Below is a description of the dateline I watched a couple of days ago that focused on the psychology of eating. I cut and pasted from an email to myself so it might be formatted funny.
Just a couple of comments from your posts. Cat - I make Mike check me out every chance I can! Nikki - I don't think I could go back to senseless eating either. I have shared before how before I started WW, I would go to a bagel place every morning for a bagel, cream cheese and a blended coffee drink. Now, anytime I think about going "off the wagon" I think about that place. I think "do I want to go there? Could I go there, knowing what I know (that my former breakfast was worse than a quarter pounder and fries)?" So far, the answer is a resounding "NO". I can't unlearn how bad that food is for me. Even if I don't want to stay within points and don't want to journal and don't want to exercise, I can't go back to my former eating habits. For some reason, this idea helps me soldier on. I guess I feel like "If I can't do that, might as well do this."
I watched this dateline a couple of weeks ago that dealt with the mentality of dieting. they did all these tests on dieters and non-dieters. The people thought they were testing food products so they had all these samples that they could have as much of as they wanted. In the first test, they had a "plant" in the room with them and if the plant took a lot of the food and ate alot of the food, then the other person would too. Basically demonstrating that we get our cues about how much to eat from social situations, not our stomachs. (Like when you order dessert because everyone else is ordering dessert, not because you are hungry anymore.) In the second test, the people were left alone in a room with gigantic plates of cookies. The dieters kept eating the cookies, while the non-dieters would stop after one or two, demonstrating that when you are dieting, and breaking your diet, then you tend to go way overboard, because "why not, diet is already ruined today anyway." The final test had to do with stress. They had them do an impossible puzzle that was supposed to be for kids to go on the back of a cereal box, then counted how many cookies they ate.
The one comment that stuck with me from the program was "when you are not dieting, your stomach dictates how much you eat, when you are dieting, the available food often dictates how much you eat. The food has the power."
Another interesting side note, some of the dieters were already quite skinny and some of the non-dieters were quite over weight.
# posted by amy @ 3:42 PM
