Lose Weight by Reframing!

Ice cream is sweetened butter.

It's absolutely true, but we don't frame it that way. We think of ice cream as its own food group, a happy wholesome treat. That's how it imprinted when we were children, and while our adult minds recognize it as pure animal fat (aside from the gobs of sugar), it still viscerally strikes us as a visit to some bright candyland universe with vague consequences, rather than a nutritional bear trap.

I've never been drawn to large servings of ice cream. After mulling it over, I figured out why. Ice cream is sweetened butter, and I wouldn't want to scarf down like a pint of cold butter. I'm grossed out by the thought! And now that I've consciously staked out my position - my framing - on this, I find that I'm happy with smaller and smaller portions. A tablespoon of butte....I mean ice cream seems like plenty. I have reframed it!

Another reframing was what I called "The Best, Easiest, and Most Sustainable Diet Tip:

At some point in every meal you've ever eaten, the following mental question has arisen: "Do I want to eat some more?" It's always asked quietly - so quietly that it may not consciously register. And our reaction is, nearly always, to shrug and eat a few more bites. What the hell!

1. No one in the history of the human race has ever asked themselves this question while still hungry. Genuinely hungry people just eat! The fact that you're asking means that you have, in fact, eaten enough!

2. The gratuitous few bites you take after this point will probably add 10-20% more calories to your meal. And most of us are 10-20% overweight, so these are the marginal calories that make us marginally overweight. So drop your fork!

....and yet another was my "Pizza Protocol":

I was ordered on a permanent low fat diet....and I cooked up the following ground rules:
I'd eliminate all bad pizza.
I'd eliminate all so-so pizza.
Really good pizza is permissable, but only one slice.
If really necessary, I could occasionally enjoy two slices.
Since I already cooked healthy at home, I'd cook at home a bit more to offset the errant slices.
This policy eliminates 90% of my normal fat-ingestion-via-pizza, while removing only 10% of my enjoyment:

Dieting doesn't work if you just try to change your behavior. When the diet ends, you will, of course, simply spring back. What's required is reframing. But most people have no facility for reframing (they mistakenly think framing is imposed on them by external circumstances). That's why they can't lose weight. Or change in other ways. It's why adults famously can't learn.

Frozen perspective prevents change, stifles creativity, and causes depression. My framing spiel is not dry philosophy. It's nothing less than salvation, the remedy to humanity's blocks and unhappiness. Plus: it just melts off the pounds!


Many Slog postings - particularly the ones you may have found insightful or clever - are the product of perceptual reframing. That's always been my little trick: a simple flip of perspective.

Until recently, I was fuzzy about my own trick. I hadn't framed my framing! Once you've framed something (as you surely have in some aspect of your life - surely attributing it to "learning", "growing" or "maturing", though framing happens in the blink of an eye whereas those other things are processes), a clarity arises that makes everything feel easy. You don't want to trap yourself in a frozen meta-perspective, nor do you want to be like the centipede who thinks so much about his hundred legs that he's unable to walk. But it helps immensely to have a framework for understanding who you are and what you do.

I often note that I use the Slog not to explain stuff to you, but to myself. I can see now that what I've been doing all along is framing my framing. It's not intellectual philosophy, it's extremely practical. It's everything.