Good Girl, Bad Girl

REWARD & PUNISHMENT

Yummy food rewards for good behavior, and severe punishment or deprivation for bad behavior, go back a long way in my psyche. With every good intention, my mom trained me using the classic reward-punishment technique from the time I was a very small girl. As soon as I was old enough to think for myself – at age 40 or so (just kidding!) – I applied the same technique to managing (or should I say mismanaging) my weight. Even a tiny infraction of whatever diet plan I was following at the moment was punished severely with hours, days, or weeks of self-loathing and recrimination which would be followed by much bigger eating crimes (I’m a hopeless screw-up because I ate a donut yesterday, so I’m going to eat a dozen donuts today) or by extreme deprivation (I ate a donut yesterday, so I’m going to eat nothing at all today, and if I’m a very, very good girl, I’ll earn half a carrot stick as my reward tomorrow).

I learned a bit about behavioral science in college, and goodness knows I’ve read enough self-help books and articles to have picked up a thin smattering of knowledge about it, but none of it meant very much to me until the past five or six years. As I moved towards my weight loss surgery decision, I had to admit that the good girl, bad girl system had not been working very well for me. I just couldn’t seem to responsibly give myself one “cheat” a week as recommended in women’s magazines. The authors of these magazine articles claimed that one serving of cheesecake on Sunday would keep me from bingeing out of desperate deprivation for the rest of the week, but one serving was never enough for me. I guess I’m an all-or-nothing kind of gal, and for me, the only alternative to eating an entire cheesecake was to (mentally) beat myself with heavy chains and a medicine ball covered with spikes. Neither approach yielded the results I wanted, but what other way is there to live as a responsible, law-abiding adult? Without laws and law enforcement, don’t we suffer the chaos and degradation of anarchy?

POSITIVE & NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT

Sad to say, I’ve learned more about reward and punishment from living with dogs than from living with myself. I can plainly see that screeching at them for bad behavior is more likely to get them cranked up than to get them to behave. They have taught me that a positive or negative response to a behavior, be it good or bad, reinforces the behavior. We humans are not doing ourselves any favors by punishing our own “bad”, negative, or counter-productive behavior with more negative behavior. All that does is reinforce the bad stuff and use up all the extra energy we really need for the good stuff. When all we hear is an internal voice crying, “bad girl!” (or “bad boy!”), eventually we become resigned to being a bad girl (or boy, as the case may be), and the bad stuff goes on and on.

Nor are we doing ourselves any favors by molly-coddling ourselves after an eating infraction. You say you don’t do that? Well, I sure do. I eat five cookies off the plate on the break room table at work, sigh, and grab a sixth cookie while thinking, “It’s just too hard to resist those cookies, you’ve had such a trying day, you deserve a treat, you poor thing.” That kind of response also reinforces the very behavior that’s can keep me from maintaining my hard-won weight loss goal.

The reward-punishment cycle is hard to stop when it’s so deeply ingrained in us, but it is possible to end or at least reduce the occurrence of the negative stuff. One of the things that’s helped me regain control over my eating behavior (on many levels) is keeping a food log.

Entering my food intake (including time of day, amounts, the eating environment, my physical hunger, any eating problems, and how I felt emotionally before, during, and after eating) has forced me to put on my scientist hat. I’ve always thought of myself as an intuitive, creative person, not a scientific one, but sometimes when I act a part, I become a part. When I’ve written down all this data about my eating, it’s easier for me to see it with an objective eye. Patterns that are invisible to me when I’m in the middle of a situation become clear when I’ve backed far enough away from it. Things that I didn’t understand when they happened to me yesterday have new meaning when I study them today.

Things that I don’t really want to understand also become clearer to me when I see them in my food log. For example, after my weight loss surgery it became increasingly difficult for me to eat when sharing a meal with my elderly mother. Twenty years earlier, eating with her was a joy because we both loved food and the conversation that surrounds a meal. As she grew older, fussier, more confused, more demanding, the joy drained away and I found myself in the middle of painful stuck episodes every single time we ate together. A few hours after each incident, I would find myself seeking comfort in food, like stopping at Baskin-Robbin’s for a 670-calorie Cappuccino Blast after leaving Mom in the capable hands of her assisted living facility staff.

I loved my mom, I loved our old ritual of enjoying meals together, but it just wasn’t working any more. Time to make a change, Jean! After that realization, when it was time for a family meal, I spent the time fussing over Mom instead of trying to eat my own meal. I ate my meal later, when Mom was safely tucked in bed.

The take-home message here is this. Try to avoid the extremes of “good girl, bad girl” thinking, not just in your eating but in your exercise, work, parenting, and anything else you undertake. Sometimes a little bit good can be good enough, and a little bit bad doesn’t necessarily signify the collapse of western civilization. Try to be a kind, tolerant, but firm parent to yourself. Instead of screaming, “Bad girl!” when you fall off the bandwagon, give yourself a boost back up onto the wagon by saying, “That wasn’t good, but I know you can do better, so go prove it.”