Forty-one percent of Americans are currently trying to lose weight, while 63% say that they have dieted at some point in their lives according to a survey by Consumer Reports. People spend billions of dollars to lose weight, but often have few results to show for the investment. A research review of 31 clinical weight loss studies published in the American Psychologist reports that most people who diet regain the weight they lost within one to two years, and ~40% gain back more weight.

[The real stats are probably even more discouraging because most research studies do not actually weigh people (and people tend to “fudge” their weight reports) nor follow-up on the significant number of people who drop out of these studies and who tend to do the worst in terms of weight loss.]

A meta-review of the major commercial weight loss programs in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded that “… the evidence to support the use of the major commercial and self-help weight loss programs is sub-optimal.”

What accounts for these less than impressive results? Well, most weight loss programs ignore one very important fact:

People fail in their efforts to lose weight, not because they don’t know what to do, but because they don’t DO what they KNOW. And they don’t do what they know because it is TOO PAINFUL!!

We are not talking about plain old physical hunger pains here. In fact, many people report that they are not even able to restrict their eating long enough to feel real hunger in the belly because they can’t tolerate the dreadful feelings they experience after even a short period of food deprivation.

The human brain has evolved and adapted over a very long span of earth time. Consider the following timeline:

• First brain of any kind (flatworm) appears about 550 million years ago

• First primate brain appears 40–65 million years ago

• First human ancestor brain appears 7 million years ago

• First homo genus brain (homo habilis) appears 2.5 million years ago

• First “human” (homo sapiens) brain appears 195,000 years ago

The human brain has very ancient regions evolving over the past 550 million years such as the amygdala and the hypothalamus and the limbic system that manage functions such as sex, eating, fighting, fleeing and emotions, as well as more “modern” ones which are less than 200,000 years old such as the pre-frontal cortex that manages functions such as planning, reasoning and language.

Our New Brain is terrific at abstract thought, focused attention, working memory, problem-solving and other important “executive” functions that help us to survive and thrive and create and innovate. New Brain has enabled us to fight our way to the top of the food chain on the planet and to assert dominion over it (now let’s all hope that New Brain can also figure a way to not destroy the planet we have dominated!).

New Brain has enabled us to discover a lot about how the world works and to use those discoveries for great benefit. Our Old Brain is terrific at taking care of critical life functions such as regulating our breathing so our blood and organs maintain sufficient oxygen levels, maintaining our body temperature within just a few degrees of 98.6F despite wide fluctuations of external temperature, putting us to sleep so we can “reboot and defrag” our neurological hard drive, etc. In most instances our Old and New Brain regions work in harmony. One topic on which they do not cooperate well is eating and weight management. Specifically, Old Brain is obsessively focused on survival, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, while New Brain is often preoccupied with higher levels in that hierarchy such as relationships and status and meaning/purpose.

Gluttony is the source of all our infirmities and the fountain of all our diseases. As fire extinguished by an excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by an intemperate diet. (Burton)

As we have learned more about the health risks of overweight from our scientists and researchers (who tend to have rather large and impressive New Brains!), we have tasked them with finding a solution to the problem. And New Brain, being a smart young organ, came up with a solution pretty darn quick: EAT LESS. Brilliant! Case solved.

But hold on now. There’s one little problem: Old Brain doesn’t exactly get all warm and fuzzy at the notion of eating less than it needs (read: starvation). See, for most of its 550 million years of experience, Old Brain has discovered that you never know where your next meal is coming from, and it can be tough to get it in your mouth even when you find it. So it pretty much made up its mind a long time ago that it is ALWAYS a good idea to eat when you can, to eat fast, to eat more.

Then along comes New Brain just a short 200 millenia ago with its big frontal lobes all packed full of the latest peer-reviewed science and its geeky attitude of superiority and says:

“Now listen here, Old Brain. We’re getting much too fat here for our own good. We really need to change our ways. We need to exercise more to burn off those unsightly fat stores, and cut way back on those pesky fat calories. Otherwise how will we ever fit into a swim suit in time for next summer’s beach parties in the Hamptons?”

Well, as you might imagine, Old Brain does not take too kindly to this young whippersnapper talking down to it and presuming to know more than its elders. After all, Old Brain has done a pretty fine job of keeping the wolf from the door (literally!) all these millions of years, and it deserves some respect. It’s not about to adopt the latest fads and fashions just because some “expert” or celebrity says to. In fact, if you look in the dictionary under the term “resistance to change”, you will see a picture of Old Brain! So we get into a bit of a power struggle between Old Brain and New Brain, the voices of tradition and modernity.

The more New Brain pushes for fewer calories consumed and more calories burned, the more agitated and scared Old Brain gets because it has learned from its ~500 million years of experience that fewer calories is a perfect formula for DEATH. And while it has actually grown rather fond of New Brain in the brief 200,000 years it has been tagging along, Old Brain is not about to let New Brain destroy everything it has accomplished over the past half billion years. Old Brain views all threats to its survival the same; it does not discriminate. Even if New Brain has the best of intentions such as better health and looking good on the beach, Old Brain will react exactly the same to its weight loss scheme as it does to a saber tooth tiger or an invading virus.

This brain/eating business works as follows:

• Urge to eat is triggered in the brain (by physiological calorie deficit, observing real or virtual food, emotional factors, etc.)

• Old Brain moves into calorie seeking/consuming mode

• Old Brain encounters an obstacle to eating, either external (difficulty securing foodstuffs, a competitor, etc.) or internal (New Brain’s diet plan)

• Old Brain experiences a blast of fear, anger, and dread based on millions of years of starvation experiences

• Old Brain intensifies its pursuit of calories until it either eats, gives up or dies

Our Old Brain cannot tell the difference between an external event threatening its survival and another part of its own brain doing the same thing

Once the urge to eat has been triggered, the part of the human brain that takes care of physical survival that we’ve called Old Brain will react exactly the same way to something in the ENVIRONMENT that interferes with its eating mission as it will to an IDEA from New Brain that interferes with its eating/survival mission (like a diet). If your New Brain tries to put you on a diet, you will quickly get a big blast of dread/fear of death and your Old Brain will launch into survival mode.

To get a glimpse of Old Brain at work, consider what happens to most people when they decide to lose weight by dieting. They define a target weight, go out and buy a scale, select a diet plan, and start to execute the plan. Looking good so far. Then some very interesting things begin to happen. Many people report that over time they don’t lose weight even though they are “strictly” following their diet plan (“Really Doc, I’m just eating celery and ice chips!”). In most cases this happens because they are in fact eating off-plan food without being aware of doing so. When given the assignment to keep an accurate daily log of all food intake, they discover that they are eating a considerable surplus of food and calories. That’s Old Brain at work, trying to get around this really bad weight loss idea by slipping food in your mouth without New Brain’s noticing. Very stealthy!

Other people on diets report that they are trying to lose weight, they are quite aware of eating more than their plan permits, but they believe it is perfectly reasonable to do so! When we study this closely, we find that when they have an urge to eat something that is not in their meal plan, they come up with persuasive arguments that justify or rationalize what they are doing, such as “It’s only a small piece of cheese” or “I’ll make up for this by eating less later” or “I’ve had a hard day and I deserve a little something nice”. This is what recovering addicts refer to as stinkin’ thinkin’, the self-deceptive ideas that enable an addict to keep using even when they “know” they should stop. That’s Old Brain at work again, trying to find a way around this silly diet thingy and back to the food. One of the biggest challenges for any addict, regardless of their substance of choice, is to understand how their Old Brain can seduce them into continuing to use and abuse while denying the self-destructive nature of what they are doing.

So Old Brain can bring on line 3 very powerful defense programs to protect itself from New Brain’s bright ideas for weight loss:

• Old Brain makes New Brain “forget” to diet and ignore how much it is eating by distracting it through the use of hypnotic and dissociation techniques. It’s like when you’ve been driving for a while and suddenly you realize you weren’t seeing the road for a while but you’re still in the middle of your lane. Old Brain just took over the driving from New (conscious) Brain for a while.

• Old Brain whispers sweet nothings into New Brain’s ear (I know I said Old Brain doesn’t speak, but bear with me!) to persuade it that eating more isn’t REALLY going against the plan: “You’ve had a hard day and you deserve a little something nice; eat darling!”

• If these distraction and persuasion tactics fail to stop New Brain from restricting intake to the point that actual starvation kicks in, Old Brain just happens to have a very special relationship with parts of the body that can slam the door hard on weight loss to protect the brain and other vital organs by slowing the draw down of fat stores. This involves complex metabolic and hormonal adjustments of insulin, glucagon and glycogen levels, and explains why fasting turns out to be a completely self-defeating weight reduction strategy.

Our New and Old brains seem to be in frequent conflict on a range of very important matters. Let’s stop a minute to recognize and respect the wisdom and power of a brain that has figured a way to survive for 500 million years. None of us would be here now if our brains were any less wise or any less powerful.

But we do face a major challenge when our ancient brains cannot make use of the new learning that our modern brains have achieved. This split-brain dilemma creates urgent challenges in a number of critical areas such as war and violence, overpopulation, viral pandemics, and environmental degradation and climate change. In these areas of life, our Old Brains drive us to behave in ways that are self-destructive in the long term, even as our New Brains ring the alarm bell about those behaviors and their ultimate consequences.

When our brain is at war with itself, we always lose. Now that a growing percentage of the human population has been able to transform its own environment (the first species to do so on this planet, with the possible exception of the beaver) from calorie-poor to calorie-rich and from high to low demand for muscle work, we face a great challenge: how to prevent an instinct (eating) that has protected our survival for millions of years from making us sick and killing us in greater and greater numbers in the years ahead.

As we know from negotiation theory, we can only impose our will on another party if we have superior power. Otherwise we are well advised to understand what the other party wants and what their interests are, and to attempt to forge a deal where we and they are achieving more gain than loss, especially if the relationship is a valuable and enduring one. Short of a well negotiated settlement, any agreement or plan will break down quickly with a return to the status quo ante.

Forty-one percent of Americans are currently trying to lose weight, while 63% say that they have dieted at some point in their lives according to a survey by Consumer Reports. People spend billions of dollars to lose weight, but often have few results to show for the investment. A research review of 31 clinical weight loss studies published in the American Psychologist reports that most people who diet regain the weight they lost within one to two years, and ~40% gain back more weight.

[The real stats are probably even more discouraging because most research studies do not actually weigh people (and people tend to “fudge” their weight reports) nor follow-up on the significant number of people who drop out of these studies and who tend to do the worst in terms of weight loss.]

A meta-review of the major commercial weight loss programs in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded that “… the evidence to support the use of the major commercial and self-help weight loss programs is sub-optimal.”

What accounts for these less than impressive results? Well, most weight loss programs ignore one very important fact:

People fail in their efforts to lose weight, not because they don’t know what to do, but because they don’t DO what they KNOW. And they don’t do what they know because it is TOO PAINFUL!!

We are not talking about plain old physical hunger pains here. In fact, many people report that they are not even able to restrict their eating long enough to feel real hunger in the belly because they can’t tolerate the dreadful feelings they experience after even a short period of food deprivation.

The human brain has evolved and adapted over a very long span of earth time. Consider the following timeline:

• First brain of any kind (flatworm) appears about 550 million years ago

• First primate brain appears 40–65 million years ago

• First human ancestor brain appears 7 million years ago

• First homo genus brain (homo habilis) appears 2.5 million years ago

• First “human” (homo sapiens) brain appears 195,000 years ago

The human brain has very ancient regions evolving over the past 550 million years such as the amygdala and the hypothalamus and the limbic system that manage functions such as sex, eating, fighting, fleeing and emotions, as well as more “modern” ones which are less than 200,000 years old such as the pre-frontal cortex that manages functions such as planning, reasoning and language.

Our New Brain is terrific at abstract thought, focused attention, working memory, problem-solving and other important “executive” functions that help us to survive and thrive and create and innovate. New Brain has enabled us to fight our way to the top of the food chain on the planet and to assert dominion over it (now let’s all hope that New Brain can also figure a way to not destroy the planet we have dominated!).

New Brain has enabled us to discover a lot about how the world works and to use those discoveries for great benefit. Our Old Brain is terrific at taking care of critical life functions such as regulating our breathing so our blood and organs maintain sufficient oxygen levels, maintaining our body temperature within just a few degrees of 98.6F despite wide fluctuations of external temperature, putting us to sleep so we can “reboot and defrag” our neurological hard drive, etc. In most instances our Old and New Brain regions work in harmony. One topic on which they do not cooperate well is eating and weight management. Specifically, Old Brain is obsessively focused on survival, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, while New Brain is often preoccupied with higher levels in that hierarchy such as relationships and status and meaning/purpose.

Gluttony is the source of all our infirmities and the fountain of all our diseases. As fire extinguished by an excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by an intemperate diet. (Burton)

As we have learned more about the health risks of overweight from our scientists and researchers (who tend to have rather large and impressive New Brains!), we have tasked them with finding a solution to the problem. And New Brain, being a smart young organ, came up with a solution pretty darn quick: EAT LESS. Brilliant! Case solved.

But hold on now. There’s one little problem: Old Brain doesn’t exactly get all warm and fuzzy at the notion of eating less than it needs (read: starvation). See, for most of its 550 million years of experience, Old Brain has discovered that you never know where your next meal is coming from, and it can be tough to get it in your mouth even when you find it. So it pretty much made up its mind a long time ago that it is ALWAYS a good idea to eat when you can, to eat fast, to eat more.

Then along comes New Brain just a short 200 millenia ago with its big frontal lobes all packed full of the latest peer-reviewed science and its geeky attitude of superiority and says:

“Now listen here, Old Brain. We’re getting much too fat here for our own good. We really need to change our ways. We need to exercise more to burn off those unsightly fat stores, and cut way back on those pesky fat calories. Otherwise how will we ever fit into a swim suit in time for next summer’s beach parties in the Hamptons?”

Well, as you might imagine, Old Brain does not take too kindly to this young whippersnapper talking down to it and presuming to know more than its elders. After all, Old Brain has done a pretty fine job of keeping the wolf from the door (literally!) all these millions of years, and it deserves some respect. It’s not about to adopt the latest fads and fashions just because some “expert” or celebrity says to. In fact, if you look in the dictionary under the term “resistance to change”, you will see a picture of Old Brain! So we get into a bit of a power struggle between Old Brain and New Brain, the voices of tradition and modernity.

The more New Brain pushes for fewer calories consumed and more calories burned, the more agitated and scared Old Brain gets because it has learned from its ~500 million years of experience that fewer calories is a perfect formula for DEATH. And while it has actually grown rather fond of New Brain in the brief 200,000 years it has been tagging along, Old Brain is not about to let New Brain destroy everything it has accomplished over the past half billion years. Old Brain views all threats to its survival the same; it does not discriminate. Even if New Brain has the best of intentions such as better health and looking good on the beach, Old Brain will react exactly the same to its weight loss scheme as it does to a saber tooth tiger or an invading virus.

This brain/eating business works as follows:

• Urge to eat is triggered in the brain (by physiological calorie deficit, observing real or virtual food, emotional factors, etc.)

• Old Brain moves into calorie seeking/consuming mode

• Old Brain encounters an obstacle to eating, either external (difficulty securing foodstuffs, a competitor, etc.) or internal (New Brain’s diet plan)

• Old Brain experiences a blast of fear, anger, and dread based on millions of years of starvation experiences

• Old Brain intensifies its pursuit of calories until it either eats, gives up or dies

Our Old Brain cannot tell the difference between an external event threatening its survival and another part of its own brain doing the same thing

Once the urge to eat has been triggered, the part of the human brain that takes care of physical survival that we’ve called Old Brain will react exactly the same way to something in the ENVIRONMENT that interferes with its eating mission as it will to an IDEA from New Brain that interferes with its eating/survival mission (like a diet). If your New Brain tries to put you on a diet, you will quickly get a big blast of dread/fear of death and your Old Brain will launch into survival mode.

To get a glimpse of Old Brain at work, consider what happens to most people when they decide to lose weight by dieting. They define a target weight, go out and buy a scale, select a diet plan, and start to execute the plan. Looking good so far. Then some very interesting things begin to happen. Many people report that over time they don’t lose weight even though they are “strictly” following their diet plan (“Really Doc, I’m just eating celery and ice chips!”). In most cases this happens because they are in fact eating off-plan food without being aware of doing so. When given the assignment to keep an accurate daily log of all food intake, they discover that they are eating a considerable surplus of food and calories. That’s Old Brain at work, trying to get around this really bad weight loss idea by slipping food in your mouth without New Brain’s noticing. Very stealthy!

Other people on diets report that they are trying to lose weight, they are quite aware of eating more than their plan permits, but they believe it is perfectly reasonable to do so! When we study this closely, we find that when they have an urge to eat something that is not in their meal plan, they come up with persuasive arguments that justify or rationalize what they are doing, such as “It’s only a small piece of cheese” or “I’ll make up for this by eating less later” or “I’ve had a hard day and I deserve a little something nice”. This is what recovering addicts refer to as stinkin’ thinkin’, the self-deceptive ideas that enable an addict to keep using even when they “know” they should stop. That’s Old Brain at work again, trying to find a way around this silly diet thingy and back to the food. One of the biggest challenges for any addict, regardless of their substance of choice, is to understand how their Old Brain can seduce them into continuing to use and abuse while denying the self-destructive nature of what they are doing.

So Old Brain can bring on line 3 very powerful defense programs to protect itself from New Brain’s bright ideas for weight loss:

• Old Brain makes New Brain “forget” to diet and ignore how much it is eating by distracting it through the use of hypnotic and dissociation techniques. It’s like when you’ve been driving for a while and suddenly you realize you weren’t seeing the road for a while but you’re still in the middle of your lane. Old Brain just took over the driving from New (conscious) Brain for a while.

• Old Brain whispers sweet nothings into New Brain’s ear (I know I said Old Brain doesn’t speak, but bear with me!) to persuade it that eating more isn’t REALLY going against the plan: “You’ve had a hard day and you deserve a little something nice; eat darling!”

• If these distraction and persuasion tactics fail to stop New Brain from restricting intake to the point that actual starvation kicks in, Old Brain just happens to have a very special relationship with parts of the body that can slam the door hard on weight loss to protect the brain and other vital organs by slowing the draw down of fat stores. This involves complex metabolic and hormonal adjustments of insulin, glucagon and glycogen levels, and explains why fasting turns out to be a completely self-defeating weight reduction strategy.

Our New and Old brains seem to be in frequent conflict on a range of very important matters. Let’s stop a minute to recognize and respect the wisdom and power of a brain that has figured a way to survive for 500 million years. None of us would be here now if our brains were any less wise or any less powerful.

But we do face a major challenge when our ancient brains cannot make use of the new learning that our modern brains have achieved. This split-brain dilemma creates urgent challenges in a number of critical areas such as war and violence, overpopulation, viral pandemics, and environmental degradation and climate change. In these areas of life, our Old Brains drive us to behave in ways that are self-destructive in the long term, even as our New Brains ring the alarm bell about those behaviors and their ultimate consequences.

When our brain is at war with itself, we always lose. Now that a growing percentage of the human population has been able to transform its own environment (the first species to do so on this planet, with the possible exception of the beaver) from calorie-poor to calorie-rich and from high to low demand for muscle work, we face a great challenge: how to prevent an instinct (eating) that has protected our survival for millions of years from making us sick and killing us in greater and greater numbers in the years ahead.

As we know from negotiation theory, we can only impose our will on another party if we have superior power. Otherwise we are well advised to understand what the other party wants and what their interests are, and to attempt to forge a deal where we and they are achieving more gain than loss, especially if the relationship is a valuable and enduring one. Short of a well negotiated settlement, any agreement or plan will break down quickly with a return to the status quo ante.