Appetite and Weight Loss: Weight Control Article

Appetite and weight loss are words that just belong in the same sentence. If you want to get serious about weight loss then you have to be clear about appetite. The first definition that comes to mind is that appetite is a desire for food. It is; but there is much more to it than desire. If your concept of weight management is that of a battle with desire, then you have been at a great disadvantage!

First, appetite is a means your body uses to regulate you food intake, to make sure your body has enough energy to do all the things it needs to do to keep you alive. That is an important function!! It is so important that your body will make sure that you eat enough food. Your body will make sure that eating is a top priority for you. Your body accomplishes this with desire, a very strong emotion. One can think about this desire as a force of nature, and natural forces are very powerful.

This desire, which is your appetite, lies on a continuum. On one end is an absence of desire to eat, maybe even a disgust at the thought of eating, and on the other end is total fascination with eating, a drive to eat at all costs. Between these two extreme lie your daily experiences of appetite where at one time you want to eat more than at other times but not so much that you make yourself sick overeating. However, perhaps you might eat more than your body needs. This is the experience of appetite most people have. Let’s take a closer look at this desire we call appetite. We will use two concepts of psychology: satiation and deprivation. These broad concepts will allow us to say things important in weight control for men and in weight control for women.

Some Psychology of Desire

The psychology that is useful here are concepts that allow us to control our appetite, or our desire to eat. Typically, appetite operates in the background of our consciousness breaking into the foreground only upon occasion. When we see a donut at the bakery, we usually aren’t aware of what is happening to us except that we suddenly want the donut badly! Sometimes we succeed in resisting, other times we follow our desire. Whether we resist or comply with our desire involves the processes of satiation and deprivation. These are our tools!

These concepts are not difficult but they are important. Satiation is the effect whereby our body decreases its desire for eating when we have eaten enough to meet the energy requirements of our physical needs. The effect resembles that of a thermostat. When your food intake reaches a certain level, your desire clicks off or is reduced, depending on how much you have eaten. The important point is that eating a certain amount food reduces your desire for more food for a period of time. After a time, your appetite’s thermostat clicks back on. The process that has turned the thermostat back on is called deprivation.

If you have gone without eating for a time, you have observed the familiar process of deprivation. The longer you go without eating, the more your thoughts turn to eating. If you are around food, the food seems to talk to you, to call your name. Thoughts of food and eating occupy larger and larger areas of your consciousness. Essentially, your appetite becomes stronger and stronger. The process that caused this change of appetite is deprivation.

We are used to attending more to our thoughts than our behavior; our thoughts subsume our behavior. In the above discussion of appetite, we saw that the quantity of food we ate affected our thoughts about food and these thoughts about food affected our eating behavior. We found ourselves in a vicious circle, but we may have a way out of this circle since our behavior strongly influenced our thoughts. Maybe it’s easier to change our behavior than our thoughts. Maybe our behavior provides more options for change than our thoughts in this case. Maybe the behavioral processes of satiation and deprivation can offer us a way out of our vicious circle.

Weight Training for Women Over 50

The processes I am talking about occur in everyone regardless of age or gender. Deprivation and satiation are universal behavior processes. Parts of weight management differ for age and gender. Exercise is one. But deprivation and satiation work the same for everyone. Let’s think of satiation and deprivation as existing on a continuum with deprivation on the left side of the continuum and satiation on the right side. Somewhere on the continuum is a middle ground where you are neither deprived or satiated. At this point, you are ambivalent about eating. If precented your favorite dish, you could take it or leave it. These moments are ones we encounter everyday.

When we think about our eating, we focus on our moments of deprivation. Those moments when we had not eaten in a while and our appetite was in full force to eat. When thinking about our eating, we disregard those moments after a large meal when we are full and our satiation is in full blossom. We are not tempted by food. And we may not even recognize those passing moments when we are neither satiated nor deprived. We are in that golden middle region of equilibrium and we are impervious to all temptations of food. We all experience these states of appetite everyday. Sometimes we may feel insatiable to food. It may call our name and entice us to eat more than we need. We may succumb to these calls every day; but we all experience every day states of appetite when we have control over our eating behavior. Times when our appetite is in a lull.

A Satiation Strategy

Satiation and deprivation are scientific concepts based on a scientific theory of behavior. However, scientific theories require a technology for implementation. You will never manage your eating behavior by learning a scientific theory without an accompanying technology. A technology of behavior involves procedures of action. We have a scientific theory, we need a procedure now. We will base our procedure on satiation. Whatever your strategy, it needs to reduce your appetite for eating. If you can control your appetite in some way, you have an advantage. That is exactly what satiation does, and it is a natural part of our behavioral processes. We might describe our procedure a natural weight maintenance strategy. You will be using, not some drug, but the way your behavior naturally works.

Before talking about the strategy. I want to talk about why satiation is important in any weight maintenance program. In the developed world, people are blessed with an abundance of food year round. With that abundance comes a large variety of food. This variety can be a problem. First, variety has been shown to strengthen behavior. Thus, eating a variety of food increases the strength of your eating behavior. We are all so used to having something different everyday that we are oblivious to it in our lives, much less its effect on our weight management. The strategy I am proposing takes advantage of this fact.

How to Use Satiation

In statistics, the rate at which something changes, or varies, is called its variance. This factor can actually be measured. If you wanted, you could measure the variance of your eating behavior. You can get a feel for the variance of your eating behavior by thinking about how many times per week you repeat a food item in your weekly diet. For example, how many times each week do you eat sirloin steak. This number is important, because the number of times you eat sirloin steak each week is related to the satiation you have for sirloin steak and the satiation is related to your appetite for sirloin steak. But the most important fact about these relationships is that the more satiated you are on sirloin steak, the less strength it will exert on your eating behavior. thus, the less the desire for sirloin steak will permeate your consciousness.

These relationships reveal satiation as an important factor in weight management. The strategy I propose is to increase satiation of the food you eat. You increase satiation by reducing the variety of food you eat in any given week. I suggest looking at your diet in terms of week intervals. People like the variety of food they eat, and they get bored with a food item when eaten too frequently. Although peoples appetites are strong due to the reinforcement of food variety, they are fragile.

You will want to begin by identifying the foods you tend to eat during a one to two week interval. How many different foods do you consume in these time periods? Begin by slowly reducing the number of different foods you eat during the one or two week interval. Reduce it by the number that is comfortable for you. Don’t panic!!! You are not permanently eliminating food items from your diet. They will just be eliminated for one interval, which is one or two weeks. They will return in other intervals as you exchange other foods for them.

You will need an elimination strategy. Which food items do you choose to eliminate on any given interval? You will find a preference list useful. List the food items in order from most preferred to least preferred. This list will include all the food items you eat, not just those for a single week or two. When choosing which food items to eliminate and which to include for any single week, use this list to make sure your have some more preferred items and some less preferred items. It’s important that you don’t have a weekly list of all less preferred items. To maintain any behavior, there has to be reinforcement.

Conclusion

Satiation and deprivation are two behavioral processes that play important roles in your eating behavior. The weight management strategy presented in this article used satiation to decrease your appetite for food by decreasing the variety of food you eat in any single week. Overall, this strategy does not decrease the variety of food you eat. We experience our appetite as something very powerful. Something that is certainly more powerful than our will power. However, systematically using satiation, we can reduce that power just enough to help us make the daily dietary choices we need to maintain a healthy weight.