Blog-bin

Don’t look in this article for menus, calorie counters or weight tables. Here, instead, is a scientific technique that can change your eating habits for the rest of your life—and become the key to making that life last longer.
The technique is called behavior control, and is based on the reward-and-punishment ideas of B. F. Skinner and the many psychologists• who followed him. I came upon it quite by accident. The year was 1956. 1 weighed 190 pounds. For a five-foot, ten-inch man at the age of 30, 1 was 35 pounds overweight. My father, too, had been overweight by 35 pounds when he died of a coronary heart attack in 1948, at the age of 44. His diet had been rich in high-calorie, high-fat foods, as mine was. As a science reporter, I understood well the relationship between overweight and his misfortune.
On the day my father died, I arrived a few minutes after his last heartbeat. The picture of his final agony was burned into my mind: jaw drawn back, mouth slightly open, skin gray. I shall never forget it.
I recount that sad, terrifying moment because of b curious phenomenon that occurred when I began to try to lose weight eight years later. Lunchtime. A cafeteria. Like an addict, I am drawn to the hot table with its corned beef and french-fried potatoes. At the sight of corned beef, I actually feel my jaw working. And then, an image of my father’s face as I last saw it flashes before me. I am appalled. I try to turn off the picture by moving away from the hot table. I take a salad. The picture returns. I shout silently to myself: “Stop!” I try to think of something pleasant: my forthcoming trip to Europe—anything to get that hospital scene off the screen of my mind. But note:
I ended up with the salad rather than the corned beef. And it happened day after day.
Unconsciously, I had altered my eating habits through behavior control. I did not hear about the technique until many years later. Indeed, it was not until the I 960s that psychologists showed that human beings can use thoughts to reward and punish themselves in order to bring unwanted behavior under control. And only more recently have the psychologists applied these techniques to eating behavior.
The use of thoughts as reward or punishment is enormously convenient if you can make it work, because thoughts are always available. However, each person must find the technique that fits his own life and convenience. And he must use it in a formal and systematic way—that is, set it up as if it were an operating manual for driving a car.
Let’s analyze how it worked with me. It depended on the fact that eating is automatic, my eating behavior and yours being governed by signals—stimuli. The sight of food is obviously a signal to start eating. Hunger may also be triggered by a glance at the clock, a TV commercial, a feeling of anxiety. On that day back in 1956:
I. I am confronted with a stimulus (a signal)—the corned
beef.
2. The stimulus initiates an automatic response—I start to reach for the corned beef.
3. At that moment, the unpleasant thought (punishment), the image of my father, appears in my mind.
4. Instead of the corned beef, I take the salad—a desired behavior.
5. Because the image of my father is disturbing, I shut it off by shouting, “Stop!” in my mind. I must do this or else the punishing image will overlap with the desired behavior and perhaps stop that, too.
6. Finally, a pleasant thought as a reward. I used a trip to Europe, imagining that picture immediately after—not before—the desired behavior. The sooner rewards are given, the better they work.
7. 1 move rapidly away from the food table, so as not to let the persistence of the corned-beef signal overwhelm me.
Such a system can be adapted to your own situation. By using thoughts in this way consistently and—it should be emphasized—over a long period, you will instill a new eating pattern. And the result will be a “permanent” weight loss.
The first concrete step in formalizing your own diet change is to make sure you can get your imagination under conscious control. You need to learn three skills: conjuring up an unpleasant thought, stopping that thought (remarkably, imagining yourself shouting, “Stop!” will momentarily clear it away), conjuring up a pleasant thought. Practice this sequence in your mind while lying down.
If you cannot imagine a scene that is sufficiently punishing,
perhaps one of these will do:
• An image that will make you nauseated, such as a bowl of ice cream covered with maggots.
• Someone you know who is so obese that he or she disgusts you. Then let that person’s face dissolve and replace it with
your own.
• Rolls of fat around your abdomen come off in your hands like sticky, hot taffy—and then grow back instantly.
The essence of such negative thoughts must be that they are sufficiently horrifying to deter you, even momentarily, from undesirable eating behavior. Indeed, the rougher a negative thought, the better will be its effect. Heart-attack victims often have no problem losing weight initially, because they unconsciously use scenes of themselves in the hospital or dead to deter eating behavior.
in the punishment-stop-reward sequence, the punishing thought loses its potency if you do not reward yourself—at once—for the desired action. The following scenes are suggestions for thought rewards:
• Walking arm in arm, thin and handsome or beautiful, with someone you love.
• A thin you standing before a mirror in a bathing suit.
• Playing with your children on a smooth, green lawn.
Whatever image you use, it must give you great pleasure; it should almost have the quality of a daydream.

Once you get your imagination under control, you are now ready to put the technique of reward/punishment to work. As far as your diet itself goes, it really makes little difference what plan you use—counting calories, restricting or eliminating certain foods, or following a specific menu. The key is to be consistent. If you count calories, count them every day and eat a variety of nutritious foods. You must end up each day, however, having eaten less food than is required to keep the energy balance in your body.
Unfortunately, habit often overrules plan. Calorie-counters find themselves wolfing down a piece of apple pie when they “could not resist it any longer.” When they count up the calories later in the day, the thought of having “broken the diet” is so punishing that they give up counting. But remember that in the reward/punishment system, there is no such thing as “breaking the diet.” Instead, you are concerned with achieving control at the moment of eating. Occasional failures are not critical; the idea is to adhere to the method more often than not.
To keep track of your food intake, I suggest you make a chart. A graph that shows a line of what your basic weight loss should be over a period of time will suffice. (Don’t try to lose more than a pound or two a week.) Just remember as you go along to make another line on the chart of what your actual weight loss is. Such a chart has some reward/punishment features. For instance, you are about to reach for a slice of pie; in your mind you picture the chart with the line representing your actual weight crossing above the projected weight-loss line; the punishing image will deter you. Even without its psychological utility, the chart is essential as a method of monitoring the amount of food you eat.
After you have chosen your dieting plan—calories, food restriction or menus—and set up a chart, you still face the major problem of handling eating behavior in the presence of a stimulus. Learn to recognize the external signals that trigger your eating. Keep a diary in which you list for each eating occasion what happened to start you eating. Then develop tactics for avoiding these stimuli. If a commercial acts as stimulus, never have food near the TV set, or better, never have a high- calorie, ready-to-eat food in the house.
But behavior control is more powerful than avoiding stimuli,
because every refusal increases your resistance. To review the
sequence once more: stimulus, television commercial, for in-stance; food desire: punishment thought, a fat person—your’ self—unable to get off a sinking ship; alternate activity, you pick up a book or a magazine; stop the punishment thought; pleasant thought. walking along a beach, for instance, held long enough so that the eating stimulus (the commercial) ends,
Each success makes the next effort easier, because the power of the stimulus to make you feel hungry will be reduced—and that will reduce your food intake.
How well does all this work? Experiments indicate that reward/punishment methods can cause weight loss. If you are more than 50 percent overweight, you probably will need the help of a doctor and perhaps a behavior therapist to set things up for you and to keep you on track, If you are 15 percent to 50 percent overweight, you will find behavior changes on you own difficult but not impossible. People who are around 15. percent overweight have the best chance of changing on their. own, using the reward/punishment schemes.
They worked well for me. I now weigh 157. I’ve lost 33 pounds—and I never felt better in my life.

health, self improvement health, self improvement

“For Two months I’ve had these spells,” Fran Wilson told the heart specialist. “1 get short of breath. My heart beats like a hammer and unevenly. I’m dizzy and I tremble. My chest hurts. ‘ice I’ve fainted. My doctor says that my blood pressure and electrocardiogram are abnormal.”
“Was there any upset in your routine before the spells began?” the specialist asked.
“My husband was transferred to Arizona,” said Fran. ‘1 stayed behind to let the children finish the school year. Since he left, I haven’t slept well. Do you think fatigue brought out my heart trouble’
“I suspect we’ll find,” said the specialist, “that you don’t have heart trouble at all. I suspect that your illness is caused by emotion.”
Although the doctor proved correct, Fran was not imagining her ailments. Nor was she mentally ill in the usual sense of the
phrase. Emotional stress can produce real illness—true changes
in the body chemistry and structure of quite normal people.
And this phenomenon is amazingly common. Many specialists
agree that psychogenic (emotion-caused) disorders account for a large percentage of Visits to the doctor.
Physicians have long known that the mind could make the
body ill. But they did not know how to differentiate between
physically caused illness and that caused by emotional stress.

Today, answers to this problem are beginning to appear. And many doctors are using this new information as regularly as they employ their stethoscopes and tongue depressors.
Fran Wilson’s case illustrates one of the easiest means of recognizing such ills: identifying characteristic “clusters” of physical symptoms which often point to emotional causes. Since Fran’s spells resembled a common cluster called “neurocirculatory asthenia,” the heart specialist tried a simple test. For two minutes he had her breathe deeply and rapidly. She grew dizzy. Her heart pounded. She gasped that she was having an attack.
When she had rested, the doctor explained: “Those were some of the physical signs of great anxiety. Rapid deep breathing produces many such signs in any person. When we are afraid or angry, a part of the brain called the hypothalamus prepares the body for action. The heart speeds up to rush blood to our muscles. We breathe hard to fill the blood with oxygen. Hormones are released to bring the nervous system to a pitch of alarmed readiness. Sometimes our conscious mind, seeing no reason to be angry or afraid, may block out our awareness of anxiety. Yet all the while the hypothalamus continues the alant.”
Fran’s emotional alarm had evidently been triggered by the temporary separation from her husband. “I feel upset if anyone close leaves me,” Fran admitted to the doctor. “When I was a child, my parents left on a trip and were both killed in an accident. When Jim left—the first time in our marriage he’s been away more than overnight—I felt real panic. I pulled myself together, but I guess the fear was still there.” Fran was given tranquilizers and saw the doctor three times to talk over her fears. The symptoms vanished in two weeks.
Everyone knows that the mind evokes certain automatic responses from the body. Think about food and you salivate. Words or thoughts can prepare sexual organs for function, and cause a blush or goose-flesh. But more serious effects can be wrought by emotion. Take the case of Ruth Chadwick.
Four times Ruth had conceived a child but miscarried. On her fifth pregnancy, the obstetrician asked Ruth how she felt about motherhood. He learned that, though she wanted a child, girlhood tales of the rigors of labor and terrified her. The doctor decided to let Ruth talk out her fears at each prenatal visit.

With no other treatment, Ruth delivered a healthy full-term baby.
Why? Researchers at the University of Colorado have said that a woman fearful of pregnancy might, after weeks or months of carrying a baby, produce special hormones of a type normally produced only at the end of pregnancy. They cause contractions, dilate the opening of the cervix, and bring about birth. Indeed, many women like Ruth Chadwick, who habitually miscarry, may need only a little office counseling to carry a child to term.
How can thought work such changes? There is a pathway between the hypothalamus, the brain segment that controls primitive reactions to anger, fear, hunger and sex, and the pituitary gland. This mysterious gland, a lump the size of a sugar cube, located at the base of the brain, had long been known to secrete a growth hormone. But recent research has uncovered a number of other hormones it produces. The front lobe alone was found to create chemicals that trigger the making of sex hormones and govern the thyroid, which in turn controls the body’s metabolism, it yields yet another chemical that regulates adrenal secretion.
The middle and back lobes of the pituitary affect the kidneys, contractions of the uterus, and blood pressure. “We have just opened the door,” says one researcher, “and have had only a superficial look at this gland. But we now know one way in which emotion can be translated into bodily changes.”
With such clues to very real mechanisms, many doctors have begun to look for signs of emotional stress in patients as a matter of routine. Written tests have been designed to seek out the factors most commonly found among people whose ailments have been proved to be caused by emotion.
One such patient was Jean Becker, whose low back pain had grown steadily worse for a year. with no apparent cause. The symptoms seemed to suggest a ruptured spinal disc, which sometimes cannot be seen on X ray. During an office visit her doctor gave her a 20-question test. When he had scored it, he asked, “Have you been depressed lately?”
“Ever since a year ago, when my father died,” she said. “Mother died when I was small, and Dad brought me up alone.
Although my husband and children give me plenty of family,
without Dad all the joy seems to have gone out of things.”

The doctor gave her anti-depressant pills and told her to
come in for a chat every few days. Within a week Jean’s back
pain had disappeared. Moreover, the talks revealed that she felt that her children had little need of her and that her husband
was too occupied with his business to give her much attention.
Only her father had seemed to depend on her.
When the situation was explained to Jean’s husband and
children, they’ quickly gave her the assurance of love she needed, and the pills could be stopped. Had the back pain persisted once Jean’s depression was gone, the doctor would have felt it more likely that the cause was purely physical.
One test devised by doctors at Duke University. Durham, N.C., sought out unexplained fatigue, lack of sex interest, loss of weight, constipation, hopelessness, feelings of uselessness, difficulty in making decisions and restlessness. All of us sometimes have such feelings, of course. The key to the Duke test is whether a number of such factors are present much of the time. Sleep disturbance is one of the prime clues: the person with a psychogenic disorder is likely to wake early in the morning or during the night and have a chronic feeling of fatigue.
Sudden changes in life are often found to precede illness. In one study of patients with a wide range of ailments, three out of four were found to have recently suffered some major loss—loved ones, jobs, homes. Even apparently pleasant changes, such as a trip abroad, can cause trouble. The tourist who complains about foreign food or water would probably be wiser to blame the tension of being in a strange place. More- over, susceptibility to minor illnesses, such as colds, may be caused by small emotional stresses.
Are doctors other than psychiatrists really able to handle
such emotional problems? Numerous experiences show that
they are And some medical schools now are offering short courses in office psychiatry to their graduates Most physicians cannot devote an hour to talk with a patient as psychiatrists do. But so long a time has been found unnecessary in treating most patients with psychogenic illness. They need, primarily, ye- assurance that their ills can be dealt with.
As doctors learn to incorporate the new knowledge of psychogenic illness into their work, some of the responsibility, as
always, must rest with the patient. He should make an effort to protect himself when he knows that stress has made him vulnerable. He can help the doctor by telling him when emotional upheaval has preceded or accompanied an illness. He should be completely frank about his angers and fears, his frustrations and losses. The heroic view that “everything is just fine” may be good manners with a friend, but it is poor judgment when it is your doctor who wants to know.

health, self improvement health, self improvement