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Dr. Fat was an intuitive creation
Introduction
As a decision-making scientist I take great pride in being part of the historical tradition of using rationality and the scientific method to make well reasoned decisions. However, I know from reading “Thinking Fast and Slow” and “The Righteous Mind” that most of my decisions are not made by a rational and careful analysis of the options and then logically choosing from them to determine the one with the greatest utility (Haidt, 2012; Kahneman, 2011). Like all humans most decisions I make are made intuitively and only later analyzed by the slower conscious processing for explanations. The story of how I lost ~130lbs and might have gone too far demonstrates the working of both decision making systems.
I have been and continue to be overweight all of my life (NIH, 2017). However, my weight was not something I thought about very deeply until recently. The mindless eating that resulted in me ballooning to 317 lbs. probably had many causes possibility from epigenetics (Jirtle and Skinner, 2007), cultural norms (i.e. my parents were brought up not to waste food and may have passed that mentality on to me), genetic behaviors that reinforce high calorie food consumption, advertising that drew my attention to higher cost processed (processing food increase availability of calories), mere exposure effect causing me to like these foods, (Haidt, 2012) and cheap calories. All of these effects can be summed up as being decided by Kahneman’s System 1 or Haidt’s Intuitive Elephant. These countless decisions to eat high caloric foods without much thought at all demonstrate the power of these systems to drive my behavior.
Figure 1 Fat Guy
2a. Kahneman would explain this phenomena as a lazy controller. Whenever my weight was brought to my attention I would focus on other things because it’s unpleasant to pay attention to what you are eating. In fact we don’t like to pay attention to any behavior because System 2 is lazy (Kahneman, 2011). The intuitive System 1 doesn’t like to be overridden and I resisted paying attention to eating because there were plenty of excuses not to pay attention. Here are a few that I used, for example BMI is a bad measure of health… true there are better ways with more validity but there is a limit to how useful these are. A major factor that helped me do the unpleasant System 2 thinking about heath was when an actuarial model asked me to pay a lot of money for life insurance. As you will learn later in Thinking Fast and Slow expert opinions (myself and my cherry picked studies saying I’m fine) are not worth as much as actuarial judgment and the actuaries at the insurance company told me I was a risk. As someone who is vowed to take what he teaches seriously I became determined to fix my actuarial predicament.
2b. Haidt would probably laugh and say I told you so. Plato’s rational philosopher kings do not have as much explanatory power as Hume’s emotional biological drives (Haidt, 2012). I’m not the rational decision maker that economists and scientists imagined humans to be guided by. The intuitive elephant ate deeply of all things yummy and available and my driver was left to try to explain why I was such a glutton. My system 2 driver was a good explainer and I can still quote from research saying my weight wasn’t a problem or the best exercises for burning calories but know that those things don’t really matter and what helped me was to focus on eating less (Carroll, 2017)
3. I eventually managed to lose weight ~130lbs but I know the research saying that changing the lifestyle and not relying on the lazy and effortful System 2 to maintain diet and/or lifestyle changes is how to keep it off. This is not a perfect system and I’ve gained just a little bit back but I no longer trust my System 1 and know my System 2 is unreliable so I trying to make healthful habits that I don’t have to think about.
Figure 2 Less fat guy
Carroll, A. (2017). The Bad Food Bible: How and why to Eat Sinfully. Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt.
Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind. Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage.
Jirtle, R. L., & Skinner, M. K. (2007). Environmental epigenomics and disease
susceptibility. Nature reviews genetics, 8(4), 253.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.
National Instatuits of Health, [Online]
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmicalc.htm
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