Fortunately, one doesn’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive a car, and one doesn’t really need to understand the Bernoulli principle to fly an airplane.   But it is important to know some simple, basic, fundamental facts of physics.  One of those is that, if you want to leave the surly bounds of earth’s gravitational pull, or at least resist it long enough to become airborne, weight is your enemy.   Something having to do with Newton’s law, I think, or fruit trees.

Losing weight in an airplane is a fairly simple task.   Pilots are trained to calculate weight and centers of gravity in order to know what their airplane is capable of doing and not doing.  They simply have to do the calculations, and then make the rather black or white decision to remove the weight, shift it, or stay home.

For humans, however, excessive weight may feel like extra baggage but removing it presents a more substantial problem.   An overloaded airplane may make it off the ground, but it will have difficulty climbing over the tree near the end of the runway or turning away from it on time.   Demise will come quickly.

Humans know that they can get away with carrying extra weight for quite some time before diabetes or some other weight-related problem arises.   And as long as there are no trees that need to be climbed on the way to work, the smell of that newly baked chocolate chip cookie is so appealing in the moment that it is just too hard to resist the sugar fix.

The problem with diets and with losing weight in general is that most humans know very well what is required to solve the problem.   Typically it means choosing to eat less, and sometimes it means choosing to eat certain foods rather than others.

As a psychologist who has seen scores if not hundreds of clients over the years who were concerned about their weight, I can assure you that when it comes to overeating, we have theories ranging from serotonergic deficiency to oral fixation, and most of our theories do as much good at helping people lose weight as a piece of strawberry shortcake.

Some historians of psychotherapy have noted that the concept of willpower has gone out of fashion and pretty much stayed out of fashion since Freud posited that most problems stemmed from unconscious conflicts.    It is a shame, because the concept of will, however flawed as a construct, can be very useful when struggling with habits.  Whether stuffing extra weight onto your airplane because either the passenger or her suitcase weighs more than you anticipated, or stuffing chocolate mousse into your mouth because, well, that is where it belongs, the ultimate decision is driven by the will to live a healthy, long life.

But as any connoisseur of the human body can tell you, it is rarely weight unto itself that is the problem.   There are, ahem, many airframes designed to carry a lot of weight.  The problem in that case, to borrow a business metaphor, isn’t sales but distribution.

When I asked my trainer once what the best way of losing my protruding belly was, he replied that at some point (meaning my age?) the only way to make a belly look smaller is to make one’s chest larger.  Other than the fleeting thought that I may be paying my trainer too much, I considered that he might be right about that, and that weight alone wasn’t as critical as where it is located.

Thinking of yourself as an airplane could be dangerous if you are anywhere near an 80-foot bluff overlooking the ocean, as I am fortunate to be as I am writing this.  But if you do, try the exercise of thinking of that sandwich as adding an extra suitcase, because it will probably end up on the rear of that airframe of yours.  Then make the executive pilot decision to politely and respectfully let someone else crash and burn.

—This post was written in August, 2015, a month or so before I knew of my cancer diagnosis.  Having throat cancer, as well as surviving the chemotherapy and radiation adds an entirely new dimension to weight loss.   Due to the cancer, I have lost about 80% of my sense of taste, and it is difficult to swallow.  Yet, the radiation oncologist insists that those who maintain their weight through radiation stand a better chance of survival.  There are very things one can control during the intensive treatment regime I am under, so I struggle to use the little willpower I have left to eat.