photo credit James Wheeler on pexels.com
The world is changing, and in turn forcing change upon all of us. I won’t belabour any points about climate change and pandemic. The immediate impacts of storms, drought and disease make it a dangerous time. We have only a short moment, right now, to modify and adjust. That means change and this column is about changing behaviour on an individual level.
There are a lot of avenues to useful change. In this column I want to lay out practical steps to effect a change in your own life. I am talking about the challenge of doing something consequential and positive, not the easy stuff that is akin to re arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The point of making an important personal change is that it affects more than yourself; it creates ripples into the wider community. I made a big change this year, and it gave me much to think about.
Over the last six months I lost 25 pounds. On my small, five foot tall frame, that is considerable. There are several important effects of this action. The first is that there have been measurable improvements in my health. I can anticipate being more productive and independent of social supports like health care. A simple thing, but with less insulation covering me, my body can cool more effectively. The heat is easier to bear. Other effects are less direct. I am more cheerful and relaxed, and this affects those around me. I am more able to offer care and support to others. My husband and I take daily bicycle rides. From remarks we’ve heard, the two of us are a known quantity in the community. Here we are, a retired gray haired couple, riding bikes every day. Hey, if they can do it... I have better energy, so I started a substack and I write a lot.
So, back to the main topic, change is necessary but can be hard. Many things are, but we do them because there are worthwhile outcomes. Hard is not the problem; it is just part of the overall picture. It is to be dealt with, along with all the other challenges. Big changes in behaviour, such as weight loss, are uncommon but not exceptional.
Because it is a universal theme, I am going to frame personal change in terms of that favorite story line, the Hero’s Journey. You will recognize it from fantasy stories, video games or movies. This not unknown territory. People have done this before. Your turn. Don’t fool yourself; it will not be easy. If you want easy, stay home.
The Hero’s Quest follows a strict formula that goes like this. The hero starts as young and inexperienced person, but there is something they want or need very badly. They have a goal. They leave the comfort of home to go on a quest. The journey is tough and sometimes dangerous. Along the way they do three things: collect tools; choose friends; slay dragons. In the end, they reach the goal and find the castle or holy grail or chest of treasure. The hero’s journey is a framework of everything you need to know about taking on and achieving something very difficult.
Part I. The Quest
Coming to a decision and formulating a clear goal is the beginning. Excess weight has been a problem for me most of my life. As I age, it exerts predictable and increasingly unpleasant health effects. I awoke one morning six months ago with the decision that it had to stop. So there, one clear goal, delivered with certainty to the conscious mind.
Part II. The Journey
On that first morning I decided on three simple rules. First, I would return to my roots and eat like my grandparents. Three basic meals a day, nothing between meals but liquids, no alcohol, desserts rarely. Second, get on the scales every day, without fail, to stay honest and focussed. Third, exercise one hour a day, minimum 5 days a week. Easy enough, I was already cycling or walking pretty regularly.
These are very simple rules, easily remembered. I lost weight immediately. Subsequently, I made some minor modifications to take a social life into account. No more than once a month, a bigger meal with dessert and one serving of wine or beer was permitted. The three rules resulted in steady, week in week out weight loss. Twenty five weeks, twenty five pounds.
Doesn’t that sound simple. Everything is easier when broken down into baby steps. It is by no means the whole story. If that were all there was to it, there would be no journey, no hero, no prize at the end. The quest, in the hero framework, is not easy.
Part III. The Tools
An early challenge is to know this is your task, and no one else can do it for you. One reason diets fail is because the responsibility for the weight loss falls to the diet. Follow the diet, lose weight; don’t follow the diet, gain weight. In that view, the diet holds the responsibility. Well, that’s all wrong. The agency resides with the person. The diet is just a tool, a means to an end. Taking responsibility is also a tool. The decision rests on the individual each time they face temptation. Unlike a loved one, a child or a career, a diet can be broken and mended any old time. This time, it is your arrow in your quiver, so respect it.
There is hunger on this journey. Of course there is hunger. Do not fool yourself, you are eating less. The task is to manage the hunger. Negotiate and tolerate, because this is the gollum dogging your trail. Hot herbal tea, or decaf beverage with a splash of milk was the first thing I chose. Very helpful. Ice water, or iced herbal tea, in summer. Other times stay busy, distract yourself.
There is one unexpected bonus, a type of boon granted on the journey. There is lot of energy, physical and mental, freed up when you stop eating so much. It is helpful find somewhere to put it. One friend, in the course of a major weight loss program, started painting. She became quite good at it, sold some pieces. I started writing this substack, and I write a lot. The daily bike rides are useful.
Part IV. The Companions
Every hero needs companions on their quest. Select the people that will help, a few good and hearty companions. Most everyone else will still be there when you are done. One friend told me how he lost a large amount of weight in graduate school. He took up running, changed what he ate and gave up alcohol for the duration. When his friends invited him for beer, he begged off with a simple “I’m in training”. Okay then. Next time.
Just as importantly, there may be some people that, for you, do not make suitable companions on the journey. One of the tools I had to acquire was how to make those distinctions. People come in messy packages and all with some lovely parts and some tougher bits. For some time I had been finding it increasingly hard to tolerate verbal attacks. By these I mean one person deliberately acting to harm another. I have seen this kind of thing flare up unexpectedly in friends, coworkers, family and extended family. It did not have to be an attack on me; it needed only to be one person I know acting consciously to harm another. As I explain below, attacks causes me much distress. Slowly, over time, I was removing myself from people who had shown both the capacity and a willingness to attack. There have been some. That part was hard too, but I could no longer expend energy finding empathy, making excuses or watching my back. It could no longer be my problem.
Part V Dragons
This part I think is the hardest of all. You must slay dragons. If you want to make a permanent change in your life of any kind you will have to deal with the emotional landscape that keeps you where you were and restrains you from moving on. How you feel about things sticks you in a context, a way of living, and holds you there. Here is an example of one particular dragon.
When I was in graduate school training to become a neuropsychologist and immersed in topics such as the physiology of neuronal processes, a student in the clinical stream made an offhand comment that stuck with me. “The predominant affect in eating disorders clinic is rage” she said. There it was. Emotion, the raw stuff, what we work so hard to civilize. People carrying too much rage ended up in a few places, and an eating disorders clinic was one of them. It is hard to change behaviour without managing the feelings that promote it in the first place.
Food moderates feelings. Food manages emotions. Unwelcome feelings, especially anger, can be suppressed with food. If you want to consciously manage food yourself, you may have had to ditch some unwelcome things you were carrying around. Again, don’t fool yourself. Everybody carries some of this stuff. I had as much excess anger as I had pounds. I also held a secret.
The secret I kept for decades was the beatings my mother gave me when I was a child. In a challenging time in her life she began to unravel emotionally. Her anger, usually well hidden, began to erupt. There was a period in my life when she would wait until everyone was out of the house and she would take the strap to me. I had no control and no means of escape. In case she was caught out, there would be some excuse, some act of mine so evil a little girl had to be stripped naked and beaten for it. Never anywhere visible. I believe it was kept secret and that no one else knew but her and I. Certainly no one spoke of it. I was too afraid. I stopped being a cheerful kid and became withdrawn and sullen. I gained anger and a lot of weight. In our village, another girl would come to school in white stockings to try and hide the welts on her legs. Everyone knew her father was doing this, so it was not particularly secret, but no one intervened. No one helped her. I was pretty sure no one would help me either.
Sixty years on I began to tell people the secret. It needed sunlight. Keeping other people’s secrets, holding anger, these are terrible dragons. Slay the damn dragon already.
Six months on, the quest is over and I have gained the prize. Here it is, then, phrased in a way to help you make change: the hero’s story. This story of weight loss is an example of how it works. Make a decision, gather tools and friends, leave your comfortable home place and go slay some dragons. Understand the road is long and hard. Keep the goal in sight and lo, there is the prize.
It is just a way to make a change, in this case to yourself and your behaviour. Now that you know how, go and change something. Time is short.