A Long, Slow, Obscure Developing Crisis

I was and remain skeptical of the notion that will power (self-regulation, putting-off-the-marshmallow, whatever you want to call it) is trainable, and I still find it difficult to imagine what the mechanism of that "training" might be, but I don't know how else to explain the steady progression in my self-control. There were changes in my life a year and a half ago that substantially reduced my stress, and which made bringing my eating under control possible, but those were one-offs, and this development seems to keep going. There's all kinds of ways in which I can self-regulate now, all kinds of planning I can undertake and carry out. Eating, spending, exercise, social media fritter: they're all becoming workable.

I suppose an explanation that doesn't involve the will being generally trainable would simply be that when you've got more will available, you construct new daily routines, and as those daily routines become habitual, the will you used to construct them becomes available for new construction. That would account for the appearance of steady progression. It looks like more and more self-regulatory power, but actually it's just that the steady finite surplus "accumulates" in the form of habits.

There also of course is just an enormously increased sense of self-efficacy. But none of this quite explains how easy it now feels -- how progressively easier it feels -- when I encounter a temptation, to shrug my shoulders and say, "sounds nice, sure, but I'm not someone who yields to temptation any more. That's not who I am."

On the other hand, I am in a long, slow, obscure developing crisis: the grandiosity of my former self -- the flip side of yielding to temptation -- has also been going away, and it leaves me up against my limitations and my mortality, in a particularly bleak way. In the last third of my life (assuming luck), what can I do that's of any use to anyone? How can I serve? I don't know. So many of my basic assumptions are dissolving, in this corrosive political atmosphere. I need to find or make a compass: I need to wake with a purpose. Eating right and exercising are well and good, but they're instrumental goals, not ultimate ones. The point of maintaining a car is that you eventually mean to drive it somewhere.

Dishes

Illustration: Dale's rage against the machine

But – first things first. This is still, and forever, going to be long, laborious haul, with no shortcuts. I have a more helpful frame for it now, though: I no longer in any way see my difficulties with food as a manifestation of my poor character. I see it as a distortion imposed on me by industrial capitalism. They skillfully turned me into what Pollan calls “an industrial eater”: and every painful step towards eating real plain food, with no sauce but hunger, is a small act of defiance. “The food thing” falls into a pattern with a multitude of others: I have been conditioned to overconsume in many, many ways; I've been conditioned to believe in consumption as the beginning and end of my happiness, when in fact it's just an endlessly steepening toboggan slide towards a concrete wall. A wall of illness, of hopeless debt, of isolation. Make no mistake: that's what the consumption slide aims at.

That's grandiloquent, perhaps: but so are the extravagances of much of the food writing I've encountered since I began this, with its extraordinary emphasis on every meal being a peak experience. Every meal will not be a peak experience, no matter how much you spice and titillate it: all you can do by trying that hard is jade your palate.

No. I'm not looking for more ecstasy than an ordinary yam will sometimes supply.

Some years ago now – after many abjectly-failing attempts to “eat healthy,” – I realized the problem was larger than I thought. To eat healthy, I was going to have to cook. There was no other way, despite the swarm of people trying to sell me things to eat: the one thing no one was actually trying to sell me was healthy food. (There's a good economic reason for this: healthy food is unprocessed, it has no value-added, it has no brand or mark-up. A french fry you can sell at an enormous profit: a potato you can barely make a few cents on.)

And to cook, I was going to have to have a working kitchen. One that stayed clean and uncluttered, day in and day out, week in and week out. I had never had such a thing. We had a big kitchen, in the house where we raised our kids, and a quantity of dishes, and we operated on the simple principle of going until we ran out of clean dishes, which took about a week. By that time the kitchen was a huge mess, and cleaning it was a titanic enterprise, even with the dishwasher we then had. We'd limp along a few more days by eating fast food alone, and then we'd finally tackle it. It was a much more laborious system than actually washing up twice a day, and we knew that, but knowing something doesn't mean you act on it.

I was deeply embarrassed by the state of my kitchen, but I was also in a state of learned helplessness about it. And there were so many other things I was trying to make myself to do, by sheer force of will, and since they all were higher prestige than the lowly act of washing up, by the time I came to the sink my oomph was exhausted. I just looked at it all, pulled a package of something out of the fridge, and shuffled back to the living room to eat it, with my fingers if need be.

So when I finally had raised my kids; and when I finally had work that I loved, which nurtured me rather than depleting me; when I finally had some fragile self respect growing in my industrially-blighted soul – when I finally had these things in place, and decided to eat healthy, I didn't start with the food. I started with the dishes. The first thing I was going to do was acquire the habit of a clean kitchen. Every single damn day, I was cleaning that thing.

It took years to root that habit. Literally. But I have it now, and it's so strong that I find it almost impossible to go to bed with dirty dishes in the kitchen. It feels wrong, now. And now, for the two of us, we have exactly four plates and four bowls in our cupboard, and some eight mugs or drinking glasses, which keeps us on a much shortened leash. I usually wash up twice a day, now. It's not a very big deal. A few minutes' work. But the expense of spirit, the force of will that it represents, is huge.

This Food Thing: The Family Curse

“You know,” I found myself saying to Martha the other day, “I think I have this food thing whupped.”

I went on to walk it back and qualify it and add disclaimers: a long way to go, just maybe over the hump, could still be wrecked by this or that – you know. That's my way. I'm a cautious man. I don't believe in rashly drawing the gods' attention. But really, I do think I have this food thing whupped.

“This food thing,” what thing would that be? Overeating, eating compulsively, eating lots of things that I know are bad for me. It's an embarrassingly big deal for me, and always has been. I've been struggling with it all my life: I've hovered on the official overweight/obese line, sometimes ten, twenty pounds from it one way or the other, as I tried various approaches and lost control of them, but always within hailing distance of it, and always, until recently, always with the dread that it will get away from me altogether, and that I'll become downright enormous.

I've noticed with friends and clients that many of them, maybe most of them, believe in a family curse. It's their fate to die of cancer, or to always make bad relationship decisions, or to be unwise with money. It's the fatal weakness of their family: and it's bound to get them eventually, no matter what they do. There's a grain of truth to it, often – all these things do run in families. But they believe in them much more strongly than the data warrants.

The curse my family laid on me was, that I was going to become fat, and I was going to die of a heart attack. I've known this all my life. My mother's father – the one everyone exclaimed I was the spitting image of – died of a heart attack at 62. My mother was fat, and hated being fat, and told me over and over that if I kept on eating as I was, I would become fat too. Which would, of course, be the worst thing that could befall anyone. But she also came from an Illinois farm family that believed one of the cardinal virtues was stuffing your menfolk, so at the same time that she warned me about this, she fed me unlimited amounts of rich food. Everything I liked to eat was on hand, all the time.

I ate. This was my fate. I'd eat, and become fat, and die early. Serve me right for my wickedness: but there was nothing to be done about it.

Oh, I'd go on diets. All of them worked, for a while, and I'd lose ten, fifteen pounds, maybe – quite quickly – and I'd picture losing the rest of the weight, how easy it would be, and I'd escape the family curse, and be free! And then the weight loss would, mysteriously, stop. Following the diet would become harder and harder, the sruggles against myself would become epic, titanic. And then – suddenly – I'd break. I'd eat. And eat and eat and eat, and accept my fate.

The state of obesity research and nutritional science, in those days, was abysmal, and the dietary advice was almost uniformly bad. One of my “diet” foods was low-fat fruit-flavored “yogurt,” sweetened to a candy with corn-syrup. Medical authority solemnly told me to avoid things like butter and red meat, and eat this poisonous processed crap instead. It wasn't until much much later that I discovered how little and how bad the science behind this advice was. It was science, right? It was the Surgeon General. It had to be true.

Medical authority also told me how to exercise to lose weight: low-intensity, endlessly repetitive, supposedly “aerobic” exercise. Here again the science was bad or simply non-existent. No one has ever been able to demonstrate that exercise of this sort, or of any sort, leads to people losing weight. It simply doesn't. Exercise and obesity basically have nothing to do with each other. But again, the recommendations were laid down by all the authorities I knew of. I wasn't a science guy. I was an English major. I took the authorities at their word. So when I did undertake exercise, what I did was try to jog, daily, for longer and longer amounts of time. Eventually I'd hurt myself, or need to do something else with all that time, and I'd give it up. And again, I knew, anyway, that there was really nothing I could do. My fate was waiting for me: there was never really any getting away from it.

It's been a long hard haul since then. I've had to learn a lot, and unlearn a lot. I've had to get stricter with myself in some ways and easier on myself in others. I've had to run a lot of experiments in what Paul Ingraham calls “the laboratory of me,” and make up new approaches based on the results. But I do think that I have, finally, whupped this food thing.

I sat down and drew up an outline of how I did it. I might write a post on each of these. Or I might not. But here's the outline:

1. A habit of exercise, and learning not to “train to failure”
2. Protecting my sleep
3. De-stressing my life
4. Learning to distrust carbs
5. Commuting by bicycle
6. Keeping the kitchen work-ready
7. La Grande Salade
8. Training the will, getting help, and hiding treats
9. That palatability study, and learning to trust carbs again. Some of them. Some of the time.

Who knows if I'll actually follow this out and write all the posts? I might. And who knows whether I've really escaped the family curse? We'll see. Stay tuned.

The Three-Week Projects

So the grand project of mending my life marches on, in three-week sub-projects. There's something a little surreal about it, something a little pompous and overdone feeling, and I wonder if it will eventually reveal itself to be bogus. But so far, it marches.

I set my three-week goals with absurd precision. Be in bed by precisely 10:35. Ride my bike at least 28.4 miles each week. Buy the salad fixings before noon if there's only one salad's-worth left in the bowl at dawn.

But it has to be absurdly precise, because I have to know with no doubt whatsoever that I have either failed or succeeded. There must be no doubt. As soon as I fail, I need to chuck the project and reformulate it, usually (though not always) by halving the effort involved, or relaxing the “time tension” on it. Sometimes the revisions are absurdly small. “No eating after 7:30” becomes “No eating after 7:45.” That sort of thing. And it all gets written down and tracked in its own color on my Google calendar.

The idea is that the commodity in really short supply, the one I must hoard and deploy carefully, is what people commonly call will-power, and I call oomph. As things become habitual, they require less oomph, and typically – as with cleaning the kitchen daily – they can be moved into the less oomphy parts of the day (which for me are afternoons and evenings), leaving the high-oomph mornings for working on the hard things.

And things that are established do, really, require much less oomph as time goes by. When we had first moved into the new house, even things that had been automatic for years – flossing my teeth, for instance – had turned into things I had to force myself to do, with huge efforts of will. It helps a lot to know that every time I successfully do something like this, I make the next time easier, I free a tiny bit of oomph for the next project.

The increments are small. It will take a year or two to get to where I want to be food, for example, so that I'm mostly eating fresh food that I've prepared myself, and drastically curtailing the refined carbs. But since I've been struggling with it all my life, I'm willing for it to take a couple years. I've had enough experience of flinging myself at the whole problem and utterly failing, sliding clear back to zero (and under zero, to new lows). I don't know if I'll ever get there, but I know by now that I can't a) establish new habits of cooking and cleaning, b) establish new habits of eating, and c) forgo most of my favorite foods, all at once. It's too much, and it all crashes, and there I end up, as discouraged as bloody hell, gorging on potato chips and cookies because – since I'm going to be fat and disgusting and die young – I want at least to have some chips and cookies first.

So I'm going in increments, and actually refraining from certain foods comes dead last in the process. I may not ever get there, and if not, then that's just the way it is: but at least I'll be eating good food as well as bad food.

All this focus on myself makes me uneasy, but I tell myself it's not really just in service of my own vanity. I'm going to be a burden to other people, not a help to them, if my health breaks down: and I've already had more good luck that way than I deserve. I may have a tough, sturdy Norwegian frame that can carry seventy extra pounds with a shrug, and guts that absorb anything that faintly resembles food without complaining, but I'm not really indestructible.

The Skilful Deployment of Oomph

I recently read some books that are not in my usual range: books with titles such as Willpower, Succeed, and Learned Optimism.

The psychology of cognition and and will has changed beyond recognition, in the past twenty years. Or rather – it's changed so that, for the first time, I do recognize it: for the first time, what these people are describing looks something like my interior landscape. I don't live in a world of low self-esteem, deep suppressed anger, and endless replication of childhood trauma. I live in a world in which I frequently run out of steam. Oomph, as I call it. Oomph is what allows me to resist temptation and change habits. I also use it to write poems, and to write difficult database queries, and to engage in socializing. It is a precious and limited resource: and a couple years ago I formulated my notion of its importance. “The art of life,” I declared, “consists of the skillful deployment of oomph.”

It turns out that psychologists have been studying oomph a lot, lately. They call it self-regulation, which is a rather negative way of phrasing it. Roy Baumeister calls it willpower, but rightly cautions against a) the grandiosity of the term, and b) the tradition of considering “willpower” a fixed personality trait, rather than the name of something that rises and falls, is depleted and replenished, in everyone. He also – and this appears to be the mainstream view, at the moment – thinks it can trained up, like muscular strength. I'm a bit skeptical about this, but he has some data to back the idea up.

Trainable or not, it's a limited resource in everyone. People are very bad at assessing how much of it they have: almost everyone overestimates. And hence they put themselves in the way of temptations they can't really resist, or set themselves self-improvement programs that they can't really carry out, which is very discouraging, and they draw the conclusion that they're weak-willed, in a permanent and pervasive way, which is even more discouraging. But in fact they've just been treating their oomph as it was inexhaustible, which it's not, not in anyone.

So. I have some things I've been trying to change in my life, for years, for decades, actually. These books, and my own thinking about oomph, have given me new hope about succeeding in changing them. The basic approach is to split the changes into manageable steps – steps that will require oomph, but not more than I have. I create clear, explicit goals for these steps, so that there's no waffle-room – I know for sure whether I'm succeeding or failing. I track it on a calendar. If I succeed in a step for three weeks, by the end of that time it should be requiring much less oomph. It will have moved into “habit” territory. I get a reward of some sort, and I go on to the next step.

If I fail – and the steps should be ambitious enough that sometimes I do – then I don't need to waste much time scolding myself and beating myself up. I just need to recognize that what I thought was one three week step is too big for that: I need to break it down, somehow, into a couple of steps, and start over. It's important to really start over: rewrite the goals, re-set the endpoint, and to thoroughly give up on making it all the way through that project in three weeks.

From time to time is that I'll start failing again at something I thought I had mastered and had moved into the “habit” column. This is to be expected, and when it happens I simply need to put it back into the “un-mastered” column. I'll take it up again.

The key here is to have only one or two steps that I'm working on at any one time, so that I know what I'm focusing on, and so that I'm not overspending oomph at any one time.

The reason all this has come up, now, is that in moving to a new place, I lost several good habits, and have had to recover them. Things as simple and fundamental as showering and doing the dishes every day had moved from being habits to being things I had to spend oomph to accomplish. I'm fortunate to have stumbled over these books when I did, because they made this deterioration much easier to understand, and made it seem much less sinister. It's more than just the stresses and uncertainties of being displaced, and having a large house-full of stuff to sort, store, or dispose of. Habits are tied to time and place: with the move I lost my bearings in both. My schedule was disrupted, and the daily furniture of my life was gone (or at least in storage). The cues for doing my back exercises in the morning, and for doing the dishes in the evening, had vanished. I was going to have to rebuild my habits in the new house.

I've re-established most of it, now. When the current three-week projects are done – I'm about halfway in to them – I should have restored my habitual exercise (cycling 4+ times per week), and moved my schedule back 2½ hours, so that I'm getting to bed at 10:30 again. From there I will move into the much more difficult territory of changing my eating, which looks to be a whole string of three week projects involving planning, shopping, cooking, and storing food. Actually restricting what I eat will come last: I need to have a whole infrastructure of food habits in place before I attempt that.

Restricting eating is its own game, uniquely difficult: one of the more fascinating discoveries that Baumeister et al have made is that self-regulation – the expenditure of oomph – depletes the glucose supply to certain oomphy areas of the brain, which results – of course – in strong bodily cravings for a quick carb-rush. It's a neat little catch-22 that was not understood until recently, but which sheds a lot of light on the failures of dieting. I have some ideas about how to circumvent it – but that comes later. First I need to have daily habits of cooking and supplying a kitchen in place.

Resentment

Yesterday I took my mom grocery shopping. Her husband's down in Costa Rica for a week, building houses for Habitat for Humanity, and the friend who was going to come stay with her was prevented from coming by the winter storms. My mom is doing quite well: I offered to simply shop for her, but she was quite up to making the shopping trip, and the cart served quite well as a walker. I just walked along beside her, chatting occasionally, making sure no one jostled her. It was easy.

Spending that much time with my mother – who is a lovely and un-difficult person, let me hasten to say – exhausts me, in prospect and in reality. Our relationship is not an easy one, not for me, at any rate. I spent the morning in trepidation and the afternoon in exhaustion. Humiliating, but there it is. And I had so been looking forward to this weekend as a weekend of recovery. Instead I read my Curzon mystery, and ate and ate and ate – leftover rich Chinese food, cake, whatever I could get my hands on. A waste of a day. And as the day dwindled into evening I noted, with self-loathing, that my plan for getting regular exercise again was going to go by the boards. And that I had left the dishes undone. Everything I looked at or thought about was a reminder of some failure or other, and there wasn't enough food in the world to insulate myself from it.

I stood at the sink – having ascertained that no, there was no ice cream in the house, and watching the urge to get more duel with the reluctance to do something so fraught with initiative and self-reliance as going to the store myself – and, leaning there like a sick man, breathed, and watched my breath. Inchoate resentments against my family rose around me, like the steam from boiling pasta. I have been surrounded all my life, they said – suddenly and surprisingly coalescing into words – by people whose egos have depended upon my continual failure.

Now that, of course, was absurd, a classic instance of depressive thinking, a billow of nonsense tethered to a couple rusty bolts of half-truth. I loathed myself all the more for entertaining it.

But instead of dropping it, I played what-if with it. And what if it were true? What then? What would it mean? What would be the appropriate response?

The answer came at once: the appropriate response would be to say the hell with it, I'm going to succeed in spite of them. I'm going to succeed to spite them, as a matter of fact. I'm going to succeed and rub their faces in it.

So I washed the dishes, and then I got on the stuck-bike followed out my exercise plan. And so I ended the day.

Neglecting Pieties

“Resolution” is just the first phase of an endless cycle, a four-phase rotation. It goes like this: Resolution → Deprivation → Breakdown → Indulgence → Resolution, and so on and on and on. At the moments of Resolution and Breakdown I am supposed to believe that my true self has been unveiled at last (I am the master of my fate; I am hopelessly weak), and at the moments of Deprivation and Indulgence I pretend not to see that the true self of the former phase is crumbling. I am beginning to find the whole sequence irritating and useless, and I'm inclined to abandon it. I may have to live my own stories, but I don't have to believe them.

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The tumults of this month have left me a little shaky. Mt Hood, with its canted shoulder, hovers over the foothills, floating free, just temporarily tethered over the sunrise. A sense of failure, of imminent disaster. What have I been doing all this time? The mountain has nothing to say to me, and I have nothing to say to it. Surely there are pieties that I have neglected.

Then I think, and I have to laugh. I'm an American: neglecting pieties is what I do. That's why God put us here -- to be the destroyers of worlds. I'm just doing my job.

The Making of the Grand Salad: an Occasion for Fanaticism

So I'm on my second round, four or five days in, and I have made my second grand salad. This is a critical piece of my regimen – it may, indeed, be the critical piece of my regimen. So I must be fanatical about it. My conviction grows that, in the absence of inifinite oomph, success in changing what I eat is a matter of choosing, very carefully, when to be fanatical and what to be fanatical about.

I need to be fanatical about the salad. I must always have the salad. I make a great big one, and it lasts four or five days. It's good food that is ready to eat immediately, and I eat it a couple times a day. If I don't have that, then I will go off-regimen. And stay off-regimen for a surprisingly long amount of time: almost two months, last time. So on the day I am going to run out, I have to go buy the stuff and make the salad, and I have to do it immediately. The stuff doesn't even go into the fridge. Throughout the two non-regimen months, I bought salad makings two, maybe even three times. They sat in the fridge until they were dubious – could I, should I, still make salad out of them? – and their presence there became a major obstacle to getting back on track. Not only would I have to buy salad stuff and make it – I would have to deal with the dubious produce in the fridge, first. So, rather than getting back on track, I'd indulge for another day. And another. And then two months had passed.

So this is one of those points of leverage. Where it really is worth it to go all steely-eyed and grim-jawed and muscle my way through by sheer will power. When the salad's running out, I make a new one. Even if it's inconvenient for other people, even if I don't feel like it, even if it will make me late for work. Now, this is a good candidate for spending oomph, because it is finite, and because it only comes up every once in a while. I don't have to heroic every day. Once or twice a week, that's all. I can manage that.

I'm wondering, in fact, whether I should measure my time “on-regimen” by salads made, not by days. In which case the last “on regimen” period wasn't nine days, it was two salads.

Where I've Been

I've been scarce. I'm writing a book, backwards. Didn't know if I wanted to post any of it here, but what the heck.

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Here is a simple set of four points summarizing the prevailing theory of why people get fat:

1) Human beings, having evolved in feast-or-famine conditions, are designed to store excess food as adipose tissue, which their bodies then consume to keep them alive when they don't have enough food.

2) By a simple exertion of will, such as that by which a person can make their bed each morning, a person can simply decide not to eat as much as they want.

3) Some people simply will not make the effort. These people get fat.

4) It doesn't matter what they eat. It's simple arithmetic: if you eat more calories than you expend, you get fatter; if you expend more calories than you eat, you get thinner.

I grew up believing these to be true. They are not abstruse propositions, nor are they particularly difficult to verify or disprove. In fact they are all false, and have been proven to be false: but their hold on the public consciousness is tenacious. Here are some contrary propositions:

1) Human beings don't “bank” calories, or not much. Fat people don't starve much more slowly than skinny people. When the body lays in excessive adipose tissue, it's because the endocrine system is malfunctioning.

2) People have no long-term control over how many calories they consume, just as they have no long-term control over how much oxygen they consume. The cerebral cortex can override the rest of the brain temporarily, but not permanently. The amount we eat is no more under our voluntary control than breathing is. If we found that people were taking in more oxygen than was good for them, we could tell them they ought to breathe less. We'd get results similar to the results we have gotten by telling them to eat less.

3) Some people have vulnerable endocrine systems. The homeostatic processes break down in these people, under certain environmental pressures, and they get fat. Some people do not have this vulnerability, and they do not get fat. There is no observable difference in the amount of will power between the two groups. Normal weight people, of course, think that their conscious decisions determine their weight, for the same reason that normal people confronted with lights that randomly switch on and off, and a switch that is disconnected from these lights, think that their flipping of the switch influences whether the lights come on and off. If there is supposed to be a causal connection between random events, people will perceive it.

4) It is indeed true that if you eat more calories than you expend, you will get fatter, and if you eat fewer, you will get thinner. But since the regulation of calorie intake is not under the long-term control of the cerebral cortex, this is not really useful information for someone who wants to lose weight. Human beings in general cannot, or will not (at the public health level, it doesn't matter which), regulate their calorie intake. If we can't change how much our bodies want to eat, we can't lose weight. We can torment ourselves, and struggle heroically, and lose weight for weeks or even months at a time, but in the end we will be fatter than ever.

I have arrived at these conclusions after a lot of reading and a lot of observation. I believe the second theory fits the observable facts much better than the first theory. The motivation for fat people to lose weight is overwhelming. They are led to believe (far more than is true, actually) that their health, their love lives, their sex lives, their careers – basically, their whole happiness – is at stake. If these motives don't suffice, it's hard to see what motives would. Far the simplest explanation for why people don't restrict their calorie intake, is because they can't.

The tantalizing thing is that diet obviously does affect weight. People can, to some extent, change their eating habits, and they do. They can induce great see-saw swings in the amount of fat they carry. What they can't seem to do is the one thing they want to do: lose fat and keep it off.

Some time ago I read quite a bit about weight loss, and I was startled by how little real science had been done. The real scientists considered the problem solved – people simply had to eat less: if they didn't, that was their own problem, not the scientists'. The field was left largely to hacks, who proposed diet after diet, claimed great success rates, and who rose and fell like the tides.

What the pop diet people understood – the solution they were groping for – was that there might be some kind of diet that would make people less hungry, some way of eating or thinking about eating that would solve the real problem. The real problem being that our bodies think they need more food than they do.

I believe this problem has now been partly solved: the single thing in the diet that most confuses our bodies are refined carbohydrates. Sugar and corn syrup, especially in liquid forms – the obvious and glaring culprits being soft drinks, fruit juices, “sport drinks,” and beer, which deliver incredible amounts of sugars virtually direct to the bloodstream – are the worst. After that come all the starches: the potatoes, and the overrefined grains: white flour, white rice, pasta. Nothing in our evolutionary history prepares us for these foods, and for some people – but not for others – they wreak havoc on the endocrine system.

Exactly how or when this damage is done, we really don't know. Some of it is observably “real time”: when I've been in a phase of eating lots of sugar and carbs, I am hungry virtually all the time, often savagely, ferociously hungry. But some of the damage may be done before birth, or in infancy. Some of it may be irreversible. And some of it may not be dietary at all.

I've done a lot of experimenting with diet and eating: I've become interested both objectively – interested in the science of it – and interested, as someone who practices meditation and introspection, in the mental processes involved. I've been overweight all my life – according to the usual (totally unscientifically arrived at) standards, by thirty to seventy pounds: that is, I tend to waver right around that magic line between “overweight” and “obese.” I have been as motivated as anyone else to lose that weight, and tried as many things as anyone else, and failed as miserably as everyone else. My knowledge of diet and nutrition is not that of an expert, but that of a well-read amateur. Likewise my knowledge of brain science. The only expertise I can claim is that of introspection. I have observed very closely what happens in my consciousness as I overeat, or do not overeat. It's fascinating and humbling to actually watch one's will crumble.

Will. It's an interesting concept, largely unexplored in the West, except among people who have a special interest in it: addicts and contemplatives, who are daily brought up against the fact that it doesn't work at all as advertised. We of all people know that will power is a very finite commodity, which has to be deployed with exquisite care. We can't afford the luxury of believing the cerebral cortex always controls our behavior: we know – by dint of repeated excruciating failure – that it does not.

I am writing this as part of an experiment. I already know that I am incapable of restricting my calorie intake. Whether this “should” be true is a question that I will leave to theologians, or anyone who thinks it is a meaningful question. That it is true, I have discovered empirically by repeated experiment, and I'm not interested in running any more (emotionally painful, if not devastating) experiments on that question.

My present experiment is to see if I can change what I eat (not the amounts, but the kinds of things), permanently. I am hoping, of course, that I can. And I am hoping that if I do, I will lose weight. But really at this point I am motivated more by curiosity and irritation than by hope. I'm ready to be done with this whole sorry business. If I can change what I eat, and maintain that change for six months, I will declare the experiment a success, regardless of whether my weight changes much. If I can't, I'll declare it a failure. This is not an experiment in diet so much as an experiment in will. My hypothesis is that if I deploy my will power carefully, at the points of maximum leverage, I can change my diet from one that makes me obese, to one that makes me merely overweight.

Homeostasis

There are a number of homeostatic ("standing the same") processes in the body. One of the most critical is the one that maintains the proportions of sodium and potassium in the body. Every cell in the body depends on this proportion staying within certain tolerances. There are enchantingly clever mechanisms to keep it that way, and the body will undertake draconian emergency measures if it seems to be really going out of whack, cannibalizing bones, organs, and other tissues to get what it needs.

This process rises to our consciousness only in the veiled form of feeling thirsty (too much sodium) or craving salty food (not enough sodium) or possibly craving chocolate (not enough potassium). Most of the time we have no consciousness of it at all. It just works. Similarly, our breathing is regulated by the levels of oxygen in our blood. If there's not enough, we breathe more deeply. Too much, we breathe more shallowly. This process too just works. We don't make notes on our calendar: "must breathe more today." Or "not going for run: remember to cut breath intake this afternoon!"

There are actually dozens of such systems in the body, regulating all sorts of things. One thing is conspicuously absent in all of them, and that is participation by the cerebral cortex. All of them "happen automatically." You don't have to think about maintaining the Ph levels in your body. If they shifted minutely, you'd be quite dead. But the parts of the brain that do this monitoring, being very primitive, and essentially the same in iguanas as in us, don't enter our consciousness.

One of these homeostatic processes, and one which is very poorly understood, is maintaining the volume of fatty tissue at a certain level. Since this one has gone freakishly wrong in the modern world, it's the focus of much attention, most of it unscientific and silly: you might even say hysterical. The first thing to get into your head about this process is that, like all the others, it's supposed to just work. You're not supposed to have to think about it and control it from the cerebral cortex. (Which explains, incidentally, why attempts to do so are so pathetically ineffective.)

There are a couple myths to get out of the way here. One is that the volume of fat in the body is supposed to fluctuate: that fat is for long term energy storage. I was taught this in school. You probably were too. It's false. Fat is for short term energy storage. It gets us from one meal to the next. The body has no long-term energy storage: if it did, fat people would starve much more slowly than thin people, and the body would plunder its fat stores before cannibalizing other tissues. It does not, in fact, do this. That's why no one responsible recommends fasting as a diet method. In the absence of food, the body gets right to work consuming its own muscles and bones. We may consider our fatty tissue expendable, but our bodies clearly do not.

There are animals that use fat as long term energy storage, but they are all hibernating animals. Bears, for instance. Most mammals do not, and human beings certainly don't. If you give most animals an abundance of their natural foods, they do not get fat. They get horny. They reproduce a lot. But their body weight stays constant. It you want to fatten animals, as any rancher knows, you have to stuff them artificially with something that will throw their homeostatic processes out of whack. You don't fatten a cow by letting it graze endlessly. A cow allowed all the grass it likes stays obstinately at its goal weight. You fatten it by filling it up with sugars and injecting it with hormones.

The other myth that goes along with this, is that prehistoric human beings used to live in scarcity, on the brink of starvation all the time. Certainly some of them starved some of the time, but it was not the ordinary lot of your ordinary prehistoric human being. It was not until human beings developed agriculture that starvation became a way of life: a good harvest meant plenty, and a bad harvest meant starvation. Before agriculture, food supplies were, by and large, fairly steady and reliable: people were no more likely to be starving in their native habitat than modern chimps are likely to be starving in theirs. It happens, but it's not a way of life. We didn't evolve obesity as a way of coping with food shortages. (Which is good, because it isn't particularly helpful in that.)

We process millions of calories in the course of a year. If we were off by just a percentage point or two we would not be fifty or a hundred pounds overweight. We would be overweight by thousands of pounds. Or underweight by a hundred: that is, dead. This is not a process that is, or was meant to be, under conscious control. I know, I know, people who are normal weight think that they "eat sensibly." If I were normal weight, I'd believe that of myself too. But in fact they eat just like I do: they eat until they feel satisfied, and then they stop. Sometimes they want a treat but decide not to have it, just like I do. Sometimes they decide they want a treat and they have one, just like I do. This has nothing to do with our body weights.

Evidence for this is what happens when you do try to put the cerebral cortex in control of this process. Everyone who's been on a diet knows what happens. You become increasingly irrational and obsessive about food. Eventually you enter a twilight zone of struggle that is completely unlike normal consciousness. And then, sooner or later, you eat whatever you were trying not to eat.

Now, this is not the whole story. There's binge eating to be considered too. But normal-weight people binge as well as fat people. There's no particular reason to think that the homeostatic processes shouldn't be able to deal with binges. The sodium-potassium one does fine: after you gorge on potato chips, you don't die: you just become terribly thirsty, and you take in a lot more water. The body could deal with a massive intake of ice cream by simply making us rather uninterested in food for a week or two.

No, something breaks or overrides the homeostatic feedback systems. That's why we're fat. It has nothing to do with "will power" -- that will o' the wisp of popular superstition. It has to do with blood chemistry and brain chemistry, and what happens when you introduce artificial substances into a body that wasn't designed to handle them.

The Unified Command

Often I come smack up against what is probably my deepest ideological difference with most people: which is -- to simplify a bit -- that I don't believe people can control their actions. If you don't believe that, then you can find the bulky apparatus of praise and blame that everyone is trundling about with them a little exasperating. And it becomes difficult to participate in most casual conversation, which is, to a remarkable degree, about apportioning praise and blame. Michael Jackson was or wasn't to blame for whatever he did or didn't do with the children at Neverland. The Governor of South Carolina is less culpable or more culpable because he viewed his Argentinian lover as his soulmate. Whatever. To someone who views human action as I do, all this busy scuffling to scribble in the book of judgment is a little tedious. I prefer to leave that job to the angels, who presumably have the data and the skills to do it properly.

It's tedious because I can't even get into the conversation. Everyone thinks I'm saying that pederasty and adultery are fine (since I must be either approving or blaming, and I'm not blaming, then I must be approving.) Well, no. I don't think pederasty and adultery are fine. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if you want to prevent these things, it's not enough to get everyone to recite the same catechism. Probably Michael Jackson thought pederasty was wrong. Certainly Governor Sanford thinks adultery is wrong. That's not enough.

Freud had an inkling of this, but he didn't have the brain science to back it up. He proposed a model of mental life which was (for Western science) revolutionary, and mostly wrong, but it got one crucial piece right: that there is no unity of command in the human brain. The brain has (again to way oversimplify) several layers, and all of them have at various times access to sensory processing and motor control. The mechanisms by which one layer or another takes precedence are extremely obscure. But if you want to understand why Governor Sanford, who wholeheartedly believes -- with some of the circuitry of his frontal cortex, anyway -- that adultery is wrong, engages in adultery, those are the mechanisms you want to investigate.

Or you can just say that he's bad. If you like. If you feel like that gets you anywhere. I don't.

I've been eating badly, again, and I'm completely fascinated by that process. I watched myself getting ice cream out of the freezer, and spooning it into a bowl. The part of my brain that intended to eat ice cream was in firm control. I could hear the part that thought I shouldn't do it. It wasn't completely shut out. The "still, small voice" the Bible talks about was there, saying I shouldn't eat it, I'd be sorry, the gratification would be fleeting, etc., etc. But it had no access to motor control. Something else was running the show. For simplicity's sake, I'll call it the hypothalamus, but I'm sure that's a very crude and inaccurate name for something that I imagine is really, insofar as it's an entity, a "software" entity, not a "hardware" entity.

Now, the hypothalamus doesn't do words. I couldn't have told you why I intended to eat that ice cream. I couldn't have given you a justification for it. I couldn't have given you an argument in favor of it. The arguments -- squeaking away in the background -- were all against it. They simply made no difference.

Perhaps I'm a bad person, and that's why I eat ice cream when I shouldn't. Or perhaps I'm weak-willed (though I must say that no one who knows me well has ever thought that about me: I am considered by my nearest and dearest to be one of the most stubborn human beings alive.) But that's not very helpful. If I'm bad because I want to be bad, what hope is there for me? If my will is defective, then -- how do I repair it? By an act of will?

The fact that the hypothalamus doesn't do words puts it at a disadvantage in the world of books and discussion. It always comes up the loser in a seminar, or a convention of theologians. To hear us talk, you'd think it didn't stand a chance. But somehow, in real life, it manages to get hold of a lot of ice cream and Argentinian mistresses.

But suppose we give up, once and for all, the delusion of the unified command. Suppose we recognize that there are multiple entities running the show. Suppose we even go so far as to grant that there may be very good reasons why the argument-generating part of our brains gets excluded from motor control from time to time. St Augustine's mother had the wacko theory that depriving her children of water would improve their willpower and make them better people. St Augustine thought she was right, of course. Mom is always right. He drank water anyway. If he hadn't, we probably wouldn't ever have gotten to read the Confessions: little Augustine wouldn't have made it out of childhood.

The thing is, the cerebral cortex is always coming up with wacko theories. It really can't be trusted to carry out the fundamental bits of survival: eating and drinking and sleeping and procreating. So it simply gets shunted aside from time to time. You can hold your breath until you fall unconscious, but you can't hold your breath until you die. Another piece of the brain cuts in and says, "enough, already!" and starts breathing again. It's not because you're bad. It's not because your will is faulty. It's simply the way the nervous system works.

If we accept that the moralizing, theorizing part of our brains is just one constituent among many, rather than the lord and master of all it surveys, I think we will be both happier and better at regulating our actions. I think, for instance, that the reason so many priests have abused children is that they see the problem as being that they're not trying hard enough to fight down temptation. If they simply took it as read that there were temptations they couldn't fight, the actions to be taken would be obvious: get the hell out of the priesthood. Stay away from children. Tell the people close to you that you're not to be trusted with them. Instead of engaging in titanic struggles at the point of temptation, structure your life so as to avoid the temptations altogether. But of course they can't do that: they can't enlist the help of others because that would be admitting, in effect, that they are so bad they won't even try to be good. If you hew to the theory of the unified command, there's no other way to think about it.

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I don't believe that things are this simple. I don't believe the entities I refer to as the hypothalamus and the cortex are the only two players. I don't believe they're even distinct. I think they, and others, reconfigure wildly on the fly. I think the variety of things we airily call "will power" probably do have tangential influences, here and there: enought to keep the mythology going, anyway. But one thing I'm dead sure of: that if the schema I've proposed here is oversimplified, the "unified command" schema is even more so. It doesn't even begin to save the appearances.