H/T to Roy Williams

Okay, that’s the set up.  Here is the question:

Why are low-carb diets so difficult to stick to for so many who have had the above experience?

When I am in full low-carb mode, genesis-ing that neo glucose like crazy, I feel like a million bucks.  I’m not hungry, I don’t really obsess on food, and I have energy out the yang.  So, why would I ever go off the diet?  I can assure you that I do.  And sometimes I go off in a bad way for longer than I should.  I pick up a few pounds, finally get a grip on myself and plunge back into low-carbery.  When I’m back  sailing along, I wonder why I ever went off in the first place.  So, why did I do it?  Why do we all do it?

Here is what Don DeLillo writes in White Noise that is apropos to our question:

Who knows what I want to do?  Who knows what anyone wants to do?  How can you be sure about something like that?  Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex?  How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain?  Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place on one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don’t want to go to Montana.

The above quote leads off  Jonah Lehrer’s new book How We Decide, which I’ve started, but haven’t finished.  I got the book because of an article of Lehrer’s I read in the Dallas paper when I was there a couple of weeks ago. So far, the book has met and exceeded all my expectations.  And tomorrow night, I’m going to meet the author, so I’d like to get most of the book finished by then.

The article in the Dallas paper got me thinking about diets, low-carb diets in particular.  And about how much easier it would be for all of us if a lot of things changed.  Before I go into detail, read this excerpt from the article:

A recent experiment…sheds light on what happens inside the brain when people make shopping decisions. While economists have long assumed that consumers are rational agents and purchase goods based on calculations of utility, that assumption turns out to be false. In reality, every shopping decision is an emotional tug-of-war, as the pleasure of getting something new competes with the pain of spending money.

The experiment went like this: A few dozen lucky undergraduates were given a generous amount of cash and offered the chance to buy dozens of different objects, from a digital voice recorder to gourmet chocolates to the latest Harry Potter book. While the students were making their shopping decisions, the scientists were imaging the activity inside their head with a powerful brain scanner.

They discovered that when subjects were first exposed to the item, a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) was turned on. The NAcc is a crucial part of our dopamine reward pathway – it’s typically associated with things like sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll – and the intensity of its activation was a reflection of desire for the item. If the person already owned the complete Harry Potter collection, then the NAcc didn’t get too excited about the prospect of buying another copy. However, if he’d been craving a George Foreman grill, then the NAcc flooded the brain with dopamine whenever that item appeared.

But then came the price tag. When the subjects were exposed to the cost of the product, the insula was activated. The insula is associated with aversive feelings, and is triggered by things like nicotine withdrawal and pictures of people in pain. In general, we try to avoid anything that makes our insula excited. Apparently, this includes spending money.

By measuring the relative amount of activity in each brain region, the scientists could accurately predict the subjects’ shopping decisions. They knew which products people would buy before the people themselves did. If the insula’s negativity exceeded the positive feelings generated by the NAcc, then the subject almost always chose not to buy the item. However, if the NAcc was more active than the insula, the object proved irresistible. The sting of giving up cash couldn’t compete with the thrill of getting a George Foreman grill.

So far, nothing much new other than putting names to the parts of the brain – NAcc and insula – that constantly debate with one another over what we’re going to buy or do.  We think we make decisions rationally, but we really don’t.  We make them because our brain chemicals tell us what to do.  As I mentioned in a previous post, we can control this to a little better extent than Mr. Lehrer indicates that we can.

But this constant debate goes on in our brains, with our spendthrift hedonistic NAcc wanting to buy, buy, buy while our tightfisted, frugal, money-hoarding insula trying to hold the line.  That this debate occurs is not lost on retailers.  They want to do whatever they can to encourage the NAcc and discourage the insula.

…retail stores already manipulate this cortical setup. Just look at the interior of a Costco. It’s no accident that the most covetous items are put in the most prominent places. A row of high-definition televisions surrounds the entrance. The fancy jewelry, Rolex watches and other luxury items are conspicuously placed along the corridors with the heaviest foot traffic. And then there are the free samples of food, liberally distributed throughout the store.

The goal of these discount warehouses is to constantly prime the pleasure centers of the brain, to keep us lusting after things we don’t need. Even though we probably won’t buy the Rolex, just looking at the fancy watch makes us more likely to buy something else, since the coveted item activates the NAcc.

But it’s not enough to just excite our reward centers: Retailers must also inhibit the insula. This brain area is responsible for making sure we don’t spend excessively, and when it’s repeatedly assured by retail stores that low prices are “guaranteed,” it stops worrying so much about the price tag. In fact, researchers have found that even when a store puts a promotional sticker next to the price tag – something like “Bargain Buy!” or “Hot Deal!” – but doesn’t actually reduce the price, sales of the item will still dramatically increase.

These retail tactics lull our brain into buying more things, since the insula is pacified. (Paying with a credit card seems to have a similar effect. Because the actual payment is postponed until the end of the month, the insula doesn’t fully process the pain of spending money. Of course, this leads, over time, to rampant credit card debt.)

This inner-brain debate we all have going on and the retailers response to it is a kind of model of what happens to us when we’re cruising along on our low-carb diets.  Before we get into the specifics however, let’s look at how this model works with another form of pleasurable and addictive behavior.

Smoking involves these same parts of the brain, the NAcc and the insula.  Back in the 1930s, 40s and 50s a whole lot of people smoked.  In fact, it was all the rage.  As my mother never tires of telling me whenever I point out the negative health consequences of her own past smoking, back then you were regarded as an outcast if you didn’t smoke.  Although people may have wondered deep in their heart of hearts if it were really a good thing, their NAccs got plenty of encouragement everywhere.  All the movies made during the time were filled with actors smoking, characters on television series smoked (Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke, for instance), talk-show hosts smoked (Johnny Carson always had a cigarette going), cigarette ads were everywhere.  And if you thought that maybe tobacco might not be good for you, there were even ads showing doctors who smoked and who recommended smoking.  Even cartoon characters smoked.  People smoked on planes, in restaurants, at work, at meetings – everywhere. You couldn’t get away from it.  It was the norm.  Your NAcc got a boost everywhere you looked and your insula was inhibited.

Compare then with now.  In most places you can’t smoke in restaurants, in California you can’t even smoke in bars, you can’t smoke in planes, you can’t smoke much of anywhere.  You don’t see a lot in movies, and when people do smoke, it really stands out, and looks pretty revolting.  If you do try to smoke publicly, you will be glowered at by someone.  You are bombarded with ads showing the negative effects of smoking.  Whenever you hear someone died of lung cancer, you always ask if he/she was a smoker.  And if so, you may have less sympathy.   Whereas in the 30s, 40s and 50s the entire system was set up to encourage and enable smokers, it is the opposite now.  As a consequence, way, way fewer people smoke.  Why?  Because even though the NAcc might still want to smoke, the insula has so much encouragement from the world around, that it easily overcomes whatever desire the NAcc might have.

The insula can be pretty strong, too.  Alcoholism is a severe type of addiction and dependency, but can be held at bay by Alcoholics Anonymous.  How?  By attending meetings and getting the insula all fired up to cease and desist when alcohol is around.  I have a friend who is an addictive personality type and who is a bad alcoholic with a bad, bad history of alcoholic self destruction.  He’s been sober now for over ten years, but right before attending ANY event where alcohol will be available (including dinner at our house), he finds an AA meeting to get his insula topped off.

When we think about low-carb dieting in these terms, it is clear that we low-carbers are operating in a high-carb world.  We are the low-carb equivalent of the non-smoker in the 1950s.  We are considered unusual.

Everywhere we look we are bombarded with carbohydrate temptations.  No place is safe.  Just like the cigarette ads that were ubiquitous in days gone by, so now are the carbohydrate ads.  You can’t pick up a magazine, turn on the TV or even look in a newspaper without your eye falling on an advertisement for carbohydrates.  Nutritionists recommend them; dietitians recommend them; doctors recommend them; even the government recommends them.

If you tell three people you’re on a low-carb diet, I can almost guarantee that at least one of them will tell you that you are going to croak your kidneys or dissolve your bones.  Probably another is going to tell you that although you may lose some weight, you will do so at the risk of clogging your arteries.  Your insula is gathering info.  Everything you hear like this beats down your insula just a little more, making it more prone to look the other way when your NAcc wants to take control.

Looking at this situation, it’s remarkable that anyone is able to stay on a low-carb diet for any length of time at all.  In the ongoing debate in our heads between the NAcc and the insula, the insula doesn’t stand a chance.  Society is aligned today to prod the NAcc with carbs just like it did with cigarettes a couple of generations ago, even though it was/is disastrous for health.  And as it was then, society today is aligned to discourage the insula.  Just like the retailers with merchandising, societal forces are pimping our NAccs and distracting our insulas.

When you’re doing well on the low-carb diet, your NAcc is happy, and if you hang in there and keep immersing yourself in low-carb info (this blog, other low-carb blogs, low-carb forums, low-carb books, etc.), your insula stays happy.  But let yourself get away from this insular world, and what happens?

You go out for a nice dinner and hear comes the bread basket, often filled with warm, aromatic bread.  All your dinner companions are scarfing it down.  Hey, what’s a little piece of bread going to do to you, for God’s sake?  (If you happen to find yourself in the unfortunate position of having not had a booming weight-loss week, you’re really in trouble.)  Then the dessert tray comes after dinner, and if you’ve had a little bit to drink, you may be a goner.  Alcohol is the gateway drug for carbs – as a general rule, the more you drink, the more carbs you eat.  Hey, you only live once.  Go for it.  You head home after consuming about three day’s worth of carbohydrates. You resolve to do better the next day, but you’ve derailed the smooth running of all the metabolic processes that your low-carb diet had set in motion, and the next day it will be a little harder to get back on track.

Your NAcc has been beguiled by the carbs while your insula has been overcome (overtly) by your dinner companions and (covertly) by the high-carb society in which we all live, where you’ll hear things such as:  Hey, it’s okay.  Everyone knows that carbs are good for you.  We’re supposed to consume at least 150 g per day for good health.  I saw a doctor on Oprah who said we don’t get ENOUGH carbs.

And you wonder why it’s tough to stay on a low-carb diet?  And you wonder why you have cravings?  It’s pretty obvious when you think about it in these terms.

What can we do?  Aside from the Glasser techniques that I wrote about before that serve mainly to get us away from the temptation, the best thing to do is pump up our own insulas.  Just like my friend who goes to AA before any exposure to alcohol to get his inhibitory insula ready to dominate his NAcc, you’ve got to prep yourself.  Go through all the reasons you’re on a low-carb diet.  Think about how good you’re feeling.  Think about all the good things you have going with your low-carb diet.  Get yourself psyched up just as if your were going out to play in the Super Bowl.  It sounds corny, but that’s what AA does, and it’s very effective.  I call this getting into diet mode or putting on your diet face.  We’ve all got to do this until the world changes.

Think how nice it will be when the world comes to its senses about diet and realizes the superiority of the low-carb diet for health and weight.  We will be bombarded with ads for different cuts of meat.  Instead of the smell of fresh baked bread in stores, we’ll get the aroma of sizzling bacon.  We’ll be presented with dozens of options for foods prepared with coconut oil and butter.  We will look at an overweight person eating a big carb meal with the same disgust we now feel toward someone who is coughing his/her lungs out while smoking.  At restaurants we will have to ask for starch, and it may cost extra.  Dessert trays will be filled with different varieties of berries and other low-carb fruits.  If there is a tart or something similar, we’ll be assured that it comes with a crushed-almond crust and no added sugar.  Should such a world ever exist, our NAccs will constantly be stimulated with the foods that are actually good for us and that are, unlike carbohydrates, satiating, and our insulas won’t really have to be inhibited, so we will be in constant NAcc drive to eat properly.  Won’t it be grand?

When that time comes (and it probably will – who would have thought in the 40s that a time would come when no one smoked), I’ll pity the poor folks trying to sell low-fat diet books.

I told her she looked fabulous and asked her what happened. I knew that she had been a perennial low-carber, but, like so many people, never really got into it seriously for any length of time. She knew how much better she felt when she stuck to her regimen, but a million things kept coming up – parties, weddings, business travel, etc. – preventing her from really taking her diet seriously. As she put it:

There was always a valid reason that I couldn’t really get going. I had a friend’s wedding coming up, and I knew I was going to eat and drink. So, I put off starting until after the wedding. Then it was a business trip, then it was something else. It seemed that there was always something lurking in the future that kept me from getting serious today.

As she related it to me, one day, late last summer, she had been invited to a beach party. She agonized over going because she didn’t want to be seen in a bathing suit. But she went. And she ate too much of all the wrong kinds of foods and she drank too much. That night, in her bedroom at her host’s house, she couldn’t sleep. She was propped up in the bed trying to keep her acid reflux at bay, looking at her reflection in the mirror across the room, and wallowing in misery. She started ruminating on her condition, or, as she put it, meditating in her Garden of Self Loathing.

She looked back over her life and realized that her financial success had not come without a price. She had made commitments that were difficult to keep, but she kept them. She had worked all night long, numerous times, on projects to get them finished on time. She had gone to work sick. She had traveled when she didn’t want to. She had overcome looming financial disaster in the early days of getting her business going. She had met all kinds of challenges and dealt with them successfully, but she couldn’t meet the challenge of staying on a diet that she knew was good for her.

When she analyzed the situation during her meditation, she concluded that all the commitments she kept – sometimes seemingly having to move heaven and earth to do so – were all commitments to someone else. She had promised someone to have a project done by a specific time. She was working under a tight deadline imposed by a boss or by a customer. If she made a commitment to someone, she delivered. No matter what the cost to her in angst, lost sleep, time away from family, whatever. Her word was good as gold. When she committed to anyone, she came through. For everyone but herself. When she committed to herself to change her eating, to lose weight, to get rid of her GERD, she never followed through.  But she did recall that she had easily given up drinking and smoking (she smoked at the time, but hasn’t in years) during her pregnancy.  Again, however, she realized that she made these sacrifices for someone else.

That was her epiphany during her self-loathing meditation. She was perfectly capable of making commitments to others and keeping them but not commitments to herself.

She decided as she lay there in misery that she was going to commit to herself, and she was going to by God keep the commitment just as if she had made it to someone else.

The first conflict arose in her mind immediately after making the commitment to herself. It dawned on her that she was staying with friends over that weekend (in fact, she was in their guest room at that very moment), and that they had all planned Sunday brunch before she left. And Sunday brunch for her always included a Bloody Mary followed my several mimosas. So, she decided to start her commitment to herself on Monday morning. Then she realized that this was what she had been doing all along: making commitments to herself, then putting off getting started on them until after some future event had passed.

She recommitted at that moment and decided to eat correctly starting the next morning. She also decided to forswear alcohol until she lost the weight she wanted to lose. She concluded that if she ate right and didn’t drink starting the next morning, she would be one Bloody Mary, several mimosas and a whole lot of carbs ahead of the game come Monday morning.

She went to Sunday brunch; she ate right; she didn’t have a drop to drink; and she told her friends about her commitment. They all had just as pleasant a time together as they would have had she indulged. The difference was that she didn’t have reflux that night and was a couple of pounds lighter on Monday morning.

She maintained her commitment to herself just as she would have maintained it to someone else. She ate just as she told herself she should eat, and she avoided booze until she reached her goal weight. She persevered through weddings, parties, and travel – all the events she formerly thought she couldn’t make it through without eating the wrong foods or consuming alcohol. Now she eats whatever she wants whenever she wants it; but she doesn’t eat everything she wants all the time. She drinks again, but she watches herself. Whenever she does overdo it with either alcohol or food, she gets back on the straight and narrow until the pound or two she may have picked up is gone. She says she views her days of no drinking and following her low-carb diet to the letter as being in boot camp and her current life as like being in the regular Army. She requires some discipline, but not like she did in boot camp. She can live with it. She says it getting easier every day.

And she looks terrific.

My conversation with her got me to thinking about the whole diet/health commitment from a different perspective. Which is why the photo of me with my grandsons is at the top of this post. (It’s not totally just because I want to show them off.)

We all have people in our lives whom we have loved dearly and who have gone on because they didn’t take care of themselves. Think of a loved one who has died who would have lived longer had he/she been more committed to improving or maintaining his/her health. What would a year or two more (or three or five or even 15) with this person have meant to you? A lot, I would imagine.

And how many of these people had the attitude that it was their life, so they would live it like they wanted? I suppose that’s true if you leave no offspring or have none that count on you. But most of us do. And, although it is our own life to live how we like, we owe it to those who love and depend upon us to stay around as long as we can. It’s really kind of selfish to deny your children or grandchildren or great grandchildren your company because you would rather eat carbs. That’s the way I like to look at it.

When MD and I left after our recent visit with the grandsons, they both wailed when we departed. During the last couple of days we were there, they kept asking if we couldn’t stay just a day or two longer. I know the PETA folks probably hate me, but there is no doubt in my mind that my grandchildren love me. And they love their granny (MD) even more (or at least they think they do at this stage of their development ). We want to be around for them, not just for our sake, but for their sake.

When I was a kid, I loved my maternal grandfather so much it hurt. He got sick once, and I started worrying that he might die. (He was in his mid sixties at the time, but he seemed old as a rock to me.) I stressed over the loss of him mightily. And must have looked really down in the mouth. Finally he asked me what was wrong. Why was I moping around? I told him that I was worried that he might die. He said to me, ‘Mike, don’t worry about that. I’m going to live until you’re way up in college.’ (He actually made it until I was 30.) I can’t tell you how much relief flooded over my young self on hearing those words. (It never occurred to me, of course, that he really couldn’t predict such a thing, but since I trusted him implicitly, I was assured of his long survival.)

I know my grandchildren feel the same about me. So, I don’t want to live a long time just so I’ll be around to watch them grow up – I want to live a long time so I’ll be there for them.

Thinking this way helps keep things in perspective, and it makes it a whole lot easier to avoid eating what I shouldn’t eat.

Should you ever find yourself meditating in your own Garden of Self Loathing (and who hasn’t?), take a page from my friend’s book.  If you can make a commitment to yourself like she did, go for it. If you don’t seem to be able to do it that way, then make a commitment to someone who would be devastated to lose you.

Either way, whether it’s making a commitment to yourself or to your loved one, you need to do it. And keep it. I would bet that everyone reading this post has had to overcome major adversity at some point. We’ve all had to do a lot tougher tasks than just to eat right, and we’ve done them. Following a proper nutritional regimen is far easier than many, many things we’ve all done. Just make the commitment and follow through.

Enough sermonizing. Back to the normal in the next post. Meeting this woman and leaving our grandkids has had an effect on my psyche, so I figured I would spread it around.

If you click on the icon for the PPLP on the left of the site, you are taken to our current website but through a different URL.  It is the old URL- eatprotein.com – we used before we got control of proteinpower.com.

What I can tell you is that there are some pretty amazing before and after photos.  If you’re looking for inspiration, take a look at this one and this one. Or simply cruise through the pictures list.

If anyone can enlighten me, I would appreciate it.  I think the site is a wonderful idea because putting up a before photo can sometimes give one the stick-to-it-ness required to hang in there during tough times in order to put up a fabulous after photo. I hope whoever runs this site will keep it going and continue to allow people to post photos.

I imagine a number of you have seen the video below. I hadn’t. If you haven’t, it’s well worth watching. If you have, it’s well worth watching again.

Here’s the story. Randy Pausch was diagnosed with severe pancreatic cancer a little over a year ago. He underwent all the brutal treatments available, was declared cancer free, then had a virulent recurrence, and has but a few months to live. On September 18 of last year he gave a farewell lecture at Carnegie Mellon University, the institution at which he teaches. The lecture was memorable (to say the least) in that Dr. Pausch didn’t really complain about his situation, but instead is using it to live life to its fullest in the few days he has left. It’s a remarkable lecture and was repeated in abbreviated form on the Oprah show. It is the Oprah show lecture that is in the video below. Unfortunately it is slightly marred by having the camera cut numerous times to the smarmy Mehmet Oz in his too-large suit. But not marred enough to destroy the message. I hope you enjoy it as much as MD and I did.

Click here to view the embedded video.