Sat, Oct-03-09, 15:01
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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Fitness show reveals difference between sexes
Quote:
From The Sunday Times
London, UK
4 October, 2009
Fitness show reveals difference between sexes
What drives men and women? Psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters believes he knows and explains in TV's My Big Fat Cycle Challenge
Siobhan Mulholland
Are you anxious, obsessed with food, indecisive and highly strung? If you’re a woman and you’re reading this, the answer is likely to be yes. Or yes, at least some of the time. The good news, according to the psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters, is that these emotions are entirely normal. What’s going on is that you’re being hijacked by what he calls your “inner chimp” — deep, inbuilt, primitive drives that might have helped you to survive in the dawn of humanity, but are a positive hindrance in the thrusting, bountiful world of the 21st century.
Peters came up with his theory of the “inner chimp” after years of observing women and men first-hand as a GP, and then as a consultant psychiatrist. In 2008, he put it to the test when working as the in-house shrink for Britain’s cycling team. The result was an extraordinary eight gold medals. Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins and Victoria Pendleton have all publicly credited him with helping them succeed.
Peters says that men are hard-wired to cope with the demands of modern life; in men, the predominate chimp “drives” are aggression, sex, power, ego and ownership — all traits that society rewards. Unfortunately for women, survival on the savannah required them to be constantly alert and constantly eating, traits that are not especially useful now. Your inner chimp can be silenced, however, and learning how to do this can help women deal with all sorts of issues beyond winning gold medals, says Peters, who is writing a book (to be published next year) and starring in a new documentary, in which he coaches four overweight women to lose weight, get fit and lay their dieting demons to rest, with spectacular results.
In essence, what Peters is saying to women is that it isn’t their fault, that all their angst, their worries, their need for constant reassurance, their insecurities, their inability to look in a mirror and actually like what they see, is because they are being hijacked by a powerful emotional machine that is very hard to control by willpower alone.
Lesley Doyle, 39, was one of the four women who took part in the documentary. “The theory really clicked with me early on,” she says. “It’s removed this huge slice of guilt and shame that I associated with eating and exercising. When I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to eat this’, or ‘I want to eat that’, or ‘I want to go for a cycle ride’ or not, then Steve would ask, ‘Who are you talking to when you’re bargaining with yourself?’ I realised I was talking to my chimp.”
Another “click” for Doyle was understanding where her obsession with food came from. It was only little more than a century ago that the primary role of a woman was to breed and to have as many babies as physically possible in the hope that a few would survive. Consuming as many calories as she could get her hands on was a necessity because, in the battle to produce progeny, extra body fat was essential. Yet, a mere four or five generations down the line, females are now desperately trying not only to halt these hereditary traits, but to reverse them.
Doyle admits that previously going hungry or missing a meal filled her with fear. “I realised it was my chimp fretting about being hungry, so, recently, I made myself go a day without eating — and it was fine. I just wanted to show myself that hunger is nothing to be worried about in our society, where food is available all the time.” Doyle has gone from being 20st and contemplating gastric surgery to a comparatively svelte 13st.
There are further key parallels Peters makes between chimp and human behaviour to help people understand their emotions. Further back in female evolutionary history, being constantly anxious, insecure and highly strung was vital to the survival of the female. A female chimp is small and not physically powerful; if she takes on a predator, she’s the one likely to be killed. So a snap of a twig and she needs to be up the nearest tree with her young faster than her human descendant can count calories. A confident, decisive female chimp who marks out her territory in the jungle is the “stupid” one; she will not survive. So she seeks out the bigger, more physically powerful male chimp to do this for her, to protect her.
However, nature’s blueprint for female emotion remains much the same today as it was for the chimp. Women are still more likely to be insecure, anxious and highly strung than men, traits that Doyle sees in herself every time she procrastinates at work.
There is some good news for women: the maternal drive, says Peters, is a powerful, positive drive in females — a woman will sacrifice her life if it means her child survives. “In my opinion, the maternal drive is the most powerful drive in nature, more powerful than the sex drive in men,” he says. “Most women wouldn’t hesitate at all if there was a choice between them and their children. The problem is when it becomes self-sacrificing, and when they bring it into the workplace and try to mother their colleagues.”
The business executive Mandy Tythe-McCallum is a pro in the art of self-sacrifice. A 44-year-old mother of two teenage daughters, she admits her biggest challenge is finding time for herself: she has a full-time job, a husband, children and a home to run. “From my very first chat with Steve, when he was talking about the emotional part of your brain and how it works against you, I thought, ‘God, I do that all the time, or I let my kids do that to me.’”
She says she soon realised her children did not need their mother on standby for their every need: “I will be booked into an exercise class after work and, a few hours before it, my chimp wakes up and says you can’t go, you’ve got dinner to cook, to pick up one child from ice skating, the other child from college and it’s all your responsibility.” Tythe-McCallum has learnt to deal with each of the issues her chimp throws at her. “If I get home an hour later, nobody has even missed me.”
There is, however, one big drawback with Peters’s theory. Although it is not difficult to understand the model, putting it into practice takes a lot of intense, focused work. His forthcoming book is unlikely to be a “10 easy steps to happiness” type of self-help guide. He also recommends working on the theories with someone who is “clinically experienced”, a psychologist or therapist. Evidently, it’s not something we can do for ourselves, as our chimps will hijack our attempts. But it sounds like it might be worth the effort. Peters’s chimp-management theory is clearly a gold-medal-winning formula.
My Big Fat Cycle Challenge is on (British TV channel) Sky Real Lives on Tuesday and Wednesday at 9pm
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/li...icle6854229.ece
Quote:
My Big Fat Cycle Challenge
Tues 6th & Weds 7th Oct ~ 9pm
In 2008 Britain pulled off one of its greatest sporting victories ever. Against the odds, defying all expectations and predictions. The UK cycling team won 8 gold medals in the Beijing Olympics. It took everyone by surprise and generated a lot of questions such as where had this team come from? Who was behind them? How had they done it? And perhaps most pertinent of all - what really was the secret of their success?
My Big Fat Cycle Challenge is an inspiring and engaging series that sees the talent behind the British Olympic Cycling Team take on the ultimate challenge of getting four overweight women into shape by showing them how to break lifelong habits of yo-yo dieting once and for all. The squad from Team GB tasked with this challenge is performance director Dave Brailsford, psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters, Shane Sutton, the unforgiving performance motivator in chief, Nigel Mitchell the team nutritionist and Mark Simpson the strength and conditioning coach. Their quest for perfection ended with a box full of Olympic medals in Beijing, but can they use their talents to bring glory of a different kind to four overweight women?
http://reallives.sky.com/my-big-fat-cycle-challenge
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