Non Diet Weight Loss

I have two horses and I like them to be well behaved but also really enthusiastic about what we do together (which is not always the case with horses!)    I use clicker training (positive reinforcement) where the horse gets a reward (usually food) if it does the right thing.  In clicker training, you pair the food reward with a “click” sound so the horse learns that the click means “Yes, that’s right!”  This gives you an extremely powerful way to communicate very precisely with your horse.

Here’s my young horse Oto learning his first lessons about jumping - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWysKmbPlcc

(Yes, this is relevant to overeating… read on!)

One of the concerns about training horses using positive reinforcement is that they are very big animals and sometimes they just have to do as they are told, even if they don’t want to, to avoid hurting someone.  So, the obvious question is: “Why would a half ton horse do something it doesn’t want to do, for just a piece of carrot or a few oats?”  It seems to stand to reason that if the horse wants to do its own thing more than it wants a piece of carrot, you’ll have a problem.

However, surprisingly, it doesn’t work like this.  Once the horse is properly trained to do a behaviour, it becomes a habit to do it when you ask for it (i.e. when you give a “cue”), even if the horse has a strong motivation to do something else. So, I have trained Oto to stay with me on a loose lead rope, and the other day he did this even though a motorbike went past at about a hundred miles an hour and scared him. It’s become a habit. He keeps the rope slack without consciously thinking about it.

So, what’s this got to do with overeating? Well, in researching how animals respond to “cues”, scientists at John Hopkins University in Maryland have found that if you consistently show a blue light when feeding a hungry rat, say, pizza, and a red light when feeding the rat ice cream, eventually when you flash a blue light, the rat will eat pizza EVEN IF IT IS ABSOLUTELY FULL. And if you flash a red light, it will eat ice cream. The lights become “cues” to eat and they are followed automatically even if the rat doesn’t really want to eat. Similar responses have been found in humans.

Do you think maybe the food and advertising companies could have taken a special interest in this research?

So, the challenge is that we are bombarded with “eating cues” and we have been “trained” to perform certain behaviours (e.g. finish what’s on your plate). We can end up eating or finishing our plates even when it makes no sense, just as my horse didn’t run away when a big, scary motorbike was coming right at him! We end up eating and we might not even know why. We may not even  consciously notice the “eating cue” - perhaps we walk past an advert or we smell something and then we find ourselves eating before we even know what happened.  These cues go to the instinctual, emotional part of the brain, which acts very fast and at an unconscious level.

So, are we just helpless victims in all this? I think not. If we make a conscious effort to pause before carrying out “trained” behaviours, we can over-ride them. You are trained to stop at red lights but you can override this if the lights are broken. You are trained to use a toilet but sometimes you have to over-ride this on long walks in the hills! 

Eat consciously and avoid going into autopilot whenever you can. Make a conscious effort to leave a little bit on your plate.  Train yourself to get into helpful habits, like stopping when you are satisfied, so that this habit is strong enough to over-ride any external cues.  And bear in mind that the food companies will be happy to train you to over-eat whenever they can!