates and cookies and...)!

shel80kg wrote: »

Cat got your chips?

Seriously, low energy today and just wondering if my Ketosis body needs a bit of sugary fuel? I am trying to do the “right” think but feel like an old man today. Wait, I’m 64…Am I being realistic?
Oh well, one of those days .

Do you think it’s hormonal or that you don’t have enough of those quick fuel calories available to feel energized? Sometimes we do have those days, and they’re a total bummer. And sometimes it’s a sign we need to shift our diet into something practical. Hope it’s just one of those days. Otherwise, adding 150 calories +/- of some energy adding calories sounds like a good call. As my husband would say…

It's not 'You are what you eat...' it's more 'You eat what you are...'

shel80kg wrote: »

Good point Papy…
If we are impulsive, reckless and dissociated kind of folk, well, good luck with consistency and responsible eating.
I used to chomp into large bars of chocolate with no limitations. Eat the whole damn think without a second thought….or a second of thought. And I wonder why I was relegated to the 4xl sections of shirts at Kmart? Not rocket science.

Does Exogenous obesity describe your experience then?

Excerpt: Exogenous obesity has a psychological or emotional origin. Nowadays, it is the most common form of obesity and mainly occurs due to excessive consumption of food, certain eating habits, and/or undiagnosed eating disorders such as hyperphagia or binge-eating disorder. It is also associated with affective disorders such as depression and anxiety. This type of obesity represents 90-95% of obesity cases.

One of the difficulties that many therapists encounter is organizing the treatment with these patients. First, because it was believed for a long time that it was a disease that had no place in psychology centers, which was due to the view that the origin was either genetic or organic. Second, because people who requested psychotherapy for this problem did not receive specific treatment due to a lack of knowledge on the part of the professional.

An Obesity Approach from the Work with Attachment, Trauma and Dissociation

The proposed approach combines working with attachment, trauma, and dissociation. These three pillars are essential to develop the therapeutic treatment for obesity.

“When treating attachment, trauma, and dissociation, we cover all those aspects that influence both the appearance of the disease and its development. Many of the cases of obesity find their origin in an attachment disorder since food ends up associated with adverse life experience. In other cases, food becomes the way in which the person learns to survive traumatic experiences and, in others, food is the means through which the person connects with the dissociative experience to regulate themselves or disconnect”.

Continue to read if this interests you. It was pretty earth shattering for me in the right way.

https://www.gavinpublishers.com/article/view/key-points-in-the-psychotherapeutic-treatment-of-obesity

Details on these 3 points are essential IMO: attachment, trauma, and dissociation


I ate because I didn’t know when my meals were coming, if ever. And I was alone a lot and it was a self soothing technique. I often wondered why other people become obese and I see the response, “I like food a lot” here in the forum. This response doesn’t reflect the 95% of people in the study so far, but it might be too personal to say. For me, it was so much more than that, and personally I didn’t relate obesity being about taste as much as I did with uncertainty.

I think keeping an actual food journal is a great idea. How we feel about food affects what we eat so much. And really, when you think about it, food has been connected to love/security from the day we're born and rely on Mom and Dad to feed us (or not). It makes sense that throughout life, the feeling of being fed is so closely connected to the feeling of being cared for.

shel80kg wrote: »

Thanks Sollyn 2312. I hadn't considered the association between initial bonding, food source and delivery and parental reliance. Makes perfect sense. Do you think we underestimate the importance of the "early" years of development and learning? I know that some psychologists make this a major focus in therapy. I have changed my mind a number of times over the years and keep returning to the importance of how we might have been influenced/conditioned from an early age to develop our eating patterns. Interested in what all of you think about this?

Yes, I think we do underestimate it. There's an incredible amount of learning and growth at that time. I do, however, think we might have gone too far in the direction of trying to protect them from any and all trauma. It's true that trauma rewires the brain in certain ways, but that's because all learning rewires the brain. It's just that, with trauma, we probably learn some things that aren't so helpful (like feeling hungry means I am unloved and uncared for, for example). But, people are resilient, and I have enough hope to believe that if we can learn one thing, we can learn something new and different.

shel80kg wrote: »

Something I wrote earlier today to someone who is part of the "yo-yo" fraternity of weight loss and weight gain that many of us subscribe to:

I remember one of my favourite mentors at university explain that the skills required to lose weight are completely different to those involved with maintaining the weight we have achieved.

I have found that they are the same skills. The main difference is that the feedback is different when maintaining fat loss. The scale no longer goes down consistently. Well, it does, but it's punctuated by going up. Down and up. Up and down. It's losing the same five or eight or ten pounds over and over and over and not letting more than that return.

Using a tool like MFP, it's exactly the same with the exception that you get a few more calories in maintenance than in fat loss.

I do agree that it's not easy to maintain. Old ways are hard to keep at bay. It takes continued vigilance. It takes good habits. A wise person sets themself up for success by taking a slow and steady approach to fat loss and uses that time to develop the good habits that they will continue when they are done with the fat loss phase.

Was your mentor a professor? What was the class?

shel80kg wrote: »

Hi mtaratoot,

The mentor was/is a professor in Psychology with a speciality in motivation and addiction. He provided clinical evidence and longitudinal case studies on the dieting and maintenance as two separate and distince processes which I found useful (and convincing).

Most people become quite successful at losing weight. These same individuals are more likely than not at gaining back the weight and even more than they started at baseline. The prof's conclusion which I think is pretty accurate is that the choices and decisions change when the weight is lost and indivdiuals are faced with the long term process of maintaing and establishing longer term patterns and habits. Habit formation and the the neuropathways necessary for more established and entrenched responses to hunger (and often other less physcial and more psychological reasons for eating ) are often side-stepped during the "dieting phase" but activate almost without mercy once weight loss has been achieved.

Sadly, most people ascribe to you your view that the skill sets are the same and if that was true, why do a vast number of individuals succeed with dieting but simply fail at maintaining the body weight they worked so hard to achieve?

I think it is imperative that we see the two processes as different because they are. My personal view is that the "diet industry" counts on individuals constantly cycling from weight loss to weight gain and this in a large part due to the unsustainability of dieting and the lack of education and support for the longer term necessity of healthy, appropriate eating and self-care habits.

Most people may believe that the two processes, loss and maintenance are the same . . . but very many do not seem to behave in accord with that belief when losing. It is very common here to see the "lose weight fast" approach to the loss phase, with restrictive eating rules and punitively intense exercise; or falling into whatever the trend of the moment is for popular named-diet weight loss approaches.

I don't know for sure what happens in those cases, but many of the people following that kind of approach usually disappear from MFP quite quickly. Some return with "back again, regained" posts. Some do persist until goal weight is attained, but post in ways that suggest they're floundering a bit when they reach maintenance.

I obviously haven't done a formal study, but it seems like a lot of the people who do stay here and are long term successful at maintaining loss do behave during weight loss as if they believe it's necessary to identify and establish new, permanent habits. They may not go all the way through loss with that philosophy, but do have a phase during loss where they basically "train for maintenance".

I do agree with @mtaratoot that the loss and maintenance skill sets are quite similar . . . but in a context where I saw the loss phase as about finding new, sustainable habits I could stick with long term in order to maintain.

I feel like the difference between those who say (and behave as if) the essential skill sets are the same are taking a different from common approach to the loss phase. For myself, I was very determined not to do anything to lose weight that I wasn't willing to continue doing forever to stay at a healthy weight, other than a sensibly moderate calorie deficit until I reached goal weight. That put a premium on finding relatively easy, relatively happy new habits and practicing them until they could happen almost on autopilot.

I've seen another long-term maintainer here suggest that others "treat maintenance as if one still has 10 pounds to lose", which is a slightly different take, but a similar idea - to make the process the same for both loss and maintenance.

Many, many people treat loss as a project with an end date, after which things "go back to normal". That's a recipe for regain. For someone like me, who has a tendency to become overweight, weight management is a forever endeavor, lifelong. The loss phase is just an on-ramp to forever, ideally, IMO.

@shel80kg

Shel,

I don't think there's disagreement with what happens or even the motivation for people to go on unsustainable diets that only work for a while if at all.

I think it is representative of a deeper problem. I can't say whether this is the case in cultures other than USA, so it's a limited observation. I suspect that some cultural norms from USA do travel abroad. What I see is that people have trouble with delayed gratification. Right now is not soon enough. Delayed gratification - working now for something desirable in the future - is a skill that can serve us well.

When I was working, I would always be amazed when people would routinely buy new cars. Fancy trucks. On credit. Their previous vehicle hadn't even been paid off yet. They would buy new boats and trailers. For sure they had some fun toys, but they couldn't use them very often because they had to work more to try to deal with the debt - sometimes taking side jobs in addition to reasonably well-paying full-time government jobs.

I know that credit card debt is a burden that a lot of people have to deal with. It's a hole that digs itself deeper and deeper. Some people can change their habits, be a bit more frugal, and work towards paying some of them down or off before incurring more debt. Some people even overcome it. I have a friend who only got over it after a bankruptcy. She could get a credit card again, but refuses just to make sure she doesn't fall back into that trap. Kudos on her for saving enough money to buy a tiny property and build a tiny house without a mortgage just so she could avoid debt.

We recently had an ice storm. People were livid that the City didn't plow the streets. This was an ICE storm, not a snow storm. We don't get a lot of winter weather, so we don't have many plows. The plows we have are rubber-tipped. There's no way they could get through the ice. That didn't matter - people needed it done yesterday.

Road rage is an issue. If a person were to be nice and let someone else merge, it might slow them down by six seconds. Maybe more if it made them miss a traffic light. Now we're up to 36 seconds. This is maybe a weak example of delayed gratification. Then again, people paid all that money for the fancy new car, it's almost kind of interesting they wouldn't try to maximize the time they spend in it by letting someone else merge.

There's lots more examples. Needing to lose weight immediately is a symptom of the same syndrome. It stems from an unrealistic of the work-reward model. It is indeed unfortunate that when that "switch gets flipped" as you mentioned, people don't take a moment to think about developing a safe and effective approach. It is unfortunate that they believe some of the marketing that tells them there's magic to be had from {insert fast loss model duur jour}. Do you remember Martina Navratilova's "potato diet?" High carb. People today would be aghast. Remember the cabbage soup diet? Are people still doing that? Grapefruit diet? Same deal. Promises made for fast results. Failure almost always ensues even if there's some initial success. While the results from the "Marshmallow Experiment" were debunked, the practice of delayed gratification could serve people well. For six centuries people have written that "Patience is a Virtue." Many people in our modern culture have a real challenge practicing it. For fat loss, it's critical.