Sail the Boat: Elephant on Board?

Say you finally decide to attack your cookie habit. You are smart enough to know it is not good for you, so to solidify the case you memorise the calories, fat grams and sugar content of the average cookie. All day the knowledge works and you stay in complete rational control.

By the end of the day you are amazed and confused to find your head in the cookie jar, ready to devour every cookie in the free world. It is as if the intelligent, rational you was gone and an emotionally needy cookie monster had taken over. Sitting among the empty cellophane sleeves, you wonder if you have lost your mind.

Most people trying to lose weight are plenty smart, especially about weight loss. They are veritable encyclopedias of it, and still cannot achieve lasting results. The problem is that they cannot coordinate their brainpower with their behavior. Are they stupid? No. Are they lazy? Probably not. Are they exhausted? Most certainly.

Have you noticed how little willpower you have when you are tired? As exhaustion goes up, self-control goes down. That is why you end up in the proverbial cookie jar after a particularly hard day.

Self-control seems to abandon us when we need it most because it requires conscious thought, and conscious thought requires personal energy. When you lose control it is usually not because you are weak. It is because you are depleted.

This reframes the whole problem. If self-control runs on energy, then protecting your energy is a weight loss strategy — and expecting discipline from an exhausted person is a plan that was never going to work.

When it comes to behavior, the human brain can be described as two parts. There is a rational part that sits atop the emotional part like a rider on an elephant.

The rider is conscious, deliberate and expensive to run. The elephant is enormous, fast, automatic and cheap. And crucially, the rider depends on the habits of the elephant to conserve energy and get through the day. Without the elephant handling the routine, the rider would be exhausted by lunchtime.

So the elephant is not the enemy. It is the reason you can function. The trouble only starts when the elephant has been trained — often accidentally — to do things that do not get you what you want.