book
excerpt
Shame on Who?
Most diets aren’t about action; they’re
about thoughts. By their very nature, they
force us to think, think, think, think. Diets
make us think about food more than inmates
think about escape. You have to think about
calories, or zones, or the hour when you’re
next allowed to have half a cracker. You think
about not having food so much that you
develop only two sets of standards when it
comes to eating: Either you follow your diet
or you don’t. It’s bean sprouts or it’s prime
rib. It’s carrots or it’s cookies. It’s
cucumbers or it’s pepperoni. It’s all
or nothing.
In a way, we’ve all been
thinking too much about
weight and what to eat, and
not enough about how and
why we eat. When most of us
try to lose weight, we pull out
the most powerful weapon we’d like to think
we know—our brains—and launch a psychological attack in the form of discipline (“I can
resist this food!”) and ego (“I’m smart enough
to avoid this food!”). But as you’ll see in this
chapter, the truth is that there are very strong
emotional triggers that make us eat—and
make most diets fail. In many ways, it’s our
brains that sabotage our best dieting efforts.
By trying the very thing that’s designed to
help us lose weight—a diet—we’ve created a
no-win system of failure that spins us into a
cycle of blame. And what’s not to blame? The
experts blame our societal fatness on free
restaurant bread and meals with Mount
McKinley–size portions. Or we blame our fatness on fast food (for the grease), magazine
covers (for the unrealistic body images that
taunt us to smear our self-esteem in daily fistfuls of cheesecake), sixty-hour workweeks (for
making us sit down all day), cloud-soft recliners and reality TV (for making us sit down all
night), sausage (blech!), or an intervention-worthy Velveeta addiction (double blech!).
But deep down in your gut (there, over
by the sticky buns you ate two weeks ago),
there’s really only one thing you blame for
the size of your gut:
You.
You blame you.
You tell yourself it’s not the restaurants
or food manufacturers or deep-fried cheese-stuffed peppers that are derailing your
weight-loss efforts, it’s your mind. The entire
battle of the broken belt comes down to a
flurry of mental “if onlys”—and your perceived inability to control what food you
shuttle down your esophagus year after year,
day after day, meal after meal, bite after bite.
If only you had the willpower to step away
from the mayonnaise. If only you could stop
after four Pringles. If only you had the power,
the strength, the discipline, the chutzpah, the
energy, the drive, and the motivation to control your waist, then you’d finally have the
body you want.
What you’re really doing here is laying
brain blame. We rely on our minds to resist
temptations, to make smart decisions, to eat
right, to know better, and to make healthy
choices. So we naturally rely on our minds to
combat the emotions that we think we
