Continuation of: The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet
My post about the Shangri-La Diet is there to make a point about akrasia. It's not just an excuse: people really are different and what works for one person sometimes doesn't work for another.
You can never be sure in the realm of the mind... but out in material foodland, I know that I was, in fact, drinking extra-light olive oil in the fashion prescribed. There is no reason within Roberts's theory why it shouldn't have worked.
Which just means Roberts's theory is incomplete. In the complicated mess that is the human metabolism there is something else that needs to be considered. (My guess would be "something to do with insulin".)
But if the actions needed to implement the Shangri-La Diet weren't so simple and verifiable... if some of them took place within the mind... if it took, not a metabolic trick, but willpower to get to that amazing state where dieting comes effortlessly and you can lose 30 pounds...
Then when the Shangri-La Diet didn't work, we unfortunate exceptions would get yelled at for doing it wrong and not having enough willpower. Roberts already seems to think that his diet ought to work for everyone; when someone says it's not working, Roberts tells them to drink more extra-light olive oil or try a slightly different variant of the diet, rather than saying, "This doesn't work for some people and I don't know why."
If the failure had occurred somewhere inside the dark recesses of my mind where it could be blamed on me, rather than within my metabolism...
If Roberts's hypothesis is correct, then I'm sure that plenty of people have made some dietary change, started losing weight due to the disrupted flavor-calorie association, and congratulated themselves on their wonderful willpower for eating less. When I moved out of my parents' home and started eating less and exercising and losing more than a pound a week, you can bet I was congratulating myself on my amazing willpower.
Hah. No, I just stumbled onto a metabolic pot of gold that let me lose a lot of weight using a sustainable expenditure of willpower. When that pot of gold was exhausted, willpower ceased to avail.
(The metabolically privileged don't believe in metabolic privilege, since they are able to lose weight by trying! harder! to diet and exercise, and the diet and exercise actually work the way they're supposed to... I remember the nine-month period in my life where that was true.)
When I look at the current state of the art in fighting akrasia, I see the same sort of mess.
People try all sorts of crazy things—and as in dieting, there's secretly a general reason why any crazy thing might seem to work: if you expect to win an internal conflict, you've already programmed yourself to do the right thing because you expect that to be your action; it takes less willpower to win an internal conflict you expect to win.
And people make up all sorts of fantastic stories to explain why their tricks worked for them.
But their tricks don't work for everyone—some others report success, some don't. The inventors do not know the deep generalizations that would tell them why and who, explain the rule and the exception. But the stories the inventors have created to explain their own successes, naturally praise their own willpower and other virtues, and contain no element of luck... and so they exhort others: Try harder! You're doing it wrong!
There is a place in the mind for willpower. Don't get me wrong, it's useful stuff. But people who assign their successes to willpower—who congratulate themselves on their stern characters—may be a tad reluctant to appreciate just how much you can be privileged or disprivileged by having a mental metabolism where expending willpower is effective, where you can achieve encouraging results, at an acceptable cost to yourself, and sustain the effort in the long run.
Part of the sequence The Craft and the Community
Next post: "Collective Apathy and the Internet"
Previous post: "Beware of Other-Optimizing"
Even if you had to check yourself into a bariatric (is that the right word?) clinic for drugs and doctor's supervision, it's not like they're going ban you from having a computer or visitors.
Even if you had to take time off, how long would it be for?
Have you even asked that question?
What other questions haven't you asked about this yet?
Don't. You'll be better off not spending more time writing your way into deeper rationalization and justification of an already damaging belief.
My wife went through years of off and on dieting, trying every damn thing that came out and not getting anywhere, and despairing that she'd ever be able to lose the weight. Then, she made a change in her beliefs... and the very next thing she tried -- something she'd previously ruled out as an option -- worked. She's lost over 100 pounds so far, with the most fun and least problems of anything she'd tried before.
The point of which is not that you'll necessarily find something that works that quickly. The point is that what you believe about what's possible or what's wrong with you or what's useful to try, is much more likely to be a FAR greater limiting factor on your ability to lose weight than anything about your metabolism, unless you're actually diabetic or have some sort of diagnosable glandular disorder.
So if you really think you're metabolically challenged, go to a doctor, for goodness' sake. Preferably one that specializes in problem weight-loss cases, who doesn't just prescribe-and-run. Medicine in general may not be all that great, but they do have some cool test equipment. Might as well take advantage. ;-)
(Post-downmod edit: In case there's any confusion, I'm not arguing that beliefs directly affect weight loss; only that beliefs can prevent you from seriously investigating an option that might work for you... especially if that option seems "too hard" or "too much work".)
There are plenty of things I could try with more money. But for this either SIAI needs to be more successful with fundraising or my career as a speaker needs to take off... which I can only help make happen by swapping effort to making more money, which gets us back into that "diverting effort from FAI" business.