312: The Fear Of Weight Gain And Loss Aversion

Chris Sandel: Hey. If you want access to the transcripts, the show notes, and the links talked about as part of this episode, you can head to www.seven-health.com/312.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach and an eating disorder expert, and I help people to fully recover irrespective of how long the eating disorder has been going on.

Before we get started with today’s show, I just want to mention that I’m currently taking on new clients. If you want to reach a place of full recovery, I would love to help you to get there, and as I just mentioned a moment ago, this doesn’t matter how long this has been going on. If this has been something that’s started in the last year or something that started three decades ago, I still believe you can reach a point of full recovery, and I can help you get there.

So if this is something that you would like, send an email to info@seven-health.com. If you put the word ‘coaching’ in the subject line, I can then send the details over to you.

00:01:24

Fear of weight gain connected to loss aversion

I want to get on with today’s show, and what I want to talk about is the fear of weight gain and its connection to a thing called loss aversion. This came up for me – I’ve started reading this book again. I was reading it; it’s called Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. I started reading it maybe a year ago and then for some reason the book went missing – I think Rams came into our room and hid it somewhere – and then I didn’t find it again until when we were moving house in the March time, and then it’s just sat in my room and I haven’t really done anything with it. I’ve had a lighter reading year. I don’t know why.

But anyway, I started reading it again, and there was a really interesting story in it. The book is really about behavioural economics and how irrational we are. There’s a lot of references to the work of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Michael Lewis wrote about them in The Undoing Project, which is a fantastic book. I highly recommend it. Michael Lewis is an awesome writer. I think I’ve read the vast majority of his books. But it’s really interesting. And I’d never heard about Kahneman or Tversky at the point when I started reading the book, or I’d heard him interviewed talking about the book; I’d never heard about these guys, and then I read it and it was absolutely fascinating. They were really the two people who have done a lot to get this behavioural economics movement started, so they are referenced a lot, and Kahneman is still doing work.

So in this book Predictably Irrational, it’s looking at all the ways that we as humans are irrational with our decision-making. What this chapter was talking about was a thing that happens at Duke University in the US. I may get some of the things wrong with this; I don’t know if it’s still ongoing. I think this book came out in 2008 or 2009, so something may have changed now. But this was what was happening at the time that this book was written.

00:03:43

Duke University experiment on loss aversion

With Duke University, there is apparently a pretty small gymnasium where they have their basketball matches, but everyone wants to get tickets to those basketball matches, and there’s way more people trying to get tickets than there are tickets available. I don’t know when this started, but at some point there was this scheme that started that you can then set up a tent on the grounds in front of where you get the tickets or something along those lines, and you will set it up a week before the game is going to start, and this is then your way to try and get tickets.

And then the people who are in the tent at some point, the people who sell the tickets will sound a siren, and one person from the tent then has to go over and sign something to say that that tent has turned up for that roll call. And then as it gets closer to the game, they’ll do the siren again. This can be happening at any point during the day or night. They’ll do the siren again, and then every person at that tent has to go over and sign in. So people are taking a huge amount of time out of their week. They’re not able to be going to the classes because they’re having to stay in these tents, and this is what they’re doing to get tickets.

All of these people who are doing this are obviously diehard fans who want to make it to the game. The wrinkle with this is that even if you do all that, you might not get a ticket. And for some of the games, they have a lottery system, so even if you do this, all you’re doing is entering into the lottery system and then some of you will get tickets.

What Dan Ariely and his colleagues wanted to do was look at, what would people value tickets at depending on whether they got tickets or not? What they did after one of these events had occurred, all the tickets had been given out for a particular game; some people got them who’d been staying in these tents, some people didn’t get them who’d been staying in these tents, and they got a list of all the people’s names who had then been participating in this, all the people who’d been staying in the tents or a section of the people who’d been staying in the tents.

What they did is called them before the game. The people who had tickets, they called them and said, “Hey, we could potentially have someone who’d want to buy your tickets from you. What would you sell them for?” And for the people who didn’t get tickets, they would ring them and say, “Hey, I know you missed out on these tickets. We may be able to get you some tickets. What would you pay to get those tickets?”

They wanted to see, was there a discrepancy between these two groups? The people who had the tickets, how much did they value them at? And the people who didn’t have the tickets, how much would they value paying for those tickets?

What is very interesting is just how different these values are. For the people who already had the ticket, when they were asked “Would you sell the ticket?”, a lot of the time the first answer was just “No, I’m not going to do that.” They said, “Look, everyone has a price. Name your price. What would you sell it for?” The average price that someone would say that they would sell it for was $2,400 USD. They said, “How are you coming up with that sum? What are you thinking about? What are you doing to get there?” The general response was, “I’m imagining how amazing that game is going to be for me and that experience is going to be and how much I will look back on my time at Duke and remember fondly going to that game. That’s why I’m valuing this thing at $2,400” on average.

Then when they spoke to the people who didn’t get a ticket and said “What would you pay?”, a lot of the time it would start at “Maybe I’d pay $140 or $150.” They said, “What would be your absolute maximum?” Maybe they got to $170. So it turned out that $170 was the average of what those people would pay. And again, they’d ask them “How did you come to that sum?”, and for those people, they said, “Well, I look at, if I was to go to a bar and get some drinks and get some dinner and do all of that, maybe it would be around $170. Maybe it’d be a little bit less, but I’m then willing to pay a bit more because I’m getting to go to the stadium and have that experience.”

So in both scenarios, we’re getting completely different price points: $2,400 versus $170. And in both scenarios, we’re having people think about this thing very differently in terms of how they’ve arrived at that number. The reality is, both sets of people have gone through the exact same thing. They’ve both done all the camping, they’ve both been going to the roll calls whenever the buzzer went, and yet the fact that one group got the tickets and the other group didn’t get the tickets now has them thinking about this experience very, very differently.

It would be really interesting – they didn’t do this as part of it, but it would be very interesting if they’d asked them this question before this all started, or on Day 1 of them camping. “What price would you pay for these tickets?” Because my guess is, one, it’s probably going to be closer to the $170 than it is to the $2,400, but two, there’s not going to be this huge difference. All the people are going to be probably roughly in the same area. It’s only after getting those tickets that someone has really jacked up the price of what they think it’s worth.

00:09:30

How this connects to eating disorder recovery

So why am I telling you this story? Why do I think it relates to recovery, or how can it relate to recovery?

So much of what people fear around recovery is the fear of weight gain. “How am I going to handle putting on that weight gain? What’s going to happen when the weight gain occurs? What amount of weight gain is going to happen?”

If I was to then go to your former self – let’s go to you before this eating disorder even started – and I said, hey, I’ve got a way that I can help you lose weight, and this is what it is. I’m going to explain all of the different components of the eating disorder that you’re going to be experiencing. Yeah, there’ll be some weight loss with this, but there’ll be this huge amount of fear that then comes about in terms of “What happens if the weight starts to go up again? How am I going to cope with that if that occurs?”

It’s going to have an impact on the quality of relationships that you have and the depth of relationships that you have. It’s going to have an impact on your capacity to think about so many other things in life, and so much of your thought and the cognitive load in your brain is then focused on food and “how long I can go between meals” and “did I get enough exercise in” and all of those things.

There’s going to be the cost of “I’m hanging out with my kids, but I can’t be present in the way that I would like. I’ve got all these symptoms that are now occurring. I have osteoporosis. I’ve lost my period. I’m cold all the time. I’m getting stress fractures.” We could go through all the list of things that people are very regularly going through as part of the eating disorder.

And if I said to someone before this had all started, “Would you want that as a way of not gaining weight or of losing weight?”, my sense is that the vast majority of people would say no. And this is true whenever I ask someone when I’m working with them, “Would you recommend this to a friend? Would you recommend this way of living to a friend, way of avoiding weight gain to a friend?” It’s a very strong “Hell no, I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone else.”

Again, if I went to someone who is living in a large body – maybe a much larger body than you think you could ever be possible with – and I said to them, “Hey, I’ve got this thing that could help you lose weight” and I walked them through every aspect of the eating disorder and how it’s going to impact their life and said, “Do you want this as your method?”, once again, I think there is a very, very, very tiny fraction of people who are going to say yes to that.

And the people who are going to say yes to that are going to be the ones who are not understanding what this really means, because every person I speak to who’s in the depths of an eating disorder does not want to be in the depths of an eating disorder. Even if there is the fear of weight gain, even if there’s the fear of “I don’t know how this is going to end”, there is the “If I had a magic wand where I didn’t have to live like this, I didn’t have to have all of these thoughts, I didn’t have to have all this anxiety, all this worry” – people would not be signing up for it.

This is where I think it relates to the Duke University piece in that when someone is looking at their fear of weight gain, they are like the person with the ticket that is drastically overvaluing how important it is. And when you get to the other side, you really understand the insanity of the high price that is being paid to avoid the weight gain or to avoid these fears.

For any person who is not living in your experience and is not having the kinds of thoughts and feelings and everything arise in the state that you’re in, no-one is going to be wanting to sign up to this. No-one is going to say, “Hey, this seems like a really great way to be able to lose weight.” Because the reality is, there are a lot of people that want to lose weight, and this is a real preoccupation. It is a real worry for them.

00:13:57

Paying too high a price due to fear of weight gain

I think this is the thing that comes up a lot with people and becomes a block for recovery: “Yeah, but everyone in society worries about weight gain, so it’s normal to worry about weight gain. I’m just simply doing something about it. Loads of people worry about this. How am I any different?”

The way that I conceptualise this is that yes, there are lots of people who are worried about this thing, but it’s “What will I do about that?” For example, you can be very worried about the fact that “I don’t have enough money and that finances are a little bit stretched right now. We’re making it just week to week or there’s not enough money to last the month” – and at the same time, you’re not going to go and rob a liquor store to have more money. You’re not going to go and rob a bank. You’re not going to start embezzling money out of your company as a way of dealing with that. Because there’s the realisation of “Yeah, I can have these fears about it, but I’m just not going to go to that extreme to deal with this.”

At the same time, if you do go down that route, there’s all of these repercussions that then naturally occur. For example, you could have someone who is a millionaire because they’ve inherited that money or they have a business in a way that makes them that money and it works fairly easy for them versus someone has got a million but has embezzled that money out of the company they work for, or they’ve robbed a bank to get that money. In essence, you have two people who have the same thing – they both have their million – but I can guarantee you that they both feel very differently about that situation.

The person where it’s come very naturally, there’s going to be a lot less stress and worry and anxiety connected to that. The person who’s embezzled the money or has robbed the bank is going to be constantly looking over their shoulder. They’re going to be worried, “Am I going to get found out about this thing? Oh my gosh, what’s going to happen if I end up going to prison?” There’s all of these things that then occur because of the way that that thing has been gained.

And yeah, it’s unfair in the society we live in, in terms of the amount of monies that people can have or the disparity in income. And the same thing with people’s body sizes and weight and all of that. Yeah, it is unfair in a lot of ways for many people – and you doing the equivalent of robbing a bank doesn’t actually make it better for you.

This is the thing with living with an eating disorder: you found a way to do this thing, but you’re paying a really, really, really high price for it, and often, because of the way this changes the way you think about things, you’re not paying enough attention or noticing the high price you’re paying because you’re much more captured by the fear of the loss, the fear of “But I’m going to lose this thing.” It’s so much more intensely painful to think about the loss as opposed to thinking about the opposite of what could happen in terms of the joy and the changes that could be gained.

It’s really apparent what someone who doesn’t have an eating disorder is able to do in terms of being able to be with family and friends, to be able to go on a holiday and be present, to be able to go out and have a meal without the need to check the menu in advance, or for the meal to actually be an enjoyable experience and they can enjoy the food and chat with friends as opposed to “I’m having to compensate for hours before I can go and do this thing” or “I’m unable to be present” or “I’m looking at the menu for half an hour and I feel completely paralysed”, all these different versions of these kinds of things.

It has a really massive impact on your life and impacting the quality of your life and your relationships and all of this, and yet the thing that keeps coming to mind is the fear of weight gain and the loss that might occur.

00:18:36

Closing thoughts

That was the thing that came up for me when reading this book, and I thought it could make a good topic for the podcast. For you, when you’re in the midst of this, really reflecting on the fact of “Would I recommend this way of being for other people? Would I recommend this for my best friend? Would I recommend this for my partner? Would I recommend this for my kids or my nieces or nephews? Would I recommend this for other people?” If the answer is no, why wouldn’t you recommend it for other people? What would make you think “Hey, this is not good for those other people. This is not a good suggestion”?

And then the reality is that that’s also true for you. If it’s not something that you would recommend for anyone else, then it shouldn’t be something that you would recommend for yourself.

So that is it for this week’s episode. I hope you’ve found it useful. I hope you’ll ponder this little thought experiment and see how it has an impact. The reality is, there is no thought experiment that I can come up with that is going to completely move the needle for you and think “Oh wow, yeah, I’m going to definitely recover” and recovery now becomes easy.

Everything that I do, whether this is on the podcast or with clients, is always geared towards action-taking. It’s to have a conversation like this that then leads to taking action, because it is really the action-taking that makes the difference. Without that, this is just another bit of information that’s gone into your brain and doesn’t really do anything meaningful.

So if you do want help to take action and to make this be something that does make a difference for you, I’d love to help. As I said at the top, I’m taking on clients currently. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line.

All right, that is it for this week. I will be back with another new episode next week. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon.

Thanks so much for joining this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!

If you enjoyed this episode, please ~~share~~ it using the social media buttons you see on this page.

Also, please leave an honest review for The Real Health Radio Podcast on Apple Podcasts! Ratings and reviews are ~~extremely helpful~~ and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.