Power of Payoffs in Weight Management
Apr 27th, 2009 by Giselle
Have you struggled with managing your weight most of your adult life? If the answer is “yes”, it might be time to get honest with yourself and have a look at some of your actions that are leading to being overweight or obese. Take a “fly on the wall” view of your life and audit your behaviour. This article examines your bad habits and why they persist. Read on to find why you repeatedly do them.
First, make a candid list of all your bad eating habits. For example, not eating when hungry, eating when not hungry, eating till uncomfortably full, not eating till overly hungry, polishing off your child’s left over, eating while cooking, eating while cleaning the dishes, not eating in a designated place, heading for the refrigerator to sample bits and pieces of food after work in a mindless eating frenzy, having TV dinners (and not knowing how much you ate after), crawling into bed with a packet of chips or relaxing in your easy chair before TV with a packet of chips or generally inability to stop eating till every edible morsel on the dining table is gone.
Are you guilty of mindless munching? Do you often eat in an unconscious manner? Do you ignore the experience of eating as if it was an unquestionable reflex? Do you concentrate on other things while consuming food? If you answer ‘yes’ to any two questions, you are guilty of mindless unconscious eating and this is costing you. The result is gradual but uncontrollable weight gain. Along the way you might have felt helpless to make a difference to what is happening to your body that is gaining momentum. This is because most of your actions are hidden in your blind spots. Then one day you wake up to the realisation that you have put on 15-25% of your body weight over a few years. Now, what you have inadvertently done is you have put your body under severe stress and caused some irreversible damage to your system. Be warned, this is not a situation be taken lightly, it has severe health implications. You are well on your way to developing a host of chronic degenerative diseases like diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and cancer. Being visually unappealing should be the LEAST of your concerns (ironically, this tends to be the greatest concern for most).
This brings us to the key question – why do you keep doing something that you want to stop? Surely no sane person will deliberately keep behaving in a way that generates results they do not want or keep them getting the results they do want with every fibre of their being! The answer lies in the power of payoff. Choose the behaviour, choose the consequence.
I assert that you will not maintain any behaviour that is not providing you with some kind of payoff. Consider that you are committed to repeating some behaviour because at some level they are working for you! No pay off, no repetition. So this begs the question – what value are you getting out of your troublesome behaviour? Put pen to paper, dig deep down, roll up your sleeves, get real dirty and list the payoffs that are keeping these negative behaviour alive.
Examples of payoffs are:
- Relaxing feeling – you feel relaxed after a binge because your body chemistry literally alters and gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling from the chemicals (endorphins) that are manufactured post feeding frenzy.
- Hedonistic – seeking pleasure while avoiding short term pain.
- Emotional relief – eating is a way of coping with mood swings from stressful life situations.
- Reward – life is short, enjoy first. There are lots of ways to reward yourself, food is but one of the hundreds of ways.
- Protection – being fat makes you unattractive to the opposite sex; you may be uncomfortable with intimacy. Being obese spares you from the ordeal of dating, marriage and having a family. It offers you an excellent excuse for not participating in life.
- Belonging – you are part of a social circle that meets to eat. You have no choice in the matter; you want to keep your friends.
- Immediate gratification – it feels good to eat right now, you will deal with the other issues tomorrow.
I would love to hear some of your payoffs. Post below to share them.
Oh Wow, that is a scary but much needed dose of reality. I had never looked at binge, or uncontrollable eating in this way. I am guilty of this behavior every day, at least once. In a way it is reassuring to know that I must not be the only one on this sinking ship, if an article can be written on it, however I am the one sinking my own boat, after all, it is me that is shoving that food into my mouth and then it is my body living with the repercussions of it.
Giselle, you have hit the nail on the head with all the examples you gave, and the pay offs associated. In times past, I looked at it only for what it was, an ‘eating rampage’ , believing that it took a great deal of will power for it to stop…and of course that never happened. Now I see there are reasons behind it, ‘pay offs’ and knowing that gives me reassurance that it is not’ just me’. There is a reason, sometimes many behind why it is happening, and each of these reasons can be addressed and dealt with.
Thank you for this article!
Hi Jemima,
Thanks for commenting.
I think you could get some siginificant gains for yourself if you took on doing the above exercise and list all your payoffs for your behaviour. I admit, this is not an easy thing to do, it takes having a cold hard look at oneself. This is a job for the brave.
To make it easier, you might just want to assume that keeping your weight has some value for you. That is being overweight is working for you at some level. So what might they be?
Have fun with the exercise!
Hi, I have been reading your articles with great interest. There is a lot of gold in there!
I feel I logically know exactly what to do about my eating, but I am unable to control it when the time comes. Everyday has been the same for years. Frankly, it’s been driving me insane! I have not tried looking at payoffs for this before, so I’ll give it a go. I think a payoff for me is that I do not have to be responsible for the rest of my life turning out the way I want. I mean, as long as I cannot manage my weight, how can I be expected to have the rest of my life work? (and being fully responsible for whatever happens in my life seems kind of scary and overwhelming. So I use out-of-control eating to evade being responsible for most aspects of my life. The horrible joke of course is that I am fully responsible for all aspects of my life at all times, no matter what. So, I hereby declare that I am taking charge!
Has anyone else come to the same sort of conclusion? Did it help?
My Pay-offs….
1 To avoid intimacy
2 As a form of procrastination
3 To satisfy a craving and then not know when to stop, or convince myself it is ok to keep going.
4 It easier to eat mindlessly, when the pack is gone you know it is time to stop
5 Being too busy to think about and enjoy each bite
6 when I am alone and feel the urge to sneak foood, which is probably another issue in itself!
7 Control
8 Something to do when I am bored or lonely
9 Being tired and looking for a quick pick me up
10 I believe I now do it out of habit.
By doing this exercise I have realised that I really need to change it, whether I want to or not. It is very hard to admit the reasons behind why I am not in control of what goes in my mouth. I feel like a failure to myself, that I am being controlled by food and embarassed to admit it. I hope this helps somebody out there!
Hi Jemima,
You have done a wonderful job with the above exercise. I think this reiterates that we are where we are not by accident. Somehow, we have been committed creators in causing the same result over and over again in our lives. And the way to transform that is to understand why we are so committed to this destructive way of being. This duality between what we want and what we keep generating can be a great source of struggle. We must not beat ourselves up, but just observe ourselves.
Everyone has an irrational, destructive and emotional side to their personality that rears its ugly head during times of stress. During this time, we may be bitter, resentful and verbally venomous. These emotionally charged moments trigger emotional overeating. Every day, we make choices that create our emotional state.