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Feb 10

Dr. Kismet’s Cure – The Weekly Standard

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In 2014, a little-known nutritionist in Milwaukee, one of the more portly cities in America, developed an ingenious system to get his clients to lose weight and keep it off for good. He told his morbidly obese clients to pair each pound with a descriptive adjective, noun, or euphemism they hated, so that each time they lost a pound they could strike it off the list forever. Provided they did not regain the weight, they need never hear the mortifying term again. For example,

270 Porker

269 Lardbutt

268 Fatso

267 Chunkster

and so on, down through

245 Pleasingly Plump

242 A Tad Chubby

until finally reaching

185 Lithe

175 Lean 'n' Mean

165 Thin as a Rail. </blockquote>

At first, the dieters found this approach juvenile and silly. But to their great astonishment, it worked: By transforming dieting from an onerous chore into a game in which psychic rewards were constantly experienced, Dr. Drake Kismet was successful in getting 87 percent of his patients to lose at least 50 pounds. And in one case, a client shed 135 pounds in seven months. "It would have been more," Kismet explains, "but we ran out of words for 'skinny.'"

Had the participants shed the weight and quickly regained it, Dr. Kismet's strategy could easily be lumped in with all the other gimmicky weight-loss systems that the chronically chunky have tried, without achieving any long-term success. But the dieters did not gain the weight back; the positive-feedback word-association game exerted such a powerful influence over their psyches that almost none of them reverted to their old ways.

"I joined the program because I never wanted to hear someone call me a seething tub of suet again," said one subject who lost 85 pounds in a scant four months. "And now they never will."

Inspired by Kismet's unusual methods, psychologists in completely unrelated fields have begun to apply his tactics to other types of compulsive, self-destructive behavior. And they, too, have achieved stunning results:

"My client Randy was a complete schmuck, and had been a schmuck for many years," explains Dr. Roark Gault, a Miami psychiatrist. "We tried everything: medication, cognitive therapy, aversion training, sleep deprivation, feedback loops, yoga. Nothing worked. Then one day, after reading about Dr. Kismet's weight-loss program, I asked Randy if he would be willing to participate in a three-month behavior-modification trial whereby each week he would try to be a bit less of a crud."

The results took my breath away. The first week, he paid his alimony on timeto all eight wives. He also took 3 of his 29 kids to the circus. This allowed him to eliminate the word "schmuck" from his profile. Then I persuaded him to stop stiffing his customers. That gave him carte blanche to deep-six the word "sleazeball." We then proceeded apace through "creep," "lowlife," "scum bunny," and "jerk." Right now, he's hard at work on "slob." No two ways about it; Randy's come a long way.

Some of the most amazing results have been achieved by using these tactics with hired guns and axe-murderers. By persuading cruel, heinous menand a few incredibly unpleasant womento gradually tone down their acts, the Prodigal Project has successfully induced more than 75 hitmen to either stop killing people entirely or at least cut back on the mayhem. The approach is exactly the same as the weight-loss program: a straightforward rewards system that builds self-esteem by allowing contract killers to stop thinking of themselves in graphic, profoundly shameful terms. Siddhartha Rattigan, executive director of the Prodigal Project, explains:

You're never going to get a top-flight button man to completely give up whacking informers, patsies, and stool pigeons, but you can definitely get them to dial it down a notch. Go a full month without icing someone and we allow the subject to mothball the term "the apotheosis of pure evil." Go easy on the carnage for two months and the words "spawn of Satan" fall by the wayside. We then work our way through "atavistic," "bloodthirsty," "primordial," and "savage," all the way down to "somewhat less than cordial," "not exactly what you would call a charmer," and "a bit of a curmudgeon." Does that mean that our subjects are ever fully rehabilitated? No. But have they made huge strides in the right direction? Yes.

Adjectival Reinforcement Therapy has been shown to work with embezzlers, conmen, scam artists, thieves, second-story men, no-good-double-crossing liars, dirty rats, hooligans, and garden-variety thugs. It has also achieved amazing results with pigs, bozos, SOBs, and even rogues.

"Six months ago, my client viewed himself as the scum of the earth," says Rattigan. "But through positive verbal reinforcement, he now thinks of himself as a harmless ne'er-do-well. And his ultimate goalbeing perceived as a hale-fellow-well-metis well within his reach. One of these days, Vic the Human Glock is going to be able to describe himself as a pillar of the community, a stand-up guy, a real sweetheart, perhaps even a pussycatwithout fear of being contradicted."

Joe Queenan is the author, most recently, of One for the Books.

Continued here:
Dr. Kismet's Cure - The Weekly Standard

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