Phase 2, Day 31

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Breakfast: small V-8; small apple

Lunch: navy bean salad; roasted asparagus and bell peppers; a cup of a sort of white bean chili; one seeded cracker; diet Dr. Pepper [from Food Court]

Dinner: hummus with 1/2 white pita; 1/2 an artichoke with mustard dip; 1 c garlic-sauteed spinach; 1 c tomato soup; seared tofu with miso dressing; 1 slice multigrain bread with olive oil [restaurant meal; we ordered a bunch of appetizers]

Exercise: none

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I heard an interesting talk yesterday about willpower. Usually, we think about "willpower" as something individual people either have a lot of, or only a little bit of. So either I am a "strong" person, resisting all temptations, or a "weak" person, who gives in a lot.

In fact, psychological research shows that willpower plays a very small role in resisting temptation. It's the tempation itself that does all the work, and *this* varies a lot between people. For instance, remember how much willpower it took for you to resist sauteed calf kidneys when you became a vegan? Exactly: none. Simply put, if you have no drive to engage in a behavior, like eating a particular food, then it doesn't take much willpower to resist it. And people differ greatly in which things they have a drive to eat. Meat no longer tempts me. I even find it fairly easy to resist pie, non-chocolate candy, and white breads. But ice cream? Or hot-from-the-oven whole grain bread dripping with cold-pressed olive oil? Fuhgeddaboutit! It takes all I have to turn these down.

I am able to resist a bowl full of Skittles sitting in the secretarial pool, but my friend pops a handful into his mouth several times a day, even though both of us are on diets. Why? We differ a great deal in how tasty we think Skittles are (he loves 'em), and just as importantly, in situational differences such as how often we visit the secretarial pool, or in how long it's been since we last ate real food.

We can't do a lot about individual differences in how tasty we find various things. But this doesn't mean we can't do *anything* about them. I used to love meat. I mean really, really love it--every time I drove by a KFC my mouth would water just thinking about chicken. But eventually, after years of not eating it, and of vividly imagining meat's gory origins, I absolutely lost my taste for it. It took a long time, but it did happen. In the opposite direction, you *can* often train yourself to like certain things. Studies show that it takes up to 15 exposures to new flavors before one develops a liking for them. You know the old expression, "It's an acquired taste"? It's true. If you don't like something that is good for you, really make the effort to like it by trying it about a dozen times, and eventually you probably will.

While we can't do much about individual taste differences, we can accomplish a great deal when it comes to controlling events that compound our temptation. What are the things that make you vulnerable? I'll categorize them into two groups: drains on your "willpower reserves," and situational cues.

Willpower is a limited resource--one of the several reasons you should not rely on it. If you have recently exercised willpower, your stock is depleted, and until you have time to "recharge," you're going to be more vulnerable to further temptations. It's relatively easy to resist the offer of a cookie. But if five minutes later, you are offered pie, it's harder to say no. If you succeed, and five minutes later again, someone offers you a piece of cake... Resisting temptation gets progressively harder. Avoid situations where you will be exposed to sequential temptations. Tell people around you very firmly that you are trying to eat healthier (not just "I don't want a piece of cake" but "I don't eat junk food"), thus reducing the odds that they'll keep offering.

Willpower can also be depleted by "cognitive load," which is essentially just a fancy term for distracting thoughts, or concentration on a different task. In one experiment, subjects were asked to memorize either a two-digit (low cognitive load) or a seven-digit (high cognitive load) number. On their way to a second testing room, they were offered their choice of a slice of cake or a piece of fruit. 39% of the people in the low-load condition took the cake, but a full 61% of those in the high-load condition chose the cake. Why? Willpower is *effortful.* If you are busy concentrating on something else, you don't have the resources to also resist temptation. Take home message? When you are busy, or stressed out, you are more likely to give in to temptation, simply because it's harder to muster the brain resources to resist it. So if unhealthy food is available, do your best to really *concentrate* on the individual food choices you make. Pay close attention. Even do a quick mental pros/cons calculation for the different choices you could make. Anything you can do to increase the total amount of thought directed at your food choices, will increase the likelihood that you will be happy with those choices later.

However, all of these strategies pale in comparison to the power of shifting the situational cues that make you likely to indulge. Consider this: over 60% of American soldiers were addicted to heroin while serving in Vietnam. Heroin, needless to say, is a powerfully addicting drug, and it is notoriously hard to kick the habit. Yet only *5%* of vets remained addicted once they returned home. The difference is astounding, and can best be explained by the fact that in America, they no longer were exposed to all the situational cues that they associated with heroin, and that made them crave the drug. They completely changed environments, and for the vast majority of them this eliminated their drug habit.

You can apply this insight to your own food cravings. Take steps to remove yourself from tempting situations. Do you overindulge when you go out drinking with friends? Don't expect willpower to enable you to sit with a Perrier while your friends are chugging Old Milwaukee. Instead, don't go drinking in the first place; find another way to spend time with your pals. Do you regularly dive into the kid's Oreos? Don't buy that junk in the first place. (Your kids don't need unhealthy food any more than you do.) Do you munch while watching TV? Stop watching TV. Seriously. There are plenty of other hobbies that will interest you as much or more than sitting in front of the tube.

The final, and maybe most important, thing you can do to avoid temptation is to control how hungry you get. One final study I'm going to tell you about: the subjects were heroin addicts, who were taking a methadone-like maintenance drug in a treatment program. Researchers asked the subjects how much money they would have to be paid to forego an extra dose of methadone the next day. Half of these subjects were asked to make their choice just before a scheduled dose of methodone (so that they were "hungry" when making their decision); the other half made their choice just after a dose (making them relatively satiated.) The "hungry" subjects demanded a *lot* more money to forego the next day's extra dose than the satiated subjects.

Lesson? Make sure you don't get hungry. Eat frequently, in small meals spaced throughout the day. Eat high-fiber foods and good fats and proteins that take a long time to move through your system. Eat enough calories to satiate yourself. All of this will keep your blood sugar even, and eliminate hunger pangs. Sound familiar? You got it--it's the South Beach Diet. There's no magic involved, just good psychological science.