Verbal & mental techniques

1.   CONTEMPLATION (a silent verbal process):  Think about positive effects of being slim, and conversely the negative effects about being fat.  Imaging you are engaging a close friend in a conversation thereon.  Consider how you life has changed since you have become fat.  Think about the quality of life of your slim friends.  Think about what you have done to yourself and how you are reversing that trend. Plot out a course of action.  Repeat to your self various statements as though you are rehearsing a speech.  Practice repeatedly this mental dialogue, for such practice makes future discussion that much easier. 

2.  CONVERSATIONS:  Tell everyone about how you are going on a diet.  Describe how important it is and that you are now being a new phase of your life.  Talk about how so many important things will be improved, such as your health, ability to work, play sports, sex, and your marriage.  Ask them questions about diet.  Engage your friends in conversation about diet.

3.  VISUALIZATION (a visual process):  Carry a photo of you when taken when prior to becoming fat and a current photo.  Put similar photos on your desk.  Have a picture taken of you in a bathing suit, make copies of it, and place them in several places such as the refrigerator, kitchen table, and desk, where they will remind you that you are on a diet.  Visual participating in activities that you don’t (or don’t do well) because you’re fat, such as sports, lovemaking, jogging, cycling, hiking, swimming, etc.  Imagine yourself thin and having to carry 50 or more pounds of fat around wherever you go.[i]  Now visualize yourself as thin doing those things.  Visualize how much happier your spouse will be when you become physically attractive again, and how this will improve your relationship.   

4.  READINGS & STUDIES:  Find books on diet and read them.  Find medical articles on metabolism, diet, and medical intervention.  Take notes and discuss the subject matter with friends.  Especially study the negative health consequences.  The moderately obese person lives on an average 5 years less than the person who is not obese, and 8 years less than the fit person.  Many diseases are drastically increased with weight gain including cancer (most carcinogens are fat soluble), arthritis, diabetes, and coronary disease being the most significant.[ii]  Knowledge is one of the cornerstones to success. 

5.  NOTE TAKING:  Keep track, a journal, of what you have done: the hours, the subjects, and any good ideas.  Carry a stenographer’s tablet with you.  And while you are about keep a journal include a section concerning your eating habits.  Pay particular attention to those events preceding your eating too much or eating when not hungry.  Also note the amount and what were eaten, and how hungry you were.  Keep a daily log, then weekly work out your cumulative record.  Enter the log in your computer.  Records are much, much better than recollections.  

ACTIVITIES

A.   EATING HABITS, QUANTITY AND TYPE OF FOOD, AND SITUATIONS:

1.  Before beginning to eat, discuss your diet with your companions.  Bring up, among other things, what you are doing to limit the amount of food to be consumed.

2.   When eating by yourself, get out the amount you plan to eat and put it in your plate, and then put away the containers you got your food from. 

3.   Don’t leave out snacks or leave them in handy places.  Some people even put a lock on their refrigerator, to make not so easy to open it.  

4   Avoid large meals.[iii]  If going to a restaurant, chose one with small portions and cheap food. 

5.   Putt off the first meal as long as possible.  Wait till you are good and hungry.

6   Put off each subsequent meal until you are good and hungry.

7   Don’t eat a couple of hours before going to bed.

8   Eat only enough to take away your hunger.

9   Eat slowly, this will give a chance for what you have eaten to take away your hunger.

10. Eat small snacks between meals to help reduce the number of meals.  Moreover, by snack you won’t need to load up at the dinner table to prevent between meal hungers.  .

11.  Control the portions of your snacks.  If necessary, have pre-measured portions in baggies.

12.  Eat less than your normal portion. 

13.  Learn to eat slowly (obese people typically eat faster).

14.  Choose filling, low-fat, low sugar, high protein meals and snacks.  Avoid foods that improve your appetite and things that are not filling such as fruits and chocolates. 

B.  RECORD KEEPING:

1.   Set up a log and in this log track when you got up, when you ate, how much and what you ate, how fast you ate, and what things you should have done, such as cooked a smaller portion. 

2.  Track special circumstances, such as with company, during break at work, etc. 

3.  Record any causal observations.

4.  Purchase a copy of the USDA handbook on foods, Composition of Foods, from the Government Printing Office.  Read it and type out a table of the foods you commonly eat, their percentage water, carbohydrate, protein, and fat grams. 

5.  Purchase and read a university nutrition book. 

6.  Take notes on these books.

C.  SOCIAL/PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF EATING:

1.  From your log you will learn what occurred prior to you over eating.  Avoid those situations.   

2.   Avoid social situations conducive to over indulgence, such a spot lucks, dining out, and drinking parties. 

3.  Avoid friends who have eating problems, they will reinforce behavior inconsistent with weight loss.

4.  The more ritualized your meals; the easier it is to control your consumption.  Thus by eating at the same time and same location, it is easier to establish a pattern of good choice of foods and amount of foods, and repeat that pattern.

5.  Try not to make the meal something looked forward to.  Limit its social setting; choose bland foods, find other activities that you prefer, so that eating is taking you away from those enjoyed activities.  In other words, try to turn eating into an activity like refueling the car, a necessity, rather than a pleasure.

6.  Avoid cooking for others (and thus the social reinforcement), rather do the dishes and clean up. 

7.   Tell your beloved that he/she is not to make preparing a meal an expression of love, rather to keep it simple, nutritional, and low in fats and sugars.

WHAT TO EAT:

1.  Avoid foods which you are likely to eat too much of. 

2.  Drink water or diet soda.  Many people consume over a 1,000 calories per day in fluids. 

3.  Avoid foods with more than 10% fat content.  Fats contribute 3 times as many calories per gram as carbohydrates.

4.  Avoid foods that aren’t filling such as fruits and sherbet, and other foods that increase your appetite or reduce the amount of time after a meal that it will take before you are again hungry.

5.  Don’t use calories as a guide,[iv] rather the percentage of fat and of simple carbohydrates.  Cellulose calories are not an accurate measurement of the energy derived from foods. 

6.  Eat foods that are high in protein or cellulose. 

ACTIVITIES AND DIET

1.  Increase your metabolism by engaging in more physical activities:  walk more, climb stairs, mow the lawn, and such.  Take up active sports such as running, cycling, tennis, roller-skating, and swimming. 

2.  Increase your muscle tone, and thus increase your metabolism.  Join a gym and take up weight training.  Do isometrics and isotonics (tightening your muscles) frequently throughout the day.   

3.  Get your family and friends involved with you in sports and weight training.  Set a schedule for sports and weight training. 

DRUGS:

1.  Avoid drugs that make you relax or make you make you doppie.  You need all your energy so that you can exercise, so you can work harder, and so you will have the sharpness of mind and drive to stick to your diet.  . 

2. Avoid alcohol; it contains empty calories and will reduce your activity level.

3.  If you must take a recreational drug, choose amphetamines or LSD; both suppress your appetite and increase your activity level. 

4.  Take a diet drug at the beginning, it will surpass your appetite and will increase your motivation to lose weight.  The best routine would be to take 5 or if necessary 10 mgs of amphetamine (a small dose) in the morning, for it will reduce your appetite and increase your drive.[v]  Do this for about 2 weeks, so as to establish good diet habits.  After that discontinue for you will grow tolerant of the drug.  Thus if some months later you find that you are going off your diet, start again with 10 mgs, but continue only for a week. 

FOOD AS A DRUG

Why it is so difficult for humans to follow the dictates of reason and do the very obviously prudent things?  The remaining discussions are designed to shed light on human behavior and the obesity phenomena.  It is one thing to set down the techniques of weight reduction (as I have done in the previous sections); it's another to implement them.  There are deeper reasons for gaining weight, reasons deeper than the afore described taste of food, social setting, and peer conditioning.  There are deeper answers than: “The obese person eats to much, has bad eating habits, and is week willed.”  It is the deeper reason that I am about to set out.  There is a better way to understand animal/human behavior.  Insight is power. 

There is a relationship between behavior and environment.  In the previous section I went into social reinforcement;[vi] that is an obvious example of how environment influences eating behavior.  The pattern of reinforcers that create the behavior problem is far from obvious.  Many of the reinforcers are mild.  Think of vectors forces (as in vector algebra) deciding the direction of an action.  Only with humans, the types, and intensity of forces are hidden in the complex and long history of the person (compared to the laboratory, young pigeon).  Further complexity is added by the biological inheritance that establishes the proclivities to respond in certain ways to stimuli.  However, a listing of the events that reinforce (for the following example) Tom’s problem behavior is instructive.

Consider the example of Tom’s drinking a pint of milk and eating the last half of a Maria Callander’s cherry pie for an evening snack.  Tom will, being lactose intolerant, have a gas attack, later energy from the sugar in the pie, prevent the negative reinforcer of hunger, and deprive others of the pie.  He likes the kidding he gets about his great appetite.  Moreover, this evening there is nothing interesting going on, so he agreed to watch on television a movie with his wife.  Adding the desert to his large meal insures that he will feel tired during the film, and thus be less bored.  Moreover, about the time the movie is over, the sugar from the pie will take effect, and he will have energy to work on several business correspondences, an activity he will find more enjoyable than to continue to watch television.  By depriving others of the pie, he is expressing hostility in a subtle way, which is mildly enjoyable.  A similar pleasure is derived from the foul odor caused by his lactose (milk sugar) intolerance.  His wife will become annoyed and they will quarrel some, a thing that will break up the monotony of the movie.  And he likes the taste of cherry pie, and the milk to wash it down.  The list goes on:  the activity of eating the pie and milk during the beginning of the movie is a mildly reinforcing distraction from a film that bores him.  He will sleep sounder this night following a second snack.  These are the principle reinforcers that occur that evening.

  There are other long-term ones.  Given Tom’s dislike of physical exertion, being obese permits him to avoid such exertion.  Given their less-than-loving marriage, being physically unattractive yields subtle reinforcements.  Man by instinct will strike out against the source of both adversive stimuli and the cause for the blocking of the obtainment of pleasures.[vii]  In this case his wife, being physically unattractive and poor in bed are two subtle ways of disappointing his wife, and thus they add to the vector algebra of his obesity.  By far the greatest long-term reinforcer is the effect of weight upon his physical energy level.  A large percentage of our society at least several times a week take substance (alcohol, valiums, marijuana, etc.) that reduce their energy level; food in quantity does the same, as also does obesity. It is these long-term and the prior mentioned short-term reinforcers that are stronger than the prudent rational reinforcement that would come from properly managing his weight. 

Many small, some long term, others like breaking wind, short-term contribute to the total of reinforcement Tom gets from eating more than he burns off.  While Tom could easily, if challenged cease from any of the weak reinforcers such as the silent but chocking farts he makes near his wife, or the consumption of the last slice of cherry pie.  He cannot overcome at the same time the collection of these reinforcers.  They result in Tom eating more than he burns.  Changing the pattern of reinforcers, so that he would obtain those associated with a person of normal weight is like climbing over a mountain to get out of a valley.  Tom is in the valley of obesity and he can’t escape its pattern of reinforcers to get onto the other side and be one of the beautiful people. 

AFTERWORD

The collection of behavioral changes presented in this article is designed to get the Toms out of their valley.  One problem with people is that among reinforcers, cold-logical reasoning is not sufficiently strong of a reinforcer to overcome the pattern of short-term reinforcers.  The frequency of food, gambling, tobacco and alcohol addictions are proof of how the short-term dominate over the long-term reinforcers, and continue to dominate even though reason reveals that the sum total of reinforcement would be greater without such problem behavior.  Education and association with people given to t5he combination of studies and prudent behavior is how one can increase the force of those reinforcers that are associated with the logical process.  Studies that improve reasoning have a reward much greater than the immediate ones associated with the subject matter.  There are in my website many posted articles that are exercises in reasoning and two that are on logic itself.   Develop a program of studies and you will slowly strengthen reason as a guide for actions.