I was talking to someone in class last week about weight loss. It’s a few weeks until Christmas and talk had started about dresses and parties and Christmas food and quite frankly this being the one duality that seems to ask way too much of women (and men but to a lesser degree). At a time when they are already hopped up on the cortisol of gift planning, purchasing, making beautiful, delivering, catering, emotional modulation of small humans and making home look like Santa Barbie’s dream house.
Coming back to the weight loss question. When I am asked about nutrition, what to eat, when to eat it, how to lose fat from ‘here’ (ladies, you know the two places I am taking about) I have noticed that most of these questions come with a side of ‘I know how to do this but I need you to tell me how hard it is so I can justify why it feels impossible’. I get it.
And therein lies the issue. It feels impossible. And when things feel impossible, it feels like you will always find them impossible.
There is a psychological theory called the hot-cold empathy gap which suggests that our brains have trouble imagining a different you. This makes some sense if we look at it as if we were our ancestors. Hungry meant uber motivation for ‘find food and keep going until you find it’. It also meant once you found that blackberry bush laden with ripe juicy plump blackberries, the new motivation was ‘gorge yourself until blackberry juice runs out of your ears’ Both are very valid. Let’s also not forget that it takes your brain about 20 minutes to register that you are full, so eating more than necessary wasn’t a character flaw, it was making sure you had really eaten everything you could, in case the next meal was 3 days away. Then ‘full’ became the motivation for rest. There was nothing else to do so naturally letting your body do its digestive best work was the next logical step. The states have a real purpose.
Let’s take it back to our little-black-dress planning feeling states now. ‘Impossible’ is your brain’s way of keeping you safe. Your brain is predicting, based on everything it knows about you, the likelihood of a whether a diet will put your life in danger. So Nora (you will know her if you have been here a while, if not I think this will introduce her), starts whispering things in your ear like ‘there isn’t enough time between now and the party’, ‘there is no point because you will never look like [insert name of body nemesis]’, ‘I have tried all the diets and none of them work, what’s the point’. She’s tapped into those predictions and can be very persuasive if she has the microphone. I have heard every single one of them in my own head, that’s how I know they are in yours.
This hot-cold empathy gap isn’t just for little-black-dress season either. It can be true when you feel really anxious. You feel like you will be anxious forever. Then…’ooooo squirrel’, just like that something else catches your attention and you aren’t anxious for a moment, or more than a moment. You probably didn’t even notice. You possibly just reconnected with Nora’s anxious chatter and assumed you had been there the whole time.
Here comes another bit of psychology, called affective forecasting. Notice it’s affective not effective. Meaning it is forecasting the affect of an action or feeling state. It is not effectively predicting success or failure. Essentially, we are not always particularly good at predicting how we will feel in the future. We can imagine the discomfort in glorious technicolour but somehow forget to include the ordinary bits of life that will happen around it.
Time perception is a whole thing too. Going back to the diet. If you have ever been hungry on a diet, you probably remember that you were hungry ALL THE TIME. Which might be true depending on the macro nutrient and calorie levels you were consuming, in reality it is likely that there were times when you weren’t hungry it’s just that the loudest part, the negative bit, can shape our perception of the whole day. Also, if this is the case, please read my post on losing weight and not wanting to murder everyone.
That anxiety that lasted all day and will probably be with you for the rest of your life? What about the moment you stepped into your hot shower or laughed at a joke on your current TV binge, or read a page of your book on the sofa. Or worst of all, you laughed with your friend or partner about something so silly that you forgot about the world for a moment. It's evidence. Evidence that even when it feels like forever, as the saying goes ‘this too shall pass’ even if you don’t really notice.
We are told that we have been trained to want immediate gratification. And it’s true. Its also not wholly the fault of social media, same day delivery and microwave meals. Those services are an answer to a very ancient biological inbuilt drive we humans have. Uber Eats is simply an ancestor stumbling upon a freshly killed something tasty or a big bush of ripe fruit. They can’t pop it in the freezer for later and there might be vultures over head so it’s eat or die. The same goes for mating.
When we read horoscopes, seeking validation from others, even trawling chat gpt for answers, I suspect what we are really doing is looking for a way to stop the discomfort of whatever we are feeling. Looking for a sense of certainty in a world that is an inherent adventure with all it’s rollercoaster hallmarks. I know for sure I have been guilty of this. I can still find myself typing in a question and then realising I know the answer, it’s not one I will like, but I press send anyway. It’s where movement for me becomes so incredibly important. Any kind of physical challenge brings with it discomfort. Something many people want to eliminate from life. The issue with trying to eliminate discomfort is that when it finds us, and it will, we are underprepared and it hits even harder making our time perception and hot-cold empathy biases hit even harder. If we train discomfort intentionally, like we would a strength moment (which in itself is uncomfortable) the hard things become more manageable. Less of a shock to the system. So, if I were to give you a life gym program for discomfort, I would pick one of;
10 second cold shower
Getting sweaty for 20 minutes
Learning something really hard for 10 minutes a day
Doing something that might make you look like a beginner in public
Being in silence for 5 minutes
Pick 1. Do it 3 times a week.
The goal isn't to become someone who can tolerate endless suffering. It's to become someone who can recognise the difference between uncomfortable, unsafe and impossible.
See how you feel and report back. I genuinely would love to hear.
