I received a message from a reader in the backstage, asking me why it is always difficult to lose weight? The less you want to eat, the more you eat. You eat more than before you decide to lose weight.
This may be the experience of many people who have lost weight: the more you resist, the more you desire.
Why does this phenomenon occur?
The reason is actually not complicated, it is nothing more than the role of dopamine.
1.
Dopamine, a neurotransmitter that makes people feel eager, excited, and wanting, comes from the reward prediction error-that is, the difference between the reward we expect to get and the actual reward we get.
For example, if we expect that we can only get 70 points in the exam, but we get 100 points in the end, then the extra 30 points will stimulate our large secretion of dopamine. We will feel happy, excited, and dancing.
But if our expectation is 70 points, and we get 70 points in the end, then we will not have these emotional expressions.
Of course, we can also feel some happiness and excitement with 75 points. But we will not dance.
The greater the error, the more dopamine is secreted, and the stronger the related emotions we experience.
Or, we go to a egg tart shop every day, pass by every day, and buy some delicious egg tarts.
Although eating egg tarts makes us feel happy and joyful, it does not actually bring much dopamine secretion. It is mainly the role of “current neurotransmitters” such as phenolphthalein, serotonin and oxytocin.
But if one day, this egg tart shop has a new product, such as “bird’s nest egg tart”, we have never eaten it, so our dopamine will begin to be secreted in large quantities.
We will feel curious, excited, and eager to try. After we buy it, we will feel that this new egg tart has an indescribable deliciousness, so we decide to eat it every time. But after eating it a few times, this “indescribable deliciousness” disappears. Although the bird’s nest egg tart is delicious, it can no longer make us feel excited.
The reason is nothing else, it is just because of the change in expectations.
We expect to eat bird’s nest egg tarts, and we actually eat bird’s nest egg tarts. Without the reward prediction error, the secretion of dopamine will disappear.
2.
Reward prediction error will also have a counter-effect.
If we think we can get 70 points, but we end up getting 50 points, then the 70 points that originally did not make us produce dopamine will make us secrete a lot of dopamine. We will be particularly eager to get 70 points. Much stronger than before.
Or, we expect to have lunch at 12 noon, but we can’t eat it for a long time, and our appetite will be amplified by this reward prediction error.
After reading this, you may find that:
When the actual exceeds our expectations, we will be excited.
When the actual is lower than our expectations, we will be anxious.
But the essence of it is the role of dopamine-it is the root of happiness and pain. Its ultimate goal is to make us take action.
We will remember the feeling of excitement, which will make us work hard to get this excitement again.
We will hate the feeling of anxiety, which will make us fight to restore our inner balance.
That is why, when we control a certain behavior of ours, the behavior will increase its attractiveness to us – reward prediction error will inevitably lead to a large amount of dopamine secretion.
By the way, expectations are brought about by the subconscious, not the conscious. For example, when losing weight, our conscious expectation is to eat less, but the subconscious expectation is not the case – because we are used to a certain amount of food. This habit will become the subconscious expectation.
3.
Of course, this does not mean that we should let go of our appetite. Instead, we must understand that the more difficult things are, the more attractive they will be to a person. This is something that cannot be changed by human willpower.
We only have two choices.
The first choice is to give up control of appetite – in this way, there will be no more reward prediction errors.
Eat as much as you want, accept your behavior, and accept your natural desires. You will find that you eat much less than when you control your appetite.
The inability to stop eating is not how much a person loves food, but is entirely the result of dopamine and self-blame.
The reward prediction error brought about by self-restriction amplifies the dopamine that food can bring. Therefore, it amplifies the appeal of food. Self-blame makes a person feel bad, and in order to restore his mood, he changes this negative emotion by secreting dopamine through eating. This is a completely vicious cycle.
The second option is to focus on a period of time and let your “self-control” only control the matter of weight loss.
We mentioned before that the essence of self-control is not to perfectly control one’s heart and actions, but it is a response to the decision that has been made.
And decision-making is the role of consciousness. Therefore, our self-control has no way to control our hearts – it has no way to control our thoughts of “wanting to eat” or “not wanting to eat”, and it has no way to control whether a certain desire will rise in our hearts. It can only control our actions: not eating when we want to eat.
You can try to eat while thinking “I don’t eat” in your mind; you can also think “I want to eat” in your mind when you don’t eat.
This simple experiment will let you understand that your thoughts cannot control your actions, and your actions cannot control your thoughts.
You can completely maintain actions that are opposite to your desires when you have certain thoughts and desires. This is self-control.
And, since self-control is a reversal of a decision that has already been made, its number of reversals is limited. Just like a person doing push-ups, using muscle power to reverse the effect of gravity on himself. No matter how strong a person is, he will always be exhausted if he keeps doing it.
If you want to control every aspect of your life, then you will definitely lose control of everything.
Therefore, each time, only focus on the control of one behavior, and the limited number of self-controls every day will allow you to gradually develop a habit, and then no longer need the participation of self-control.
In the short term, controlling your appetite will inevitably amplify your appetite. But this amplification of appetite is not permanent.
First, when you wake up, the dopamine is recycled by the body, and this appetite will subside.
And, because long-term behavior shapes the neural circuit, we will develop the habit of not using eating to change emotions, and develop the habit of eating less.
Once habits become natural, our subconscious mind will no longer make decisions related to food, so there is no need for self-control – just like people who have never smoked never use self-control to restrain themselves from smoking – at that time, we don’t need to deliberately control our appetite and can eat the right amount.
However, this is a long process. It requires long and focused efforts, and it requires a period of time to actively give up self-control in other areas of life and save a limited number of self-control times.
As long as you can recognize this, weight loss success is inevitable.
