But even if this is 100% the case, isn't a placebo effect better than nothing? You know you'll never really convince yourself that eating junk food is good for you, so that option is out. And you know in your heart that eating healthy food is better for you, whether the gains are immediate or long term--so if you did manage it, and immediately felt better, why would you care whether it was psychological or real? You'd still feel better.

It is your current psychological self--the one you admit feels worthless, crushed, and broken--telling you that the benefits of change would not be real, they'd only be you convincing yourself that it was real. But your convinced psychological self would feel very differently. You would not feel that it was fake, you would feel that it was real. You would feel better. If there is a part of you that is enough above the broken self to recognize it for what it is, then there is a part of you that can take the decision-making role away from the broken self, even if, for right now, you don't believe it will work.

I'm lost, can you restate?

If good, do.

Simple, this is your brain, downhill and with a a tailwind:
http://www.naturephoto-cz.com/photos...nail-21973.jpg

this is clodfobble's brain when she's half asleep in frog pajamas:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...eCatchFish.jpg

Who's the fish?



Oh my God...is it me?

The fish is jebus, it's always jebus.

Clodfobble's brain looks pissed.

It's all business, it's not personal

Or, as Dio would say, LOOK OUT!

You have suggested that many people who eat a healthier diet only feel better because they have convinced themselves that they will feel better. I'm saying that maybe it doesn't matter how it happened, wouldn't you like to feel better regardless?

sure

But you can't get over the motivational hump to do it, because your self-esteem is crushed? (I'm genuinely trying to understand and find a workable angle here. This is foreign to me because while I've had plenty of self-loathing in my life, I also take no pleasure in food so it's never been my personal avenue of self-destruction.)

Couldn't forcing yourself to eat things you don't like kind of be its own form of self-loathing and punishment?

Here's the self esteem catch-22:

I don't think it's all that possible for one to will ones' self to be psychologically different.

Unless, that is, you're Charlie Sheen.

you serious? aside from the charlie sheen part, I mean.

how else can you change your own psychology but by will?