The QOTD:

“The vast majority of relapsers – 85 percent of smokers, for example – do not go all the way back to precontemplation, but return instead to the contemplation stage. Very soon, they begin to make plans for the next action attempt, internalizing the lessons they have learned from their recent efforts. That is why we prefer the term recycle to relapse. The return to contemplation can be an auspicious, even an inspired time for continuing to change. Recycling gives us opportunities to learn. Action followed by relapse is far better than no action at all. People who take action and fail in the next month are twice as likely to succeed over the next six months as those who don’t take any action at all.”

– James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Carlo DiClemente, Changing for Good, pg. 49-50

The QOTD, on the nature of true, lasting change:

“People who initiate change begin by proceeding [in stages] from contemplation to preparation to action to maintenance. Most, however, slip up at some point, returning to the contemplation, or sometimes even the precontemplation stage, before renewing their efforts. The average successful self-changer recycles several times.”

– James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Carlo DiClemente, Changing for Good, pg. 47

This is an interesting way of looking at change, and it underscores the fatal mistake that I think most dieters make: they leap right into the action stage (by pushing to “lose 30 pounds by summer” or something similar) without due regard for the difficulty in actually making the change stick. Thus:

“The action stage is the one in which people most overtly modify their behavior and their surroundings. They stop smoking cigarettes, remove all desserts from the house, pour the last beer down the drain, or confront their fears. In short, they make the move for which they have been preparing…

Changes made during the action stage are more visible to others than those made during other stages, and therefore receive the greatest recognition. The danger in this is that many people, including professional therapists, often erroneously equate action with change, overlooking not only the critical work that prepares people for succcessful action but the equally important (and often more challenging) efforts to maintain the changes following action. The sometimes devastating result is that encouragement is scarce for those who are in the stages that precede and follow the action stage. Support for changers dwindles when they need it most…”

– James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Carlo DiClemente, Changing for Good, pg. 47

Or as Aimee Mann put it in The Forgotten Arm:

We’ll have a big parade for every day that you stay clean!
But when the trumpets fade, you’ll go under like a submarine.
And you won’t see it coming…

The QOTD, on the Tao of dieting:

“Focusing single-mindedly on not eating eventually pushes us to eat more. Feeling deprived only increases the reward value of food, and then usually gives way to indulgence, and often to abandon. As desire evolves into [perceived] need, we do exactly what we’ve tried so hard not to do – we eat that cream cake. And then we feel worse, which makes us even more likely to be out of control.”

- David A. Kessler, The End of Overeating, pg. 156.

The QOTD, on the impact of stress on diet:

“Stress also lends more power to each of the mechanisms that drive overeating through its capacity to heighten our arousal. ‘If you’re in an agitated state, a stimulus will act on you more, will generate a little more vigor,’ said Bernard Balleine [of UCLA]…

By intensifying my arousal and approch behavior, stress steamrolls over the cognitive voice that had been trying to say no to the cue [presented by a plate of cookies]. ‘When you get into this slightly aroused state, the strongest cue in the environment will tend to elicit the motor response it has been associated with in the past,’ [Balleine] said…

‘Is there any evidence that food really makes you feel better after you’ve eaten?’ I asked Loma Flowers, a community psychiatrist in San Fransisco. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘People feel better after eating it. They eat for anxiety. And it soothes anxiety. It really does work like a Valium.’ But that effect, of course, is momentary.

When we learn that a stimulus provides gratification, that knowledge drives our wanting, arousing us further. Our focus narrows to the target of our desire, capturing our full attention and directing us toward it. The anticipation of feeling better puts us in a heightened state of focus, making us want it all the more.

What we fail to realize is that the food we ate for comfort has left its mark on the brain, creating a void that will need to be filled the next time we are cued. The result is a spiral of wanting.”

- David A. Kessler, The End of Overeating, pg. 152-53.

The QOTD, on the impact of emotions on diet:

“Among people who experience conditioned hypereating, emotional states often heighten the power of cues, overpower executive control, and intensify the drive to eat. ‘It’s a form of self-medication,’ said George Koob, at the Salk Institute. ‘You’re modulating your arousal. People take the food to calm themselves down.’

Rajita Sinha, at Yale University’s School of Medicine, said that sadness and anger have the greatest potential to drive a loss of control… Because a cookie makes me feel better, it’s easy to develop the habit of seeking it out when I’m sad or angry. Over time, as neural pathways link the change in my mood with the experience of eating the cookie, the association grows stronger.

‘These products have some kind of hedonic, calming effect,’ said Koob. ‘In other words, they relieve the itch.’ The problem is that the itch comes back.

Anger and anxiety can act as a ‘setting condition’ for cues, says Charles O’Brien, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. ‘A cue that has been extinguished in the basal state [when the body is calm] again becomes active in producing craving and physiological changes when it is presented after a person has been put in an angry state…’

The effect is visible in imaging studies in which people undergo brain scans as they respond to cues suggesting they’re about to get a milkshake. In one study, researchers first induced a negative mood by playing some dark music and asking participants to recollect a particularly depressing life experience. Afterward, the regions of the brain where the reward pathways operate showed greater activity level in response to the anticipated milkshake compared with levels among participants in the neutral mood.

‘We interpreted those findings as suggesting that when emotional eaters are in a negative mood, the idea that they are about to get a milkshake makes them anticipate reward,’ said Eric Stice, a scientist at the Oregon Research Institute. ‘That’s not the case for nonemotional eaters…”

When emotions amplify reward, the drive for reward becomes even harder to control.”

- David A. Kessler, The End of Overeating, pg. 150-51.

The Last Psychiatrist, on addiction and change:

“You can’t refrain from doing something you like. You can, however, change the person you are into the kind of person who doesn’t even like that stuff. Sugar Smacks still taste the same as they did under Carter, but I don’t know anybody who still eats them. Do the same for soda.

In medical school a lot of the guys (who went into ortho) went to the gym and would discuss with euphoria how much canned tuna they ate. “There’s 15g of protein and zero fat!” they’d whisper to each other, and they’d sooner eat salamander eyes than lick a Dorito. That was the kind of guys they were.

This may not be a reassuring solution to some, but I can promise you that it is the only solution: you have to decide you’re not the kind of person who wastes time on that. Condemning it, banning it, hiding from it– all will lead to failure.”

Full disclosure: I took that quote slightly out of context, but the principle is the same.

The QOTD, on the self-reinforcing nature of industrial food design, food marketing, and bad eating habits:

“Evidence that high-sugar, high-fat foods are reinforcing, then, comes from two key findings in animal studies: Animals are willing to work harder for those foods, and the foods intensify the power of cues, such as where the animal once encountered the stimuli.

Three other features of food also exert a powerful influence on our desire for more.

First, quantity. Give a rat two pellets of food rather than one, give a person two scoops of ice cream rather than one, and they’ll eat more. Portion size matters.

Second is the concentration of rewarding ingredients. Adding more sugar or fat to a given portion boosts its desirability (although only up to a point; in excess, either one can lessen its appeal).

Finally, variety plays an important role. We saw this when Anthony Sclafani demonstrated that a supermarket diet can throw off the body’s system of energy balance, but providing access to different kinds of foods is only one way to increase stimulation. We can also add features to the environment in which a food is served – associating it with an external signal, such as light or sound. Or we can load sensory inputs, such as adding chocolate chips to ice cream. Another way to achieve variety is with what’s called dynamic contrast. The Oreo cookie, with its combination of flavors and textures (bitter chocolate wafter, sweet cream filling), is a classic example of a food with dynamic contrast.

Sugar and fat are reinforcing, and cues, quantity, concentration, and variety all increase that reinforcement value. That still doesn’t mean everyone will go after these foods with equal effort. Some people are likelier than others to find food more reinforcing and are thus willing to work harder to obtain it. What the evidence tells us is that sugar and fat, as well as the cues predicting that sugar and fat are available, can condition the behavior of those who are vulnerable.”

- David A. Kessler, The End of Overeating, pg. 33-34.

The QOTD, on the physiological response generated by the subtle cues that food marketing companies use to stimulate appetite:

“The power of the vanilla milkshake and other high-sugar, high-fat foods is further amplified as cues become associated with them. Along with taste and other sensory characteristics, the location where the food has previously been available and the events associated with past consumption can also become reinforcers. In time, these cues become as important in food-seeking behavior as the food itself.

A bowl of M&M’s, for example, can be reinforcing before I touch a single one. If I’ve eaten the candy in the past, I’m stimulated by the sight of it because I know it will be rewarding. I reach for an M&M, eat it, and experience that reward. The visual cue gains power.

Cues associated with the pleasure response demand our attention, motivate our behavior, and stimulate the urge we call “wanting”. When those cues are present, we learn to pursue food with greater vigor to secure the expected reward. With experience, the association between the food and cues becomes even stronger, and we become more single-minded in our focus and our pursuit. That increases consumption. We pursue the food more frequently, and the resulting pleasure leads us to repeat the behavior. A continuous cycle of cue-urge-reward is set in motion and eventually becomes a habit…

For humans, too, location is one of the most potent cues. Pass the mall where you know you’ll find a Ruby Tuesday or the neighborhood where your town’s best pizza is available, and you’ll experience a desire you didn’t have a moment before.

- David A. Kessler, The End of Overeating, pg. 32-33.

“The core method of the lawyer and the judge is ‘legal reasoning,’ and it lacks scientific rigor; indeed, at its best, it is uncomfortably close to careful reading, to rhetoric, and to common sense.”

– Richard A. Posner, The Bluebook Blues, 120 Yale Law Journal 850, 860 (2011).

Here is an excellent summary of some of the alternatives to the insane crash-diet-and-exercise mantra that America sells to obese people:

It’s important to have realistic expectations and to be kind to oneself. Cultivating a drill sergeant mentality will not improve quality of life, and isn’t likely to be sustainable.

If there’s one thing that’s consistent in the medical literature, it’s that telling people to eat fewer calories does not help them lose weight in the long term… Many people who use this strategy see transient fat loss, followed by fat regain and a feeling of defeat. There’s a simple reason for it: the body doesn’t want to lose weight. It’s extremely difficult to fight the fat mass setpoint, and the body will use every tool it has to maintain its preferred level of fat: hunger, reduced body temperature, higher muscle efficiency (i.e., less energy is expended for the same movement), lethargy, lowered immune function, et cetera.

• Here’s a simple meditation primer that will teach you the basics of meditation in just a few minutes.

• “The biggest lie we tell ourselves is that meditating is not a high priority… But I don’t want to sound too girly when I tell you to meditate. So I’m telling you instead that the Marine Corps is using meditation to help troops cope with the stress of warfare. Imagine fifty guys sitting cross-legged, eyes shut, with a rifle in every lap. The Marines were totally skeptical at first, of course, but in Men’s Journal (one of my favorite magazines) there’s a great article by Vanessa Gregory about how the Marines became believers.”

On the myth of gluttony:

Let’s start with a few things most people can agree on. If you don’t eat any food at all, you will lose fat mass. If you voluntarily force-feed yourself with a large excess of food, you will gain fat mass, whether the excess comes from carbohydrate or fat (2). So calories obviously have something to do with fat mass.

But of course, the situation is much more subtle in real life. Since a pound of body fat contains roughly 3,500 calories, eating an excess of 80 calories per day (1 piece of toast) should lead to a weight gain of 8 lbs of fat per year. Conversely, if you’re distracted and forget to eat your toast, you should lose 8 lbs of fat per year, which would eventually be dangerous for a lean person. That’s why we all record every crumb of food we eat, determine its exact calorie content, and match that intake precisely with our energy expenditure to maintain a stable weight.

Oh wait, we don’t do that? Then how do so many people maintain a stable weight over years and decades? And how do wild animals maintain a stable body fat percentage (except when preparing for hibernation) even in the face of food surpluses? How do lab rats and mice fed a whole food diet maintain a stable body fat percentage in the face of literally unlimited food, when they’re in a small cage with practically nothing to do but eat?

The answer is that the body isn’t stupid. Over hundreds of millions of years, we’ve evolved sophisticated systems that maintain “energy homeostasis”. In other words, these systems act to regulate fat mass and keep it within the optimal range. The evolutionary pressures operating here are obvious: too little fat mass, and an organism will be susceptible to starvation; too much, and an organism will be less agile and less efficient at locomotion and reproduction. Energy homeostasis is such a basic part of survival that even the simplest organisms regulate it…

My hypothesis is that, in many people, industrial food and an unnatural lifestyle lead to gradual fat gain by dysregulating the energy homeostasis system. This “breaks” the system that’s designed to automatically keep our fat mass in the optimal range by regulating energy intake, energy expenditure and the relative partitioning of energy resources between lean and fat tissue. This system is not under our conscious control, and it has nothing to do with willpower…

So do calories matter? Yes, but in a healthy person, all the math is done automatically by the hypothalamus and energy balance requires no conscious effort.

• Mild exercise (in this case, walking at one’s own pace for 40 minutes three times a week) can increase your performance on cognitive tasks.

• I won’t be ready to start this for a couple of months, but the 100 rep challenge looks like a great way for a competitive person (like me) to set a personal goal.

• Here’s an exhaustive guide to building a beginner’s workout routine.

Alex Payne recently wrote out some tips for staying healthy while working in an extremely demanding startup environment. But his tips are equally applicable to attorneys with demanding jobs (such as those attorneys slaving away at a large law firm), so recommend them to you.

Aside from time management skills, his tips are straightforward but under-appreciated. First, make sure you exercise regularly, no matter how busy you are, because it will help you get more done in the long run:

This is a no-brainer: get as much exercise as you possibly can. I try to exercise daily. I work out for three reasons: stress relief, energy, and long-term health… I’m not a naturally athletic person, and going to the gym is usually utterly unappealing after a long day. At the end of a good workout, though, I always feel calmer than when I started. Exercise boosts my mood and makes me more able to see negative or combative situations from a more positive perspective. Startup life will sap your energy. At first, it’s easy to operate on sheer enthusiasm. Over time, though, even the most exciting job becomes work. Working out can tire out the muscles, but I find that it energizes my mind.

Next, recognize that your input (food) impacts your output (cognition), and eat clean:

My metabolism sucks. My ancestry is primarily a mix of English and German, and as a result I’m genetically optimized for storing fat through a chilly European winter (also for arch looks and laconic humor). If I don’t eat carefully, I gain weight, and if I gain weight, I look and feel like crap. Without strict rules about what I can and can’t eat, I’ll find myself eating whatever’s around, particularly when I’m stressed from work. To combat this, I set very clear guidelines about what I eat and drink, and when. Programmers notoriously live on caffeine and sugar. I refuse to cut the caffeine out of my diet, but the biggest change I’ve made for myself is cutting out refined sugar… I’ve also removed most “bad” carbohydrates and starches from my diet. I avoid bread, pasta, white rice, potatoes, etc. So yes, that means no sandwiches, no noodles, no fries; none of a lot of things that I enjoy…

I just try to eat fresh vegetables, lean protein, low-fat dairy, nuts, and fresh fruit. This regime removes a huge number of readily available and hideously unhealthy foods as meal options. Being able to say, “nope, that’s just not in the category of things that I eat” is helpful when confronted with a menu or grocery store full of choices… The point of all these dietary changes is primarily about achieving constancy. Yes, it’s nice to lose some weight, but by sticking to the above rules, my energy level throughout the day remains the same. Removing the sugar and carbs means that I don’t peak and trough. I generally feel less ruled by food, and it’s easier to make dietary decisions now that I have a framework.

And finally, make the time to see the big picture:

This is probably the most important of the changes I’ve made. Regular meditation is absolutely essential to maintaining quality of life for me. It keeps me calm and focused, and helps me sort out personal and professional conundrums… The hardest part of meditation is making the time to do it. Realistically, you need about 20 minutes per NSR session. While that doesn’t sound like much, adding 20 minutes to your morning and evening routines is harder than you think. It’s entirely worth it, though. Meditation cuts right through feelings of being stressed-out and overwhelmed, and neatly organizes thoughts and emotions. More than once, I’ve been meditating and have had the solution to a problem I’ve been struggling with pop to the forefront of my mind. That’s time well spent. In a way, meditation is an investment in the quality of time spent not meditating. Even if you don’t have any magic moments of clarity while sitting there with your eyes closed, you’ll probably find that the rest of your day just feels better when you meditate regularly. At the very least, meditation makes my work time more productive, and that alone makes it worthwhile for me.

In other words, these tips boil down to one principle: no matter how stressed you are, or how unreasonably demanding your client or partner is being, or how busy you are, never, ever sacrifice the long term for the short term. You’ll regret it down the road.

• Yummly is the best recipe site I’ve found so far, despite it’s overly-clever “web 2.0″ interface.

• Required reading for anyone looking to science to guide their decision about how to lose weight.

• Vitamins should always be taken with a meal.

• As a reminder, mass produced foods are not nutritionally equivalent to real foods. This particular outcome had to do with tea, but the principle is valid almost everywhere.

• Drinking water can help dieters maintain their weight loss: “A team led by Brenda Davy of Virginia Tech has run the first randomised controlled trial studying the link between water consumption and weight loss. A report on the 12-week trial, published earlier this year, suggested that drinking water before meals does lead to weight loss. Moreover, the effect seems to be long-lasting. In the subsequent 12 months the participants have been allowed to eat and drink what they like. Those told to drink water during the trial have, however, stuck with the habit—apparently they like it. Strikingly, they have continued to lose weight (around 700g over the year), whereas the others have put it back on.”

• Here’s another reminder that healthy sleep patterns are crucial for someone trying to lose weight or maintain weight loss, because a lack of sleep changes how your body burns fat: “All participants were told to eat 10% fewer calories that usual for two weeks, however half of them were instructed to sleep for 8 and a half hours per night, and the other half were instructed to sleep for 5 and a half hours. The actual recorded sleep times were 7:25 and 5:14, respectively. Weight loss by calorie restriction causes a reduction of both fat and lean mass, which is what the investigators observed. Both groups lost the same amount of weight. However, 80% of the weight was lost as fat in the high-sleep group (2.4/3.0 kg lost as fat), while only 48% of it was lost as fat in the low-sleep group (1.4/2.9 kg lost as fat). Basically, the sleep-deprived group lost as much lean mass as they did fat mass, which is not good!.. Another sleep restriction trial published in the Lancet in 1999 showed that restricting healthy young men to four hours of sleep per night caused them to temporarily develop glucose intolerance, or pre-diabetes. Furthermore, their daily rhythm of the hormone cortisol became abnormal.”

• Similarly, a lack of sleep can increase your risk of heart disease and stroke.

• This is why change is much harder than people think: “Schmidt’s extensive research focused on the amount of practice necessary to learn a movement, to make it habit. A new pattern learned from scratch, he discovered, seemed to reliably take between 300 and 500 repetitions to become permanent. But new patterns learned to correct and replace an old, less efficient pattern instead consistently took between 3000 and 5000 repetitions – a literal order of magnitude difference… [I]n that context, it’s clearly only worth setting out for change when you’re ready to buckle down for a long-haul commitment, when you’re ready to start even knowing that you aren’t aren’t ‘done’, you aren’t finished thinking about your actions, until you’ve got things right again and again and again, three thousand to five thousand times.”

I’m starting to feel like a curmudgeon.

A pretty substantial part of my life has been spent on the internet, in one form or another, all the way back to BBS’s. So it’s coming as something of a shock now to look around and, for the first time in my life, see technology moving forward and leaving me behind.

I’m talking, of course, about social media.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of social media. I am, after all, a blogger, and it naturally follows I am the sort of person who believes that online conversations are a meaningful way of connecting with others. Still: something about facebook, and twitter, and even youtube rubs me the wrong way. I’ve been trying to put my finger on just what it is, and I think I’ve finally got it.

To understand where we’re going, we have to understand where we’ve been:

The Net grew like a weed between the cracks in the monolithic steel-and-glass empire of traditional commerce. It was technically obscure, impenetrable, populated by geeks and wizards, loners, misfits. When I started using the Internet, nobody gave a damn about it outside of a few big universities and the military-industrial complex they served. In fact, if you were outside that favored circle, you couldn’t even log on. The idea that the Internet would someday constitute the world’s largest marketplace would have been laughable if anyone was entertaining such delusions back then. I began entertaining them publicly in 1992 and the laughter was long and loud.

The Net grew and prospered largely because it was ignored. It worked by different rules than the rules of business. Market penetration wasn’t interesting because there was no market — unless it was a market for new ideas. The Net was built by people who said things like: What if we try this? Nope. What if we try that? Nope. What if we try this other thing? Well, hot damn! Look at that!

One of the hottest damns was the World Wide Web. It came out of efforts to create electronic footnotes — references between academic papers on high-energy physics that maybe a few dozen people in the entire world could actually understand. That’s why now, when you turn on your TV, you see www.haveanotherbeer.com.

Well, OK, a few things did happen in between. One of those things was that the Internet attracted millions. Many millions. The interesting question to ask is why. In the early 1990s, there was nothing like the Internet we take for granted today. Back then, the Net was primitive, daunting, uninviting. So what did we come for? And the answer is: each other.

The Internet became a place where people could talk to other people without constraint. Without filters or censorship or official sanction — and perhaps most significantly, without advertising. Another, noncommercial culture began forming across this out-of-the-way collection of computer networks. Long before graphical user interfaces made the scene, the scene was populated by plain old boring ASCII: green phosphor text scrolling up screens at the glacial pace afforded by early modems. So where was the attraction in that?

The attraction was in speech, however mediated. In people talking, however slowly. And mostly, the attraction lay in the kinds of things they were saying. Never in history had so many had the chance to know what so many others were thinking on such a wide range of subjects. Slowly at first, a new kind of conversation was beginning to emerge, but it would achieve global reach with astonishing speed.”

– Christopher Locke, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Chapter One.

I think there are three things about the future of the net that are bothering me.

First: the social media world (Facebook, Twitter, even Youtube to a degree) was corporate-owned/commercially-minded from the word “go.” Even when they were subversive in the beginning (as in the case of the early YouTube’s tacit approval of copyright-infringing content), that was only a tactic, a weapon used to bring down the barriers to entry. As soon as they could go legit and sell out, they did. People are out there trying to connect with one another, trying to have conversations, and the tech industry (which, in the past, has usually been a vanguard of privacy, freedom from authoritarian control, and experimental openness) is opportunistically taking advantage of that: using sophisticated data mining to erode our privacy and sell us stuff. It’s distasteful.

Second: Like the early internet just after the Eternal September, the sudden influx of “regular people” as a result the explosive popularity of social media has changed the culture of the net. The puritans, the hucksters, the authoritarians – they’re all here. They’re all watching. And some of them are buying your data from facebook.

Finally: I don’t like the increasing fragmentation of the web. The early internet was completely open and value-neutral, which created a lot of experimentation and a certain idealism (leading to the famous claim that the internet treats censorship like damage and routes around it). But now the iphone is locked down, the carriers are trying to prevent users from rooting android phones, facebook is a walled garden, my monitor won’t play blu-ray because it isn’t HDCP compliant, ICE is seizing domains without due process, and on, and on, and on. The authoritarians, not content to simply participate in the culture of the net, are redesigning its very architecture to give them greater control over our freedom of expression.

These days, the only thing that gives me hope for the future of the tech industry is the Kinect.

Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is this: Chris Locke is right again:

Now me, I’m still trying to get my head around “Markets are conversations.” I often worry (not that I lose any sleep, but still) that people will take this as a reversible reaction, to use a probably inappropriate metaphor from chemistry. I mean: that they’ll think, oh right, and therefore “Conversations are markets.”

But no, I don’t think that would be so good. In one week, Oprah racked up well over half a million followers on Twitter. There’s an instance of a “conversation” — and you know we need the scare quotes — being treated as a market. No matter how much you like Twitter, no matter how crucial you see it as being to the brave new world of social media, I’m sorry, that’s just the same old bullshit.

The QOTD, on the priming effect of “highly palatable food” (defined as industrially designed and processed food heavy in carbohydrates, fat, and salt):

“Sometimes just one taste of a food – a single dose – is enough to trigger conditioned hypereating. We call that effect ‘priming,’ and it’s another way to kick overeating behavior into action, even when we’re not hungry.

That’s what the food industry knows when it tells us, ‘Bet you can’t eat just one.’ It’s what Alcoholics Anonymous recognizes when it warns drinkers, ‘One drink, one drunk.’ A small quantity can be enough to generate a large response.

Although the underlying biology of priming isn’t fully understood, the same neural circuitry that responds to cues seems to be at work. A highly palatable food tells the brain, ‘This is a desirable object, get more,’ Harriet de Wit, in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, explained to me. Immediately after eating that first salt-and-fat-rich potato chip, ‘you want more of it than you did a minute before you had one. It is as though it is stimulating the dopamine system – the motivation and reward-seeking system – a little bit, enough to get it going to make you want more…’ Adaptive in origin, it is yet another tool our species has developed in order to survive. ‘It makes adaptive sense for animals to get hungrier once they find a little bit of food,’ said de Wit…

When we’re hungry, almost any food can have a priming effect – in fact, that’s one of the risks of dieting. But in the absence of hunger, only highly palatable foods are likely to spark further eating… Martin Yeomans at the University of Sussex, in England, has done experiments in which he keeps interrupting people as they eat to ask them how hungry they are. Halfway through their meals some people rate their hunger levels higher than before they started to eat…

Unlike cues, priming holds power only for a short time. That means the food for which you’ve been primed has to be readily accessible. If you eat one piece of candy and there’s a bowl of them in front of you, chances are you will keep eating more. But if no more are available or you have to search for them, the priming response may be undermined because you won’t be stimulated for long enough to alter your behavior.”

- David A. Kessler, The End of Overeating, pg. 149-50.

The QOTD, on the biological basis for obesity:

“Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one’s breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe. The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight. The power of this drive is illustrated by the fact that, whatever one’s motivation, dieting is generally ineffective in achieving significant weight loss over the long term. The greater the weight loss, the greater the hunger, and, sooner or later for most dieters, a primal hunger trumps the conscious desire to be thin.”

– J. M. Friedman, “A War on Obesity, Not the Obese,” Science, Feb. 7, 2003, vol. 229, no. 5608, pp. 856-858.

The QOTD, on the idea that a calorie is a calorie (again):

“[D]ifferent people who overeat by the same amount can gain very different amounts of weight. Bouchard recruited twelve pairs of identical twins, young men who agreed to purposely try to gain weight… [F]or six days a week, over a period of one hundred days, each young man deliberately ate 1,000 calories a day more than he needed to maintain his weight. The total number of extra calories for each young man was 84,000. With 3,600 calories per pound, that meant that each man should gain 23.3 pounds.

The average weight gain, Bouchard reported, was 18 pounds, but the number of pounds gained varied from 9 1/2 to 29 pounds. Identical twins tended to gain nearly identical amounts of weight and tended to put on fat in the same places… When the study ended, however, all the young men effortlessly returned to their original weights, just like the subjects in Sims’s studies of overfeeding…

[E]ach person has a comfortable weight range that the body gravitates to. It might span 10 or 20 pounds – someone might be able to weight anywhere from 120 to 140, for example, without too much effort. That may be why so many people say they could easily gain weight if they just let themselves go; they could, in fact, gain weight, but there is a limit to how much they would gain. Going much above or much below a person’s natural weight range is difficult, and the body fights back by increasing or decreasing the appetite, and increasing or decreasing the metabolism to push the weight back to the range it seeks.

‘This is not good news,’ Bouchard says. ‘Over the past decade we have seen repeated a thousand times studies in which people have lost weight but then regained it.’

Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller… added that people often can lose 10 pounds or so, but beyond that it becomes increasingly difficult to lose large amounts of weight and keep it off.

‘In trying to lose weight, the obese are fighting a difficult battle. It is a battle against biology, a battle that only the intrepid take on and one in which only a few prevail.’”

- Gina Kolata, Rethinking Thin, pg. 124-25.

The QOTD, on the cause of overweight:

“[T]here are two possibilities that could explain why the children of fat parents are fat: it could be that the children inherit a genetic tendency to be fat, or it could be that the parents encouraged bad eating habits and an abhorrence of exercise… [To explore this question,] Stunkard wanted to study adoptees- a classic method of deciding the relative contributions of genes and environment to human trains… The study included 540 adults whose average age was forty. They had been adopted when they were very young – 55 percent had been adopted in the first month of life, and 90 percent were adopted in the first year of life – and reared apart from their biological parents… The results, published in 1986, were unequivocal. The adoptees were of the same fatness as their biological parents, and their fatness had no relation to how fat their adoptive parents were… It did not matter what the children’s adoptive parents fed them; it did not matter whether they set a good or a bad example with their diets and exercise habits. The fatness or thinness of children when they grew up had nothing to do with their adoptive parents. It had everything to do with the fatness or thinness of their biological parents, even though the children may have had no contact with their biological parents and may not even have known them…

A few years later, Stunkard conducted another study, using another classic method of geneticists – investigating twins… In a paper published in 1990 in the New England Journal of Medicine, Stunkard and his colleagues reported that the identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together… The researchers conclude in their paper that 70 percent of the variation in people’s weights may be accounted for by inheritance, which means that a tendency toward a certain weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other tendency, including those that favor the development of mental illness, breast cancer, or heart disease…

The results do not mean that people are completely helpless to control their weight… But they do mean that those who tend to be fat will have to constantly battle their genetic inheritance if they want to reach and maintain a lower weight.”

- Gina Kolata, Rethinking Thin, pg. 121-24.