Forced dieting

[Spice_Weasel]

@bump

Imagine it this way… take your average three pack a day smoker, serious alcoholic, etc… and tell them that they have to smoke 9 cigarettes a day, 3 at each meal time. But they can’t go over that, and they can’t go under that. Or for the alcoholic, that they have to drink one shot, but no more at each meal. Of course they’re not going to succeed. They’re going to fail spectacularly in fact.

This is a good point, but I do want to point out that quitting any kind of substance is also highly dependent on a person’s environment. If someone smokes every time they wait for the bus, for example, of course they will find it easier to stop when they are in a different environment, but their brain is still hard-wired to smoke at the bus stop.

To paraphrase a former addict I found on YouTube (struthless), "When I left the drug house and went to my grandma’s, I didn’t use nearly as often. Then I went home and did a bunch more drugs. And I thought, hey, maybe I’m doing so many drugs because I live in a drug house."

The trick for anyone is to eliminate environmental cues and forge new pathways in the brain by creating alternative behaviors. The old pathways never really go away, they can always be triggered by environment or circumstance, but if you’ve given your brain an alternative pathway, the more times you use the alternative, the better chance you have of abstaining much of the time. (Probably not always.)

So the smoker can’t avoid the bus stop, right? But if every time he sits down at the stop, he pops out a piece of chewing gum or replaces the smoking habit with something else, he is not guaranteed behavioral change but he’s giving himself a shot at choosing a better alternative more often.

Also, a lot of us fat people can eat a nice healthy meal just fine, but there are certain foods that can trigger overeating. Soda is one of mine. So we can change our environment by removing soda from the home (I choose to leave it off the menu completely) and whenever that soda urge hits, do something different.

But in keeping with the point of the thread, I started drinking soda again in December because I got sick a lot and I just naturally associate the two from as far back as my childhood. I’ve currently got a stomach bug and for whatever reason, Sprite helps with my nausea. So I have to practice that alternative pathway some more.

[bump]

Absolutely. I’m just saying that with other things, you can just quit them. You can’t just quit food.

[Spice_Weasel]

Yeah, I’m in the difficult position of having to have junk food in my house at all times, because my son has severe feeding issues related to sensory processing, and there are a limited number of things he will eat. I know a lot of kids are picky as everyone reminds us whenever we talk about it, but this one’s been in occupational therapy for a year and he’s started regressing, starves himself at daycare, and is now losing weight. We are trying to get the ADA paperwork done to have a therapist sit with him in daycare and work on feeding. Since I have started eating and cooking nutritious meals this has become both a constant temptation and a source of existential despair. I wanted better for my son. And it would be a lot easier for me to avoid snacking if my cupboards and freezer weren’t full of crackers and chicken nuggets.

[bump]

That’s rough. Our oldest is on the spectrum and has a touch of the sensory processing issues that other autistic kids have, but not nearly to the degree that I’ve read about. Luckily or unluckily, eating isn’t somewhere that he has that sort of trouble… at all.

[Spice_Weasel]

@bump

Our oldest is on the spectrum and has a touch of the sensory processing issues that other autistic kids have, but not nearly to the degree that I’ve read about.

We have suspected our son is mildly autistic for a while now. On top of the sensory stuff he is obsessed with numbers and number and color sequences and elaborate daily routines that can’t be deviated from one iota without becoming seriously distressed. Socially it’s hard to tell with an almost three year old, but I’ve never seen him take the slightest interest in any of his peers. He might try to engage by saying something like, “pink triangle!” referencing a girl’s shirt. The other day I bumped into a kid at daycare and the kid said to me, “Oops. I’m sorry.” Can’t imagine my kid being that socially aware. The last time a little girl said goodbye to him, while she was coloring, he said, “Bye crayons!”

We’ve done some evals at home and with the pediatrician and he always comes up borderline. So we are in “wait and see” mode. We may need to get him a detailed evaluation for the ADA stuff.

[bump]

Part of our problem is that he’s also academically gifted, very verbal, and reasonably social. He’s just what we’d have called a ‘spaz’ when I was in school. Socially awkward and clueless, but not an introvert.

So as a result, he pretty much didn’t actually get diagnosed until he was older- the whole talking and being social thing throws doctors and psychologists, etc… especially when he was younger. It ended up being the school SPED people who finally diagnosed it based on his social interactions.

[Velocity]

Yeah, this is why forced exercise may be much more effective. The person may be sore and aching each day after exercise, but at least they won’t have that gnawing belly hunger. You sleep much better at night with sore muscles than with an empty stomach.

[Spice_Weasel]

Wouldn’t exercising a lot make you hungrier? Makes me hungrier. Not right away, but usually within an hour or so. And you’d have to put in a ton of time exercising to be even remotely comparable to a calorie deficit. And eventually your body would become more efficient at burning calories and pumping blood… I think there would be a law of diminishing returns.

However, exercise reduces all-cause mortality significantly regardless of weight. So at least you’d have that.

[thorny_locust]

Exercising also makes you more able to do things; and makes exercising easier, so it’s more likely to be kept up after the “forced” aspect ends.

[Spice_Weasel]

It really depends on how you feel about exercise. Some people don’t get that big endorphin rush from it. I do get the rush, and I still found it a struggle for most of my life.

No matter what the intervention, you’re still going to have this fundamental problem that you’ve created an artificial environment, so whatever habitual cues exist in this prison will vanish the moment the person is transplanted to a different environment.

[thorny_locust]

That’s true. I don’t really get the endorphin rush; but moving still feels good, so as long as it’s movement doing something I like, that’s a reward in itself (up to a point, of course; but as exercise makes movement easier, doing some keeps the point reasonably high.)

But, if we’re talking about people who have trouble getting across the room to go to the john by themselves, I’d think that being able to do so would also be a reward.

– though I think you’re right that returning to exactly the same situation is likely to produce the same results (or worse, if forced dieting had been added in.) Something needs to be changed about the situation. What that is probably depends on the individual person.

[Spice_Weasel]

@thorny_locust

But, if we’re talking about people who have trouble getting across the room to go to the john by themselves, I’d think that being able to do so would also be a reward.

For sure. My troubles aren’t that extreme, but my back pain basically vanished when I started doing kettlebells and when I don’t do them for a while, I can feel the pain returning. I then get off my ass, quite of my own volition, and do more kettlebells. I’ve heard it said that in order to make a change you need something to protect. In my case, it’s a pain-free back.

Running is much easier for me to keep up because it’s easy to get started and it feels so damned good. But what people truly enjoy varies from person to person, and the key is to find that thing that doesn’t really feel like work.

[Toxylon]

@Tim_T-Bonham.net

In alcohol treatment, we call such people ‘enablers’.

They are called ‘enablers’ in obesity treatment, as well, and everybody on the 600 lbs. show has one or more of them.

[filmore]

Although we can’t quit food, we can quit foods that produce an overly intense enjoyable reaction. It’s not just junk foods that promote overeating. For example, a common trigger for overeating is simple carbs, such as in white bread, white rice, pasta, etc. It’s very easy to eat a lot of those kinds of foods before feeling satisfied. But if instead someone ate whole grain bread, brown rice, and whole wheat pasta, they would likely not feel the urge to eat as much because those foods don’t provide the same level of enjoyment. They would reach the point of feeling full or satisfied sooner and would not crave them.

If someone is struggling with overeating, they should take a good look at their eating behavior to understand if they are truly trying to satisfy their hunger or if they are chasing a drug-like high that comes from eating. It’s trivially easy to create self-addictive behaviors with food. If thirst is satisfied with a sweet drink and hunger is satisfied with a delicious food, the body will soon learn to produce those signals in order to get the pleasure from food regardless of whether it needs the food or not. It’s like a kid who gets ice cream when they have a tantrum. It won’t take long for the kid to have tantrums all the time in order to get the ice cream reward. By acknowledging that certain foods produce drug-like high in them and switching to foods that don’t produce that high, they should be able to get more control over their diet. Don’t quit foods altogether, but rather quit foods that produce cravings.

As for the OP, this might work as well as when addicts go to prison and get off their drug because it’s no longer available. Some people do stay clean after being in this forced environment, but many other seek out the drug while in prison or get right back on the drug after they get out. They haven’t worked on whatever makes them an addict in the first place, so they go right back to old habits. I think that would happen with food. Someone would lose weight in this restricted environment, but the cravings would not necessarily subside and they would go back to their old dietary habits once they had full access to food again.

[thorny_locust]

@filmore

But if instead someone ate whole grain bread, brown rice, and whole wheat pasta, they would likely not feel the urge to eat as much because those foods don’t provide the same level of enjoyment.

If they don’t provide enjoyment, they’re not really going to provide satiation, either.

Many people, however, find it possible to get a great deal of enjoyment out of whole grain breads and of dishes made with brown rice and whole wheat pasta. I don’t even like most white breads any more. But a) that probably doesn’t work for everybody and b) whole grains don’t make me thin.

[Spice_Weasel]

@filmore

Someone would lose weight in this restricted environment, but the cravings would not necessarily subside and they would go back to their old dietary habits once they had full access to food again.

If we look at the bulk of the research, the most likely outcome is that they would go back to their old dietary habits and end up heavier than where they started.

[Bill_Door]

Running makes me hungrier, but oddly enough walking does not. In any event I control my weight with intermittent fasting, which I consider High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) for my metabolism. The calorie reduction periods don’t last long enough to send me into starvation mode, I rarely fast more than 42 hours at a stretch, and during my eating window I’m eating in excess of 2000 calories a day.

[Riemann]

@Danger_Man

Let’s say you agree to be locked in a cell

Has anyone talked about this aspect of OP? Surely it isn’t possible to “consent irrevocably” like this. If you changed your mind after 3 days and asked to be let out, they’d have to let you out. So this aspect of the OP just doesn’t work - it’s really no different from trying to do whatever you want to do through voluntary self discipline.

[Dr.Strangelove]

@Riemann

So this aspect of the OP just doesn’t work - it’s really no different from trying to do whatever you want to do through voluntary self discipline.

You could add other motivators, I suppose. Put down $50k to join the program–and get $40k back if you stick through it to the end. Lose it all if you quit early.

[Spice_Weasel]

@Dr.Strangelove

Put down $50k to join the program–and get $40k back if you stick through it to the end. Lose it all if you quit early.

People are more risk adverse to loss, so it might make more sense to say, “This program costs $10,000, but if you quit early, we’ll charge you an additional $40,000.”

I know it sounds like a subtle distinction but this is how people’s minds work. We are more likely to stick with something if we have something to lose instead of gain. I’m the first example, a person is likely to think of that $50k as already gone.

Isn’t it fascinating how you can learn so much about human psychology, habit formation, choice architecture, diet, exercise, and nutrition, and still struggle with it every day of your life?