The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I've been thinking about this for a couple of hours and trying to articulate my thoughts about it. In a nutshell, I think we're saying the same thing in different terms. I've abandoned psychology and most of its concepts, including "the subconscious mind," and have found that "the body" and "biochemistry" are effective substitutions.

So where psychology might talk about drives and motivations, I would try to think in terms of chemical imbalances, hormones, evolutionary imperatives, and so on.

Both paths lead to the same general place: in this instance, that things more or less outside my conscious control drove me to get very fat. The difference--and I feel like it's an important one--is that the biological, deterministic view dispenses with the subtle morality of the psychological view, and leaves aside all questions of "why", which I've found to be without value in actually making change for myself.

Embracing the purely-physical has opened the way to solutions that are imperfect, partial, incremental and technological, and has freed me from the quest for the Ideal Solution that I believed was supposed to come from healing my psyche.

So (whew!) thank you for giving me the opportunity to organize all those thoughts into clear(ish) sentences!