My possible self is wearing the most fantastic fucking shoes EVER.
Right before I took the social psych prelim last month, I read a really interesting article in the June issue of Social Psychology Quarterly by Ellen Granberg about weight loss maintenance, incorporating Identity Control Theory, possible selves, and the narrative of self.* I don’t remember if I actually got to cite it on the prelim, but it was one of the few things that I actually enjoyed reading in my frantic whirlwind of studying.
Of course weight loss maintenance is something that holds particular significance for me, but I also thought that she synthesized the theories really well–basically, the idea is that losing weight is a process of identity change for most people who embark on the project, but that cultural narratives about what weight loss means do a lot to undermine the maintenance of the new, lower weight. Because we’re taught that losing weight will completely remake our lives, it’s very difficult to feel like we’ve “succeeded” when we do manage to lose weight and subsequently do not become perfect princess rock stars.
Possible selves are pretty self-explanatory; they can serve as motivators when we imagine ourselves actually inhabiting them, either positively (if I lose weight I will be a happy skinny person) or negatively (if I don’t lose weight I will be a miserable slug-like creature). Identity Control Theory argues that people seek out self-verifying feedback, and if they don’t get it, they may adjust either their behavior or their self-concept, with the latter usually being a last resort if the former doesn’t work. Granberg suggests that self-concept change may be a more frequently used strategy, however, in situations where one is adopting a new identity.
She argues that the people who are most successful at keeping weight off are those who either start out with domain-specific expectations about their skinnier possible self (”My cholesterol will go down”; “I will be able to ride my bike faster and longer”), or who are at least able to change/narrow their skinnier-self-concept if they start out thinking that they will experience a total extreme make-over of self by losing weight. People who can’t give up that construction of the skinnier self are more likely to become discouraged by the continued lack of confirmatory feedback and may end up reverting to old bad habits and regaining weight–because keeping weight off is a project, too, and one that doesn’t produce dramatic results like losing it did. If you feel like you’re working hard to maintain a self that’s really a disappointment–because you lost weight but you’re still not a perfect princess rock star–it’s not surprising that you might gradually become less dedicated to the work necessary to maintain weight loss.
This is definitely something that I find myself thinking about sometimes, although when I started working on losing weight, I think I was fairly realistic about what I wanted to attain; I just didn’t want to feel actively bad about my body anymore. But it’s hard to totally escape that mainstream cultural narrative of the fat ugly duckling becoming the thin beautiful swan, the plot of every other teen movie ever, even when you’re aware of it. It’s hard not to catch yourself thinking, when things get really shitty, I thought everything was supposed to be better now.
Like most psychological processes, I guess it’s just a matter of degree. No one is issue-free, and it probably doesn’t help that nobody’s body seems to fit the clothing designer ideal. My problem used to be my chest being too big for things; now it’s my shoulders, which are apparently freakishly broad in relation to the rest of me, and my butt, which isn’t there. But overall I feel pretty good about my body, and I still feel invested in maintaining the ground I’ve gained in the past year and a half.
Besides, while I know that weight loss will not fix everything that has ever gone wrong in my life, I’m pretty sure that these shoes will:
Um. Amazon is having a blow-out shoe sale.** Spend $80 or more and get free shipping (even for stuff that normally isn’t eligible, I think) and $20 off (that only works once, in case you were wondering).
WeightWatchers and other weight loss programs frequently suggest buying shoes as a reward for losing weight because, in addition to presenting an obviously superior alternative to, say, celebratory eating, your shoe size is much more resistant to change than your pants size. This is true, but I still lost about a half shoe-size last year, too. And yet, thanks to my incredibly well-muscled calves, buying any boots that go up much higher than those remains an ordeal. It’s always something.
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*Full citation: Granberg, Ellen. “‘Is That All There Is?’ Possible Selves, Self-Change, and Weight Loss.” Social Psychology Quarterly 69.2 (June 2006): 109-126.
**That link goes to the women’s section, because there doesn’t seem to be a link for the top level, and I suspect that most people who will be interested in this sale will be primarily interested in women’s shoes. But men’s and children’s are on sale, too.
September 4th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Although I’ve never been able to frame it in such well-put words, I have noticed that sort of thinking both in myself and in people I know who attempt to lose weight. The motivation is this powerful, yet still vague fantasy of your happy, sexual, confident, successful thin self. It’s an understandable fantasy and obviously presented to us by those who want people to lose weight (either for personal reasons or for profit).
One great disadvantage I’ve noticed in this sort of thinking is that it really doesn’t help one’s current self-esteem and, for people with a lot of weight to lose, it makes the goal seem depressingly far away, (if healthy weight loss is about 2 lbs a week, if you have over a 100 pounds to lose, that’ll take nearly a year), thus the tendency to go on crash diets. It is not entirely impossible to be happy, feel confident, have friends, or enjoy sex or a loving relationship while fat. I manage to do all right for myself.
I feel like I’m walking a fine line. I don’t want to appear like I’m ignoring the health risks of obesity (even though as a person who has overweight half of her life, I still don’t have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or diabetes). But if a fat individual doesn’t like herself and really clings to this ugly duckling fantasy, thinking herself less worthy until she fits into a dream size, there are the health risks that come with crash dieting, the yo-yo effect of weight gain and loss that comes with periodic crash dieting, and eating disorders. And, as the article points out, once you get to your goal and you’re still you, then what? Losing pounds and inches doesn’t necessarily equate to losing shyness, sexual frigidity, or self-loathing, however much people want to think otherwise.
September 5th, 2006 at 3:03 am
Hey, you’ve gone all pink! Very pretty.
Can I link to this entry? My non-LJ blog is a weightloss one, and I have a half-formulated entry on this very topic.
I started my efforts thinking that it was about remaking myself (and looking pretty in my wedding dress) and discovered part-way that in fact, being in good physical training is more important to me than the way I look: my body hasn’t changed that much to look at, but I’m much happier knowing that it can run away if it’s threatened, and lift things without hurting itself.
Also, I always did lose slowly, so I never had the “dramatic results” thing.
(That’s the short version!)
I have the muscly calves, too.
Talking of remaking selves: have you seen this? More to the point, has Andromeda Sparks? I thought it was a pretty cool idea (but then, I spent hours of my childhood doing meticulously-shaded action drawings of Sonic the Hedgehog).
September 5th, 2006 at 9:55 am
Glad you like it, K. I wanted to change my theme–not sure I’m entirely satisfied with this one, so I may keep looking, but it’s the best I’ve found so far.
Feel free to link this entry–did you see this one from December about the difficulty of losing weight in a social circle that assumes you must be doing it for fashion?
And cool–I hadn’t seen the site, although I was actually at the online event where Cuppa T won the contest and, apparently, a free character sketch. So cool.
frippy: Yeah, those are all issues; I think there’s also an issue of self-efficacy involved, i.e. how capable do people feel they are of realizing a particular possible self. And it’s not necessarily the case that a lot of self-efficacy is a good thing; one can imagine how if a person really thinks they should be able to do X, but they don’t/can’t do X, that could be worse than thinking they can’t do it anyway. Or, if one has lost weight and then regained it, one might feel worse about that because of a sense that one let the side down.