Quote:
Originally Posted by Lippy100485
he's trying to help me learn to resist things at home, so I can do better while we're away.... (I had said something to him about eating over somebody's house
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This makes bout as much sense as hiding landminds on your property, so that you're prepared to encounter them elsewhere. Or bringing hookers into the house so that a philandering spouse can practice fidelity. Filling the house of a drug addict with cocaine.
The most successful tactics for resisting temptation are those that remove you a few steps from the temptation. Learning to resist temptation in a high-temptation situation by pure willpower is actually the least effective strategy (I learned that way back in graduate school for my psych degree in the early 1990's).
Even experiments using kids with candy, found that the kids that resist temptation the best used strategies that removed the tempation from sight (they hid the candy under something so they couldn't see it, or they turned their back on it). Endless variations of temptation studies have been done, and repeatedly the results are the same - the most effective strategies are those that remove either the temptation or the temptee in some way - not those that increase the temptation to provide "practice."
It's an easy mistake to make, so I'm not judging you or your hubby for thinking that "practice" might make sense, but there's so much research proving that this strategy doesn't tend to work very well for the vast majority of people.
I'm sure it's possible to learn that kind of willpower, but willpower (in this sense) expends energy - a lot of it. It requires a super vigilance that takes energy away from other things. Most people do better if they can create an environment in which it takes more energy to succumb to temptation than to resist it. For example, if you have no ice cream in the house, when you get a craving for ice cream, you've got to get dressed, drive to the grocery or ice cream shop.... It's "easier" to stay home - so that's what you'll usually do. However, if three tubs are a few yards away at all times - it makes yeilding to tempation easier than resisting it.
Unless everyone's on the same way of eating, the more people you live with the more temptations you have to live with - but there's no justification for living with more temptation than you have to.
I recently had my husband put all of the foods I have trouble resisting in a large soup pot, and we put it on the top cupboard of the
pantry. I can get it down if I want to, but I'd have to get a step ladder out to reach it - or ask my hubby to get it down for me.
It's worked a lot better than any other "live with it" solutions we've tried before. We tried a lot of other tactics, and the one that puts the foods the furthest out of easy reach work the best. It's not like it's new information to me, I've known this about "temptation" studies for at least two decades, but even so in the back of my head I still think I "should be able to resist." Somehow I should be different than everyone else, all the other people in all the studies I've read?
Nope, I'm as normal as the next person. It's easier to keep from falling when I clear my path of obstacles rather than throwing marbles in front of myself so I can learn how not to fall.