Great Lap Band Before and After Story

Quick link here – this is a promotional video from the Detroit Medical Center interviewing Dr. Mohamed Gazayerli. The woman who is in the first part of the video looks so dramatically different, it’s hard to imagine. She looks like a little bird afterwards! Very fine boned. Dr. Gazayerli has had a lap band procedure himself. Always nice to hear.

I hope you enjoy it. I love the before and after images.

Why You Eat What You Eat

Since it’s a holiday in much of the western world, I thought I’d link to this fantastic Word Press Blog post on why we eat what we eat and as much as we eat. This is one more in my series of why excess weight is so insidiously difficult to get off.

From SOMETHING TO READ WHEN YOU’RE BORED by Linsey Mallory – Do You Know Why You Eat?

This morning one of my coworkers (Rich) laughed at me when I told him I was covering up the stack of cookies he brought in because seeing them made me want to eat them. I defended my actions by informing him that there have been studies documenting the phenomenon of food visibility increasing consumption, but I still didn’t get the impression he believed me. So I of course decided to do some digging and prove to him that my snickerdoodle concealing behavior was not absurd.

So, this is what I learned in this post – that food that is convenient to us gets eaten – pretty much even if we don’t like it. I’ve done that – I’ve eaten an entire meal I didn’t like. I’ve snacked on snacks I didn’t enjoy. I don’t do a lot of it, but I have done it.

Mallory goes on to quote a CDC study on the subject:

People served larger portions simply eat more food, regardless of their body weight and regardless of the food item, meal setting, or timing of other meals; and the temptation to eat food at hand is so strong that human beings eat more even if the food tastes bad.

The amount of food consumed increases as the effort to eat it decreases, even if the differences in effort are tiny (the example they gave of this was a bowl of candy within reach, rather than a few feet away)

The mere sight of food can stimulate people to eat (Take that Rich!)

The longer the meal, the more people eat. The amount of food people eat is directly and strongly related to the number of people sharing the meal, with food consumption increasing by 28% when one other person is present and increasing steadily to 71% when the number of companions is six or more.

And this is what I find most germane to the essential topic of regaining weight after it’s been lost:

In general, human self-control over automatic behaviors is limited. Self-control tires like a muscle and taxes our ability to perform other tasks. And just as refusing food depletes a person’s mental reserves, tasks requiring mental effort can reduce the ability to resist the temptation of food. (this explains why I eat like crazy when I’m stressed out)

Because people are unaware of automatic behaviors, they are also unaware that the behaviors are not under control; people tend to fabricate reasons to explain their behaviors, typically choosing the most plausible, culturally acceptable theories.

Yes, I’ve experienced being too stressed to resist food that I didn’t want to eat. Eating didn’t require any mental gymnastics at all while refusing it seemed like the most ingracious ordeal imaginable.

Happy Easter to everyone. I’m editing my interviews with Lorraine finally today. I’m doing this post in the middle of a render. I’ll have them up later this evening for your viewing pleasure. 🙂