Mea Gulpa (or, forgive me for blowing my diet)

A few years back, when a certain psychologist (I’ll call him “Dr. Bill”) was hawking diet advice via the TV show of his good friend (let’s call her “O”), I watched just long enough for the top of my head to blow off.  I mean, in the first place, where does a 6-foot-4-inch, um, portly man, who is not even a medical doctor, get off telling an audience of mostly women how to control their weight?  You might as well go to a Catholic priest for advice on feminine hygiene products.  But here was Dr. Bill, taking audience questions and phone-ins about diet plans.

A Fallen Woman Seeks Guidance

So a woman calls in asking for advice because, after a long, hard week of working, caring for her family, and sticking to her diet, she had broken down and had a hot fudge sundae.  Does Dr. Bill tell her it’s okay, it sounds like she deserved it?  Does he ask if she enjoyed it?  (Does he ask if it was regular or bittersweet?)  No, he tells her to “forgive herself” for her terrible sin of sabotaging her diet, and to resolve to do better next week.  Excuse me?

As I talked about in “Survival of the Fattest,” we are hard-wired to want sweet, high-fat, high-calorie foods.  It requires tremendous strength of will to choose a salad over a chili burger, or to actually bake that cookie dough into cookies for the bake sale rather than tucking into the bowl with a large spoon.  Even Weight Watchers, that stalwart organization which has been fighting the fat for decades, has gone to a system where you have “free points” that you can save up and, if you want, HAVE that hot fudge sundae.  There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to forgive.

Indulgences For Indulgence

Calories are like money– you can either save up and spend, or spend and owe.  But the save up and spend option is the better one in every respect.  If you limit your calories during the week, you CAN splurge on the weekend.  You will have earned it, and knowing you earned it will allow you to enjoy it guilt-free, which can never be said for the “spend and owe” plan.  Besides, just like there’s interest on owing money, you’re going to pay interest on calorie debt, because the longer your body has those extra calories, the more able it is to squirrel them away into places where removing them is much more difficult.  And the collection agencies?  That would be the store clerks selling you the larger-sized jeans.  It’s not a morality issue, it’s a perfectly objective business issue, and the more you can think of it that way, the better off you’ll be.

Happily, Dr. Bill got out of the diet business, though not before an FTC investigation and a class-action suit.  But I think his big mistake was trying to treat dieting like an emotional problem.  Oh sure, lots of people overeat for emotional reasons, but even solving the emotional problems and perhaps fixing the behavior isn’t going to repair the damage that has already been done.  Dieting isn’t psychology or theology.  It’s science.  It’s math.  Burn more calories than you take in, you’re going to lose weight.  And vice versa.  It’s not confessional thinking, but checkbook thinking that’s going to make a real change in your behavior.  Good thing, too, because this mortgage is a killer.