PRINCIPLE 3: EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS
Managing temptations is about controlling tough times.
If you’ve tried losing weight in the past, you already know: It’s not easy.
Sometimes, you get hungry. Sometimes, you get frustrated and want to vent via
the vending machine. Sometimes, you are suddenly noshy when you smell food
while walking through the mall. Temptation is all around us, and it makes the
weight-loss struggle ever harder.
But here’s the myth: Willpower alone can get you through. Many people argue
that if you just “have the will” to resist, then you can be successful on any diet. I
would counter that the various triggers that cajole us into eating are simply
habits—that is, we’ve created our own Pavlovian responses. Turn on TV, open
bag of crisps. Strategies, like creating different eating environments so you don’t
always have to consciously engage your willpower, are what help win these
battles. (I talked more about this in chapter 3.) Some research suggests that we
may have a limited amount of willpower every day and we wear ourselves out if
we constantly fight these tugs-of-war. When we run out of our decision-making
chi, we start making poor decisions (often in the late afternoon, the witching
hour for many people). But by making automatic decisions, we reduce
temptation.
You may think that the story of hunger is all about the tongue or stomach, but
it actually starts in the brain. There, the hypothalamus acts as a central hard drive
for many bodily activities, including behaviours that key off of appetite and
satiety. (By the way, that’s not just for food and drink, but also the appetite you
have for sleep and sex.) One of its jobs is to regulate how satisfied you feel and
what actions you should take if you’re not satisfied.
Two hormones, leptin and ghrelin, influence the hypothalamus. They work in
relationship to each other to let you know whether you need food. In a perfect
system, the two sides work together like salsa dance partners, moving gracefully
with each other. Eat when you need calories to fuel your body; stop when you’re
energized so you don’t store too much fat. Your body, of course, wants this
system to balance nicely. It doesn’t want you to go hungry, and it doesn’t want
you to go haywire and overeat. It would prefer a perfect-ten dance, and that’s
where you come in.