With further digging we identified that the reason she wanted to clean her house was so she could socialize more by having people over. Being more social and having friends over? Now that’s likely to motivate someone to give up drinking. Ask yourself, How will engaging in these health behaviors help me be the person I want to be? What will make it worth it to do these health behaviors? Remember, health behaviors are hard! You need a really good reason to do them. If all you’re going to do with improved health and extra energy is sit on the couch or do more laundry, then don’t bother!
Here’s another thing to remember: We do difficult things all the time in the service of our values. For example, if you got yourself out of a warm, cozy bed to go to work today, you did something difficult in the service of something that matters to you. Perhaps it’s the paycheck, or perhaps it’s the work that you do, but something motivated you to do something uncomfortable. If it matters to you to be an engaged, attentive, caring parent, then you do difficult things for your children in the service of this value all the time, whether it’s cleaning up after your sick kid or staying up all night with a crying infant. It’s totally okay if health isn’t one of your core values. It’s totally okay if engaging in a health behavior sucks. Engaging in your health behaviors can be just one more difficult thing you do in the service of your values.
Choice Point
You can download the choice point worksheet at this book’s website: http://www.newharbinger.com/43317. At the top are boxes titled “toward” and “away.” In the model, these represent whether a behavior moves you toward or away from the person you want to be or the life you want to have. In this chapter you clarified your values, which help you engage in behaviors that move you toward the person you want to be or the life you want to live. Go ahead and fill in the “value” line in the box under “toward.” (I’ll clarify what a SMART goal is in chapter 3, so for now just focus on your value.) “Strong” is a value that’s important to me, so I’d write that on the “value” line.
If you’re following my suggestion of reading one chapter per week, then this week try to focus on reminding yourself of your values and how the healthy habit you’re working on is related to them. Thus, if you think about your healthy habit (for example, getting more sleep), try to also remind yourself of how engaging in it helps you be the person you want to be (for example, getting more sleep will help me be more creative, be a more engaged parent, and be more productive in my career or volunteer work).
Chapter 2:
Weight and Other Things You Don’t Control
I want to offer you a challenge: Tomorrow I’d like you to weigh 256 pounds; the day after that, 145 pounds; and the following day, 200 pounds. Do you think you can do this? Can anyone do this?
What if I asked you to drink one liter of water tomorrow, eat one cup of green veggies the next day, and go for a ten-minute walk the day after. Would you be able to do that?
Most individuals answer no to the first challenge but yes to the second. What’s the difference between the two requests? The difference is how much control we actually have.
I’m going to say something that flies in the face of everything you know or have been told about weight: We don’t control our weight. That’s right, I just said that.
This may seem hard to believe. You’ve likely heard from the media, health care providers, and others in your life that if you just work hard enough, if you try for long enough, you’ll be able to have a beautiful skinny body. Culturally we believe that we can control our weight, and that more effort results in more weight loss. There is a strongly held myth that weight is all about calories in and calories out, which led to a ridiculously simplified public campaign of “eat less and move more” (Chaput et al. 2014), but science actually tells us the opposite. We can influence our weight, but we don’t have direct control. Here are just a few of the factors that influence weight (Hafekost et al. 2013; Schmidt et al. 2014):
Genetics
Maternal weight
Paternal weight
Maternal weight gain during pregnancy
Whether you were breastfed
Hormone levels, including cortisol, ghrelin, and leptin
Sleep
The walkability of your city
Access to fresh fruits and vegetables
The number of fast-food restaurants in your neighborhood
The kind of job you have (for example, sedentary versus active)
With so many factors influencing weight, and the fact that we have very little control over most of them, it’s impossible for us to have direct control over our weight.
The American and Canadian Medical Associations recently defined obesity as a chronic disease, which has several important implications. First, it means that the medical community will start to see and treat obesity not as a failure of character but a chronic condition similar to diabetes or high blood pressure. The second is that weight, similar to other chronic conditions, must be managed for the long term. Doctors would never treat someone’s diabetes for only six months and then be confused why five years later the patient’s blood sugar was out of control. Yet that’s exactly how weight is approached. We expect that dieting for six months will have effects far into the future.
At the obesity clinic where I worked, participants often asked what the five-year outcomes were for our one-year program. We responded that obesity is a chronic condition that must be managed indefinitely. Our goal was to encourage participants to continue with their weight-related health behaviors for the long term.
As we’ve come to understand obesity as a chronic condition, and not as a failure of willpower, we’ve learned that we have a lot less control over our weight than we thought. In fact, not only does our culture trick us into thinking we have direct control over our weight, so does our own mind.
Our Problem-Solving Brain
Remember our cave person brain? One of the most critical things early humans had to do to survive was to problem solve, such as determining if they had enough water and food, and where they could find shelter. The problem-solving aspect of our brain comes in handy when we’re trying to control aspects of the external environment, because these problems can be “fixed.” If you need shelter, you can solve that problem. Food and water? Solvable! Thank you problem-solving brain!
However, this same problem-solving brain can also get us into trouble. Many of us in the developed world don’t need to invest considerable amounts of effort in finding food or water or shelter. Most of the ways we solve these problems are straightforward and clear: go to the grocery store, turn on the tap, turn on the air conditioner. As a result of this relative ease, our problem-solving brain looks for other “problems” to solve, because it’s hardwired to do this.
One of the other “problems” our brains will try to solve is weight, or any other chronic condition (for example, diabetes, chronic pain, heart disease). Our problem-solving brain identifies weight as a problem and works to get us to solve it or to get rid of it. Western culture fuels our problem-solving brain with messages that weight is under our control, and if you’re overweight you’re a failure or you’re lazy. Corporations capitalize on our tendency to want to fix things by pointing out what’s wrong with us and by offering solutions to make us happy, and we buy these “fixes” by the boatload: weight loss was a 64-billion-dollar industry in 2014 (Marketdata LLC 2017).
One of my clients, Claire, was a classic example of someone who experienced negative consequences as a result of the problem-solving brain. Claire described to me the numerous diets, gyms, trainers, and weight-loss programs she’d used to try to lose weight. Like many people she had spent thousands of dollars, invested a huge amount of time and effort, and sacrificed things she enjoyed to “fix” her weight only to end up heavier than when she had started. Sound familiar?
A key issue with the problem-solving brain is that it tends to
focus on the number on the scale as the goal and measure of weight-loss success. But using this number alone can actually lead to some unintended consequences in the long run. For example, Claire described adding exercise to her weight-loss efforts. “Every time I exercise I gain weight,” she told me. Because losing weight was her goal, her understandable, natural response was to stop exercising because it wasn’t helping. However, we know from research that exercise is important for long-term weight maintenance. Exercise also makes you healthier, regardless of your weight. But because exercise didn’t result in short-term weight loss, Claire came to a natural, logical conclusion: Why continue to exercise if it’s not helping me reach my goal? She therefore stopped engaging in that health behavior.
But even if you do lose weight, focusing on “fixing” your weight still has unintended consequences. Evelyn, another client of mine, successfully lost forty pounds by carefully counting calories, avoiding all social activities involving food, and knitting in the evenings (instead of eating chips while watching TV). When she finally got to her target weight, she was delighted (in fact, she celebrated by having her favorite food, an ice cream sundae). Being a well-socialized human in Western culture, once she reached her goal she stopped working on it and moved on to the next one. She therefore stopped doing all the behaviors that helped her lose weight. Not only did this make sense based on our understanding of goals (after all, she had accomplished her goal), but the behaviors she was engaged in to lose weight weren’t sustainable over time. How was she going to avoid social activities involving food forever just to manage her weight? Science tells us that continuing with weight-related health behaviors long term is key to managing weight. As expected, when Evelyn stopped engaging in her behaviors she started putting the weight back on.
The inherent problem with a fix-it approach is that we focus on “getting rid” of the problem. By focusing on the number on the scale we assume that there is an “end” to the problem. When you fix it you’re done. It therefore offers short-term solutions that don’t result in long-term behavior change. Claire gave up because she never found the fix, and Evelyn gave up because she reached her goal and thought she was done. In both cases (whether you’re succeeding or failing at losing weight), focusing on the number on the scale does not promote long-term behavior change.
Why do we need long-term behavior change? If you’ve struggled with weight then you have probably thought about and worked on your weight a great deal, sometimes even more than people who have been a “normal” weight their whole life. You’ve probably lost more weight in your life than these people. In fact, results from scientific research and my own clinical experience working with hundreds of people trying to lose weight clearly demonstrate this: weight loss isn’t the hardest part of weight management—keeping the weight off, or weight maintenance, is (Chaput et al. 2014; MacLean et al. 2011). Just like any chronic disease, weight must be managed long term, not fixed with short-term solutions (Coughlin et al. 2016). The key to weight maintenance is continuing to engage in weight-related health behaviors over the long run. You therefore need a way to continue with health behaviors even when the scale doesn’t change. How on earth do you do that?
After my divorce, I personally spent a lot of time not losing weight, and I had to figure out how to keep engaging in weight-related health behaviors even when they didn’t result in weight loss. I mentioned that I follow a plant-based diet, not for weight loss but to reduce my environmental impact. I also go to boot camp three times per week. Again, I don’t do this to lose weight, but to feel strong. Being able to do squats and push-ups and burpees makes me feel capable of tackling problems. While I was going through my divorce, feeling strong and capable was really meaningful for me. Even if I felt like an emotional wreck, I could still do some push-ups and remind myself that I could deal with whatever issue I was facing.
But despite this focus, my mind never stopped trying to get me to focus on weight rather than behavior. After all, a well-functioning mind is hardwired to relentlessly focus on fixing a problem. I had to remind myself that my job is to do my health behaviors; what my body does with that effort is out of my control. I had to repeatedly remind myself that my health behaviors were things I did in the service of my values (climate change, being strong and capable) rather than a “fix” for my weight.
Why Weight Isn’t Fixable
If you’ve been socialized in Western culture, the belief that weight is fixable is typical. So I’m going to provide some more information about why weight isn’t fixable. Over millions of years of evolutionary pressure human beings have evolved to make sure they don’t starve death. For example, research shows that our metabolism slows down when we lose weight, a phenomenon referred to as “metabolic adaptation” (Muller and Bosy-Westphal 2013; Rosenbaum and Leibel 2010). Moreover, metabolism does not necessarily recover when weight is regained. For example, researchers followed the winners of the show The Biggest Loser for six years (Fothergill et al. 2016). After six years, contestants had regained 85 percent of their weight, but their resting metabolism was still at the slower rate it had been at after they’d lost weight. What does this mean? Let’s take the average contestant.
At the beginning of the show, Mr. Average Contestant weighed roughly 330 pounds and could consume 2,600 calories and stay the same weight. At the end of the show he’d lost 130 pounds (he now weighed 200 pounds) and his metabolic rate had slowed. He could now only consume 2,000 calories a day and stay the same weight. After six years, he had regained 90 pounds (he now weighed 290 pounds) but his metabolic rate remained slow. He could only consume 1,900 calories a day and stay the same weight even though he had regained 85 percent of his original weight. So if you’ve lost weight and you feel like you’re gaining weight just breathing air, you might be right.
But our bodies don’t just stop at reducing our metabolism to make sure we don’t starve to death (Tremblay et al. 2013; Dulloo, Jacquet, and Girardier 1996). Research shows that food will actually smell better one year after you lose weight. Food will also taste better a year after you lose weight. Why on earth would your body torture you like this? Well, it thinks it’s just been through a famine, or a long, terrible winter with no food. Your body is desperate to put the weight back on to make sure you don’t starve to death. You know all those skinny girls in the advertisements—they’re not the ones who could survive a long, hard winter. Individuals who could put on extra pounds whenever food was available are the ones who survived—they are our ancestors.
Not only does your body encourage you to eat, it motivates you to eat all the things that are so-called unhealthy. Why are we motivated to eat “unhealthy” food? Consider the honey seekers of New Guinea. Members of this tribe climb about forty feet up a tree in order to reach into a beehive while dangling precariously in the air and getting stung. Sugar is so scarce in those parts that it’s worth it. Let that sink in for a minute: this is the world our body and brain were adapted for, one in which sugar, fat, and salt are rare. Would you want to climb forty meters in the air and get stung by bees just to get a handful of sugar? Of course not! So your body developed a highly motivating system to make doing so worth it: the reward system of the brain.
This reward system releases neurotransmitters (chemicals in your brain) that make you feel awesome in order to motivate you to get sugary foods (McGonigal 2013). Interestingly, this reward system doesn’t release these chemicals when you ingest the sugar, but rather in anticipation of ingesting the sugar. Have you ever anticipated that next bite of delicious food only to take the bite and not feel satisfied? This is the reward system in action! From the standpoint of survival, it makes no sense to be rewarded once you’ve gotten the food. If that were the case, you’d stop after ingesting the food. No, your brain is much smarter than that, because it wants you to survive! When we ingest the food, we don’t feel satisfied, so we continue to want more until there’s no food left.
What this means is that b
odies that gain weight are doing exactly what they evolved to do. Despite everything you’ve been told, gaining weight is a natural consequence of a highly adaptive evolutionary system. If you are overweight, your systems are working exactly as they were intended to work. You’re just not meant to live in an environment where you can ingest your total daily caloric needs in a single meal. I’m not saying that being overweight is healthy, but being overweight in our modern, Western world where food is so readily available is a natural, adaptive process—a consequence of millions of years of evolution.
So perhaps you’re thinking, Why haven’t we evolved past this yet!? Great question. The most important reason is that as you read this right now, there are humans somewhere on the planet starving to death. Starvation is still a threat to human life today.
What Do You Control?
At this point you might be feeling demoralized. Perhaps you’re thinking, Does this mean I’m going to be overweight forever? Does this mean there’s nothing I can do about my weight? There are things you can do. Just keep reading.
Let’s try an experiment (inspired by Harris 2009). Recall how you bought this book. Maybe you ordered it online or maybe you went to a bookstore to buy it. And now completely forget how you bought this book.
Could you do it? Not likely. Deleting a specific memory or thought is not a typical human ability. Now let’s try another experiment. Make your leg go completely numb. Remove any sensation or feeling from your leg, to the point that you could cut it off with a chain saw and not feel any pain.
Healthy Habits Suck Page 3