roy baumeister- willpower; self-control, decision fatigue, and energy depletion
I ended up watching this video as well. I've got Baumeister's book called Willpower, so it was just a refresher for me. The basic schtick is that if your tempted by something, but resist it, this depletes energy somewhere in the brain, probably in the frontal cortex. And the next temptation becomes harder to resist. It also becomes harder to make decisions (and really, deciding not to do something that you really want to do is just a difficult sort of decision, so the overlap makes sense). Some of Baumeister's studies show a little bit of glucose reversing the effect, but Baumeister suggests a high-protein diet for people playing the home game. It's the old sugar puts you on the rollercoaster, protein provides a steady, sustained source of glucose idea.
One test of willpower was the ability to put your hand in some ice-water--the longer a subject could sustain this, the greater the willpower. The point he made there was that in the will-power depleted state, not only were the subjects unable to hold their hands in the water as long--they also perceived the water as somewhat colder than non-depleted subjects did. He also spoke about other effects, on emotion--sadness, anger--deepening in the depleted state.
On this board, the idea of willpower hasn't always been popular. The idea that naturally lean-types just have greater willpower seems silly--they don't stop at half a slice of pie and insist they're not hungry because they have greater willpower than someone like me (who would finish his pie, and then their half a slice), they do it because half a slice genuinely satisfied their hunger. It's considerably easier for me to not eat pie then to eat a little bit of pie. Moderation is its own worst enemy.
Getting the social-anxiety urge to delete this post as rambling and off-topic, so I'd better get to the point I wanted to post in the first place.
Jimmy Moore--on the higher-protein, low carb diet, he ended up slipping up in weight, he puts it down to the protein. People who followed his story often put it down to the frankenfoods--many of which were high in glycerol. Some high in actual carbohydrate--the breads and pastas made of starches that were supposed to be indigestible, but weren't. But when he was eating these foods, he seemed to have a bit of a sweet-tooth. Once he went ketogenic, even sweet things like diet pop (which he could easily have rationalized, since they were unlikely to drive him out of ketosis), he was able to resist. And he had that bit of chocolate every day the whole time--a perfectly good trigger for a binge, that's sure been enough to trigger
me in the past, and I don't have anywhere near Jimmy's sweet-tooth.
You could think this is specific to sweet--but I'm finding if my diet is ketogenic enough (60-80 grams protein, carbs as spinach, lettuce, maybe half an onion a day) binging goes away. Not well tested--I was prone to binges, cut the protein, and haven't binged in the three or four weeks since. It isn't that I'm having urges to binge, and resisting them--the urges went away. Reminds me of the icewater thing--if the people who weren't ego-depleted experienced the water as less uncomfortable--it isn't that they resisted the urge better--it took longer for the urge to build up to the point where it was irresistible. I don't think my binging was caused by the drive to consume glucose, since flax seed really isn't a very good glucose source--but maybe the urge for something vaguely nutty was ramped up, and flax was the closest thing I had.