Guilty Pleasures, Lizards and Twinkies

This is a guest post by Jack Oughton; see below for bio.

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Image Credit: Dottie Mae

DISCLAIMER: I’m not a doctor, and all I advocate here is the slaying of guilt. Beware Twinkies and lizards. 

Do you believe in 'guilty pleasures'? 

I don't think such things exist. By nature, the phrase is an oxymoron. True pleasure has no guilt attached to it. 

Guilty pleasures are slippery things. They make little dichotomies where you may feel motivated by reward yet deterred by guilt at the same time. They split you between the impulse for immediate gratification and a moral part of you that says: "No! This is a very bad thing, you aren't allowed to enjoy it!". If you go through with the deed, you experience the pleasure but you get the accompanying guilt and self admonishment. And, if the guilt prevents you doing it in the first place, you miss out on the pleasure, sometimes later wishing that you had. Depending on the amount of guilt involved with this, it can become pathological. It's a vicious cycle and a large part in how addictions take hold. 

So, how do you win in a scenario like that? You don't. A guilty pleasure is not really pleasurable. And any addictive activity or substance can become a guilty pleasure. 

By now you can probably see where we are going with this…

Good vs. Evil

The 'diet community' (if such a thing exists), revolves around the guilty pleasure of food, which is an addictive substance like any other. It doesn't really matter what approach each diet espouses, the point of being on a diet is having a 'good' behaviour to adhere to and a 'bad' behaviour to avoid. For some, 'good' might be not eating meat, or keeping carbs low. For others, it can be entirely different, but in each camp you've gotta stay on the bandwagon to get results, apparently. And 'bad' is usually desirable (read: tasty), else we wouldn't be trying so hard to fight it off.

Most of these diets (or people on them) don't build in a margin of error into the plan. The extreme dieters often fall victim to the hubristic belief that they will be the first person in the world completely and perfectly immune to slipping up, succumbing to temptation or ending up in a situation where they have to be 'bad'. Some go into a new diet full of hope but are really resigned to failure. No diet has ever worked for them longterm, but hey, this could be the one that does it. This is a similar attitude to the people who buy infomercial products on becoming a real estate millionaire but don't actually ever open the packaging or return the product. Either way it's a pretty sad state of affairs and is an industry that plays on hope.

But hope is not a strategy.

There’s a hungry lizard inside your brain…

As you probably know, the premise of many diets is flawed because it sets willpower against millions of years of instinct. Though there may be argument on the exact neuroscience, evolutionally speaking, willpower (at least in terms of response to food) is thought to be a recent development, a function of certain cortical areas of the 'young brain'. 

Unfortunately, willpower has a competitor. Seth Godin, uber business thinker, has described it as the lizard brain, Steven Pressfield, bestselling novelist, calls it Resistance. Some scientists refer to the specific area which produces this conflict as the amygdala. Wherever it comes from, the competitor is completely entrenched and as we know, will fight to the death against our best interests. It doesn't understand what the civilised part of you wants to do. It just gets really emotional and knows that pleasure is awesome! It's the little devil on your shoulder and it knows every excuse and trick in the book to break the commitments you make to yourself. It’s your evil alter ego.

The strange thing is that it's often the guilt that makes the thing more pleasurable. You may know what I mean. It's because you aren't supposed to do it, that it feels so good. It's like reverse psychology! So wrong, but so right. And it's why eating a box of Twinkies or having sex in public can be so much more exciting for some people! 

But, back to diet…

The diet mindset – how to mess up your head, quickly and easily…

Looking for an overlap in all the competing diets we find a few agreements. But, most competing camps agree that large amounts of junk food is a 'bad' thing. So we can use Twinkies as our example. So, think about Twinkies. Eating them every day isn't necessarily a bad thing, if that's what you want to do with your whole heart, and if you accept certain accompanying risks to your health (which are obvious to our readership!) 

Of course, the risks depend how many Twinkies you are having a day. Maybe one won't harm you. Yet, many dieters have an 'all or nothing' dietary approach. You may have seen or experienced it. Everything is fine when we are on the wagon, but one bite of the Twinkie and suddenly we’ve taken 'failure' straight to the core of who we are. And since we’ve 'failed', guilt leads us to go completely off the rails in terms of what we put into their body. Then it's another Twinkie orgy, and Lizard Brain wins again. 

Image Credit: trista.rada

The lizard loves twinkies.

True, some of us may have never had this problem with the lizard or Twinkies, but it is very, very hard to find someone without a vice of one kind or another. And food is one of the more socially acceptable problems to have. Think about Christmas, I don't know about you, but the way my family arranges ours, it's basically co-ordinated binge eating…

Skip ahead a few weeks to January. Like clockwork, families just like mine, a huge portion of the Western world, step onto the scales, or in front of the mirror, following the excesses of the ‘holiday period’. With a collective guilty shudder of disappointment or revulsion, we solemnly vow to lose weight. And, full of guilt, the dieting begins… 

But how long does it last?

What's the point of Guilt, really?

Because, if you think about it, guilt is one of the more useless emotions. In fact, it's outright insidious. What meaningful purpose does it serve? 

None of this crazy behaviour or inner conflict would be a problem without guilt.  In the ideal world we decide on what we do, and do it, guilt be damned!

Perhaps it’s supposed to make you not do the bad thing again. You remember the intense negative feelings associated with what you did and that stops you a second time. Except, this isn't what guilt does much of the time. Guilt usually isn't strong enough to force change in a problem area. It just nags. Instead of say, abject fear, which will often stop you dead in your tracks, with guilt you'll often keep doing the unhelpful thing anyway, but guilt will make it all the more uncomfortable.

“Guilt is the price we pay willingly for doing what we are going to do anyway” - Isabelle Holland

Going beyond ‘diet’ - Who needs a bandwagon anyway?

So, back to diet again… 

There are some people who become morbidly obese due to overconsumption of the wrong stuff. But they're not guilty about it. It's their body, and their choices, and it may or may not be our place to 'help' them. 

Sure, there's an argument for healthcare costs, but hey, this is a blog post, not a book, so I'm gonna skip over that one. *skip*

People who don't really care aside, we can grossly simplify people interested in nutrition into 'dieters' and 'lifestylers'. 

The difference between them is in the length of time they think in. Lifestylers (as I describe them here) aren't on a wagon, but they’re on the road. For them the approach is permanent - a part of the lifestyle. They've nothing to fall off of, and they spend a lot less time or emotional energy picking themselves up or trying to stay on the wagon. 

These lifestylers espouse many different dietary philosophies (some have no specific approach – eating ‘normally’), yet they don't really have a guilty mindset food. They've arranged circumstances so that the Lizard's depraved desires for Twinkies are less of a problem. Binging and slipping up aren’t really a consideration, and when it happens, it’s not a problem.

Dieters are different. The stereotype of the dieter is ubiquitous and requires little elaboration. It is someone who has a temporary mindset towards what they eat, and looks at these things in the short term. They often set a goal to hit a certain weight, and if they do hit it, that’s it. What now? Reversion back to old habits? Very often.

Many bodybuilders, these enormously disciplined, professional dieters are paragons of body composition. And they make perfect examples of the diet mindset actually working. They’re lean when they need to be, and still get their cheat days and the ‘off season’.  

You could say pro bodybuilders are examples of people who actually have control over the diet mindset. But is this approach healthy for the average person?

In my observation, Paleo is an approach that is conducive to a lifestyle. I know of few people who've treated it like a phase – though this may change as the approach becomes more popular.

Paleo bodybuilding? Some are doing it, but most of us are interested in a more sustainable approach 

Conclusion: Guilt and hope rarely make for positive change alone…

Change really happens when you give it your whole heart and full commitment, longterm. Think about the people who have really made it work for their health. Angelo, Mark Sisson, Jimmy Moore, countless others. Minimal guilt. No yo-yoing. Wonderful examples.  

Like the people above, make it a matter of lifestyle and guilt will likely be less of a problem. Treat it like a diet; get the mindset wrong and guilt will consume you.

So, this is obvious, and far easier to say than to adhere to but don't be guilty. Guilt may come before or after the bad stuff happens, but it’s no good either way. Also, stop trying to be perfect whilst you are at it. Just be excellent!

Earthshattering advice, eh?

That's right, I'm telling you not to be guilty and to stop trying to be perfect. Not ever. It's probably not possible, but give it a bloody good go…

Also, watch out for lizards.

Image Credit: Somebody on Tumblr

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Jack Oughton is a journalist and copywriter for hire from Croydon, UK. He eats a paleo diet and most of his friends and family think his food choices are 'insane'. 

The hell do they know anyway?

He can be found on Twitter, masquerading as a talking owl called Koukouvaya