On Readiness
“I’m ready to change.”
How many times did I say those words to myself, and then fail? Countless. I often mistake desire for readiness. “I want to change” should come before “I’m ready to change.”
I have often not put enough thought or understanding into the words I use with myself, and then am confused at various less than desirable outcomes. Desire alone is meaningless if we don’t do the work..
Tom Kier has a formula for readiness. It consists of three balanced points: Awareness, Willingness, Preparedness.
Awareness is the analytical point. Do you know everything you need to know about your goal?
I failed many times because I believed things that were not true. I believed that carbohydrates were making me fat. That if I excised them from my diet, I would lose weight. When I stopped losing weight for long periods of time despite perfect adherence, and then even gained weight, I felt broken. My awareness was not up to the level required of my goal.
The next point in the formula is willingness. This is the emotional area. Are you willing to do everything it takes to accomplish your goal?
Have you visualized all that it will take? Have you then gone through the second and even third order effects? Many times, I said to myself “I will do anything” only to find there was much I was unwilling to do.
I can recall years ago starting a “stay hungry” version of keto, so long as I was mostly hungry, I would lose weight. But I began this right before the holidays, and I hadn’t taken into consideration what dieting would be like for those weeks. I quickly failed.
The final point of readiness is preparedness. This is the action point. Have you gathered and prepared everything you will need to accomplish your goal?
“I will start my diet tomorrow,” only to wake up to a refrigerator filled with non-diet foods has derailed me more than once. When I’m dieting, it is unwise for me to cook or shop while hungry, this kind of unpreparedness has ruined perfectly good progress on multiple occasions.
Each of these points is done prior to me being ready. It is from the point of readiness that my plan is executed.
Are you ready?
On Skin
Skin is the largest organ of the human body. Some of it’s functions are waterproofing the rest of our organs, it is the first line of defense against bacteria and other organisms, it acts as a cooling system via sweat, and it delivers information to us via tactile sense. Our skin grows as we do, and yet always wants to remain elastic so that when needed, we can store more fat, and for childbearing purposes in women.
If you’ve stored so much excess fat that your skin is stretched taut, it will grow larger to accommodate. Some women even find that if they do not return to their pre-pregnancy size fast enough after giving birth, that skin around their abdomen has grown in anticipation of needing to expand from the larger set point.
There is no path for reducing skin via natural means. No type of diet, or cream, or fancy red light application that will get skin to grow smaller.
Autophagy has been cited by adherents of Intermittent Fasting as way to get your skin to consume itself. This is total nonsense. Your body will consume fat, then muscle, and finally as it approaches death, during starvation it will begin to consume organs. Your teeth will fall out before you see a reduction in skin size via this method. It is possible for some who’ve been heavy for a short period of time, to go through massive weight loss and not be burdened with excess skin. This is quite rare though, and with massive weight loss, you can generally expect some excess skin.
The means we have today to reduce excess skin, is by having a doctor cut it off. This is the only way.
When I began loosing weight, no one told me any of this, and I waited patiently for my skin to shrink. When it didn’t, I tried mineral wraps, lotions, red lights and other wildly useless schemes.
Loose skin can be quite jarring. For so long, I’d had as my dietary goal, “normalcy.” And when I found out that this wasn’t in the cards, I gave up. I eventually knew that despite having excess skin, I felt better at a lesser weight, so I lost weight again and got some skin cut off. I then gained over 50lbs recovering from that surgery. It was brutal.
I have never been perfectly comfortable in my skin, that incudes this exact moment in time.
But life has been much better for me at the size I’m at now, so I forgive the excess skin I have and try my best to accept it.
For more on this topic, please listen to the American Glutton episodes with Will Sasso and John Glaude.
On Buoyancy
Last month my family and I were vacationing at a lake in New Hampshire. The house were we staying at had a floating platform about 25 yards offshore and at some point every day, we’d swim out to it. On one of these days, Clementine wanted to swim out further, so I went with her. We were just treading water, out in this lake, and I started to think, “this is really fucking hard, let’s get back to that platform!” Not wanting to look like a total wuss in front of my 17yr old daughter, I started casually heading back for it. “Where are you going?” she asked, “We’re not done...” She was really enjoying watching me struggle.
As a kid I spent as much time in the water as possible. We lived in Los Angeles and would frequently go to the beach. I would often sit frozen on the beach, trying to be small and unseen, waiting for eyes to be cast in directions away from the shortest path I could take into the water. Inertia was not on my side, so when a moment appeared, I would often miss it since my body at rest, decidedly wanted to stay, at rest. Eventually an opportunity would arise, and I would be able to summon the adequate mental and physical strength to move as quickly as possible, from my safe perch, into the water.
I wanted to rapidly get small again, so I would move out into water that hid all of my body save my head, or I would crouch. There I would remain for most of the day.
The same went for pools, quickly in while eyes were averted, and there I would stay. Long past my fellows. Long past pruned fingers and toes. There was such safety in that water.
Being in the water did something magical for me, it eased gravity. Whatever the force of gravity had on my body out of the water would evaporate within. There was a noticeable reduction of the overall pressure I experienced in the rest of life.
I knew that part of what allowed me to stay in longer was my insulation, this was obvious to me. My friends went blue and shivery long before I did. Normally I would try to obscure or disguise my fatness, and if staying in the water long past my fellows was a direct link to fatness, the alternative, getting out of the water with my t shirt clinging to my body, was merely a worse option. So I’d stay in, wait for them to get bored on the beach and come back.
The other thing that dawned on me at some point, I could tread water much longer than any of them. If we went out into deep water, or even if just hanging out in the deep end of a pool, I outlasted every last one of them. I would watch as they fought to keep their heads above water, something that was just a tick above effortless for me. Sometimes they wouldn’t even be able to hang out in the deep end without clutching the side, I really felt bad for them. The center of the deep end was a peaceful abyss for me, that held no danger whatsoever.
Though I knew these things were indications of my fatness, neither aspect kept me out of the water. I felt physically better with gravity being somewhat counter balanced, I enjoyed having my form obfuscated, and while I had markedly less energy when I would exit the water, my energy within was insurmountable. If I ever got really tired, I could just float.
The one area I struggled with at all, was breath holding contests. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hold my breath very long, I could, but I struggled to stay under water. It took real effort to keep me under. I could easily swim to the bottom of a pool, but once there, without much effort, I would rapidly rise to the surface. In the shallow end, for breath holding contests, while my friends inhaled deeply and sank back under the water, I had to do a kind of reverse upthrust treading of water to stay submerged. The only other option was to just float face down, but so much of my obese back was exposed in doing that, that it wasn’t viable when others were about. After a few brutal losses, I gave up on that competition, I just wasn’t competitive.
The very first time I effortlessly sank, I didn’t really know what was happening. I’d jumped into the deep end of a friend’s pool and when I emerged, I had to fight to stay up. It wasn’t that it was so hard to do, just more that I didn’t really know how. I’d never in my life had to work at all to keep my head above water, and now if I held still, I would quite rapidly sink. As a child, I’d once wanted to know what it was like to not have to fight to stay under water, so I got my hands on a scuba divers weight belt and went into a pool with it. I sank myself to the bottom of the deep end of a pool and just sat there, surrounded by water. When I needed a breath, I would thrust myself up, launch momentarily out of the water, breathe deep and go back down. I really enjoyed sitting on the bottom of the pool. Once at a lake, I found a large rock and walked it as deep as I could, swam up to breathe, swam back down and continued. I got that rock well out beyond where the lifeguards felt comfortable with me being and was reprimanded and asked to stay much closer to shore.
I can vividly remember sinking that first time, on my own, sitting on the bottom of that pool and crying. It was amazing to be effortlessly down there
surrounded by peace without help. The problem was, when I was done being down there, I was now the guy rapidly rushing for the side of the pool, to hold onto as my safe haven.
I had to learn how to tread water, it was just something I’d never had to do. Yesterday my wife and I went to the beach, we swam out past where we could stand, and we just tread water.
All I could think about was how much easier it is to tread water in the ocean. I could feel a marked difference between the ocean and a pool or a lake. I know analytically that this is because saltwater gives more buoyancy than freshwater, but my wife didn’t notice it at all. When I suggested that it was so much easier than the lake, she looked at me like I was crazy.
She’d learned how to swim in the body she has, while I’d never really learned how to swim at all.
On Starvation
I was a teetotaling bartender.
But with food.
I starved myself for years but became obsessed with making food.
I would cook elaborate meals for my family, that I couldn’t eat.
I flew to Beijing once to see how they prepared duck at Li Qun Roast Duck.
I forced my wife to enjoy offal at St John’s in London.
I dragged my kids out into the boondocks of Chianti to watch Dario Cecchini recite Dante while he carved up Spanish beef.
I’m much happier now, practicing moderation. Even if it’s a work in progress, forever.
Don’t think it’s lost on me, not one bit of it.
9+ million people starve to death every year. The idea of inflicting this intentionally on self seems absurd. For all of human history, mankind has battled famine A LOT.
But we arrive today in a landscape of caloric opulence, in some parts of the world.
When I was a kid, I didn’t see so many fat people, I felt very much alone in my fatness. Today, it seems to be everywhere in America. There can be a multitude of nuanced reasons for this, some of it has been shown, through science, to be socially contagious. And so, like with so much else, self inflicted starvation may fall into this arena.
I did not find that self inflicted starvation was a useful tool, because I used it to punish myself, not to make myself stronger. Not to confront my damaging habits and compulsions, but rather to harm myself in penance and swap out one bad habit for another.
I’ve found that my path to healing has a lot more to do with ideas that make me well, make me valuable, make me important, and nothing to do with shame and punishment of self.
It also feels quite embarrassing to me that in a time when people are starving against their will, that I could intentionally participate in this act with some idea that it was possibly bettering my health.
I’ve found, that the only path that lead anywhere useful was slow and hard and filled with acts towards self done out of kindness.
On Sobriety
This is a picture from just before I got sober.
I had struggled with substance abuse for years, had lost friends to it, and been told by doctors that my own death was imminent. I was suffering from congestive heart failure and most of my friends, after multiple interventions had told me they didn’t want to watch me die.
I wanted sobriety.
But my ideas about obtaining it were mostly that if I just got through detox, I would be sober. If I could just suffer through rehab, I would be cured. A short period of discomfort or pain was all it took to fix this problem. So I did that over and over again.
In the short term, I was incapable of experiencing happiness, let alone joy or elation, without drugs. Life took on this grey pallor, and when that didn’t magically disappear once I was no longer physiologically addicted to drugs, I’d give up. Occasionally, I’d white knuckle my way to a glimpse of normalcy and that sensation of being cured would send me back to drugs, because as a “cured” “normal” person, surly I had a handle on it this time.
What I never wanted to see was that those people who had achieved long term sobriety AND were happy, had never been cured but rather continued to work at it day in day out. I wanted a get rich quick scheme.
What I found was that it required constant attention and intention and work, but that eventually life did get better. The pallor lifted and I was able to experience real joy again.
There are so many parallels here to food.
Having stepped onto the path of sobriety that required a real internal look and real external work, I’m shocked that it took me over a decade to apply this to diet.
For years I wanted to punish myself with diets. If it did not really hurt, it would not work. I needed to feel that pain to make up for the years of self inflicted shame.
Lighter long term daily work was uninteresting, tedious. I wanted to harm myself to health. “If I could just lose weight, I’d be cured…”
There was rarely a look at what had lead me, over the course of decades, to reach 550lbs. It only seemed to be something to address as quickly as possible.
And then, you cannot be abstinent from food.
I didn’t achieve years of sustained weight loss until I stopped trying to get all the work I had to do done in as short a time as possible.
It is a daily practice for me.
If you are struggling with substance abuse or an eating disorder, there is no shame in asking someone for help. A quick google search will turn up a plethora of options if you don’t have someone close by to reach out to. Don’t feel you have to have anything figured out beyond, “I need help.”
I often think of it this way: if I am failing alone, another + me is a power greater than me, and we can win.
What Did You Hear?
I could hear my attempt at silence far more clearly than anything else, it was a real tension. The horror of being singled out, lead me to a numb ass, sleeping hands and feet and a total anxiety over making a single audible movement.
I’m just trying to hold still, every slightest movement is accompanied by an eruption of sound. Listen, listen, listen. What do you hear?
Some birds, the water in a pipe, younger kids playing outside, someone’s chewing gum, they stopped, a distant airplane. This is the exercise, listening. What do you hear?
Thinking about it and feeling my heart-rate increase, I can sense that, in my ears, but I’m not too sure that I’m actually hearing it. The pressure is building, if I’m called on, will I have anything that hasn’t already been given? What do you hear?
Birds, kids, airplane, a car door... These are all valid, but are they enough? I need more time, with time I could hear everything there ever was, and no matter what someone else says, I will have a new answer, but I need more time. I keep resettling inward, into myself, I can feel my heart beating in my ears, in my temples, I can feel and hear myself swallow, sinking deeper and deeper, I can hear the liquid process of my stomach.
“That’s enough kids.” The teacher says.
My eyes slowly open to find the rest of the class coming out of this sensory exercise as reluctantly as I am. Did we hear her correctly?
She hasn’t moved, not a single inch. Who has that kind of discipline? I was thoroughly miserable immediately. The worst possible noted sound would have been one I created. In fairness, “What did you hear?”
No one is bold enough to begin this phase, we are now just looking at one another, who should begin.
I should go now, I should speak up, not possible to have nothing if I go first. I immediately know all of this and yet am crippled with fear. I am thinking about all the fear I have about redundancy, about unoriginality, about the mundane, and I have the solution, SPEAK! SPEAK! SPEAK!
This isn’t enough, the attention would be overwhelming, please ma’am, pick me first and let’s be done with it. I am begging her with my mind, while I sit stone still, eyes forward, emotionless. Cosmically she must understand, the fat kid must do everything to be unseen, must not draw attention to himself, must just do his work and get out. Don’t be a target. She finally points to a girl at the other end of the room. “What did you hear?”
“The birds?”
“Great.”
I should have made eye contact with her. I should have just gone first. These are lessons I learn every day, and every day I tell myself to act on these truths, and every day I don’t. To top it off, birds was one of mine. She points to another student.
“What did you hear?”
“Kids playing?”
“Good.”
Another one on my list, please pick me so we can be done.
“What did you hear?”
“An airplane.”
“Great.”
I can feel the panic rising, there’s no rhyme or reason to her choices. She’s not bifurcating the room, or dissecting it, or even going one kid to the next, it’s a completely arbitrary and abstract pattern and it’s left me really stressed out about either not having an original sound our blurting out something unchosen. I don’t know which would be worse and I honestly think I might pee my pants.
“What did you hear?”
“Ethan breathing!”
There is an eruption of laughter and all eyes turn to me. These ten-year- old children are gargoyles whose sides are exploding with laughter as I melt. I am quite literally sinking into my chair while the eruption of my heartbeat begins to block out the sound. I’m dizzy.
“Ok, Ok, that’s enough. What did you hear Ethan?”
I have no answer for this, I am frozen. The children continue to cackle. “Enough! What did you hear Ethan.”
Nothing matters now, none of it, there’s no unwinding this. I will be in the gloom for days with no hope of escape. I never even heard my breath, I was listening so intently, how did I not hear it?
“Airplane.” I croaked, and then held my breath.
The Q&A continued, but I couldn’t hear any of it.
I would never breathe publicly again.
that-guy-from-that-thing
I have always been irritated by people who arrive to the front of a Starbucks line, and as if surprised by the question, “What can I get for you?” begin for the first time in their lives to consider the menu and available food items. I want to find these people to be the scum of the earth, to start threads on NextDoor decrying their atrocities. But the reality is, my issue has nothing to do with them at all.
For the majority of my life, all decisions have been made to avoid being noticed by others. So, my Starbucks order is thoroughly and exhaustively vetted and silently rehearsed to a stutter-free and concise perfection, before I even walk into the building. In watching these people who are able to stand before the masses without a care in the world, I cannot relate to their inner workings whatsoever. No part of their day is spent figuring out how to not be looked at.
Strange for someone who became an actor to believe he didn’t want to be on display. The truth is, I’m disguised by the work that I’ve done. The wonder and question in someone’s head about if I’m that-guy-from-that-thing, has always been a distraction, another shield that hides me from actually being seen.
Me vs. My Body
In thinking about my body and all the physical goals I hold for it, I cannot help but separate us, my body and I, it’s just easier for me to think in these terms, “my body,” vs strictly thinking as “me.”
I guess this is partially because I think of my body as an unthinking machine, that I, have to pressure to get it to perform in the way that I want it to. This machine is incredibly high tech, but basically pretty dumb. And this machine left to its own devices will not carry out my arbitrary goals, it doesn’t seem to have the same goals as I do.
In that I am neither advocating for a soul or a strict biological explanation, I can only think in terms of a separation here, and when I really dig around, the separation is far more fractured than just me and my body, for I am quite often quarreling with myself.
When I really try and figure out what my body’s goals are, because they seem so totally in opposition to MY goals, I think it’s only goal is survival. This may seem confusing, because of course my own goals aren’t in opposition to this. I’ve had to parcel out my own understanding of what it is to survive. I have a general idea of what this is, and I believe my body’s idea is quite different.
If we think of this in evolutionary terms, starving will kill us much faster than obesity. If we look at the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis and the Dutch Hunger Winter, there is evidence that our bodies can immediately adapt to more efficient fat storage. If I was a very high-tech, yet unthinking machine, I would certainly be more inclined to store energy, than live believing that there could be no major shortage that could quickly ruin my goal of survival. I can see this machine developing a warning light, that tells us we are nearing a time to refuel. But how would this sign be seen today? Certainly not when there is a constant omnipresent cornucopia of food. More realistically when we had to go out and hunt or forage for food, hunger existed only as a really early warning sign to eat.
Why is it that if I do some exercise when hungry, I crave different foods than if I simply walk to my refrigerator? Have you had that?
I can be responsible for my body’s larger actions, stand up/sit down and beyond, but the smaller functions of digestion, endocrinology, cardiovascular, pulmonary etc., I can only influence. Yet my body can influence how I control it’s larger actions too! Why does my body send signals to eat desert? I do not want desert, it is in conflict with my physical goals… BECAUSE my body WANTS to store fat! It’s scared shitless that someone/thing is going to take all the food away and we’re (lol, me and my body) are going to starve! I ate recently, why is my body demanding more more more? IT WANTS TO BE FAT! That fat/stored energy is like a battery pack that will kick famine in the teeth. My body has no idea that there’s a cache of cheap calories on literally every corner of America, and when it gets a sense of this, it says to me “Hey dummy! Go eat that shit RIGHT NOW!”
OBESITY may take decades to kill a person, that’s more than enough time to procreate, my body doesn’t recognize that as a risk to survival, so it’s not a factor my body takes into consideration. EAT, EAT, EAT! My body screams at me, the next famine is around the corner and we want to beat it. Try as I might, my body doesn’t believe that 7/11’s are here to stay.
Further, when I restrict energy intake to my body, it rages against me, and the first thing it looks to do is mitigate this restriction by using muscle as a fuel source. This way it has lessened it’s energy need and gotten some free energy that I’d been withholding from it.
How to trick it, how do I make it think that muscle is necessary to survive? Well… it’s a really dumb smart machine, it has no idea what a gym is, whatever I do with my body, it believes I have to be able to do to survive… So if I don’t use my muscles in a way that it can’t adapt to, it has to keep the muscle, it believes that basically everything we’re doing with it, is designed to survive, it literally thinks I’m out hunting and foraging.
My body and I are constantly trying to game each other… But I’m just a touch smarter, and I will win.
Sincerely,
Scientific Method And Relativism
It all begins with an idea.
We can wend our way through history and marvel at the “scientific” inaccuracies of the past. This is an easy enough experiment, and I hope I don’t have to provide examples of past scientific truths that no longer hold up today, but here are a few just in case: until the 1990s, scientists believed that gravity was slowing down the expansion of the universe, however science of today says the universe is expanding at an ever increasing speed. Also, Pluto was a planet when I was a kid, and as of today, dinosaurs are supposed to have been covered in feathers.
This stuff will probably
all change too.
I’ve found the more difficult trick to be, knowing for myself what is right, despite what I’m being told by current “experts.” There are so many battling theory’s floating around about the causation of our current “obesity crisis” that to try and pick one to believe is tantamount to declaring religious faith. And let’s not forget that each major religion has it’s own fragmented sects, those who interpret the divine in the ‘right’ way. My head spins every time I’m presented with a new WHY, i.e. WHY are so many people gaining so much weight…
I have a theory, it’s backed up by scientific evidence, I’ve talked about it on the podcast and the point of this dispatch has nothing to do with that.
The point is… drumroll…
Science CHANGES!
The most sciency reason for science changing is this: science requires tools by which to measure data, as the tools improve, the science reveals new “truths.”
It is not a rigid thing built upon a foundation of absolutes: light can be slowed, the gravitational constant has been shown to have some problems, a single particle can exist in two places at once… But for my life, functionally, none of that data is even relevant.
The other thing to keep in mind, a lot of dietary “truths” are being sold with some moral bent and as far as I can tell, there is no morality in science. It’s just data. Of course, one could use this data for moral or immoral purposes, but the distinctions between right and wrong should and must be of a personal nature.
I have found all diets I’ve done that ultimately set me in a caloric deficit, have worked to reduce my weight. Some are not specific about this deficit and just give you a list of foods to eat or not eat, and so provide a bit more freedom of choice over quantity of consumed food, and I have managed to not lose weight when doing these in a careless fashion.
If you do not want to eat animals, GREAT! If you do not want to eat GMO’s, GREAT! Lectins, gluten, nightshades, processed food, carbohydrates, sugar, anything but meat… GREAT GREAT GREAT.
What are YOUR PREFERENCES? This is a journey for you, and it’s one thing to try something that’s been successful for another, but another thing entirely to attempt to believe something that wasn’t necessarily true for you yesterday.
I can totally understand that adherence to something may be easier with the addition of morality, or the belief that it’s the best or only way, I am simply advocating that it be the best way for YOU, and only YOU can know that for sure.
BTW, there’s plenty of science on the placebo effect, belief is a powerful thing!
If something about a diet resonates with you, maybe that’s the one for you.
There are two major school’s of thought that I can see today, one is the Be Responsible school, the other is the Blame Food school. Either one can work, both schools have successes and failures. In between these two schools of thought lies a wonderful zone devoid of dogmatic rigor, I like to call the Center. The Center can see that we have not necessarily evolved to be capable of physiologically dealing with the sheer quantity of food available to us, while also utilizing some aspects of personal responsibility to deal with this knowledge. I am currently enrolled in the Center.
I believe that anything that has produced a success is valid.
Sincerely,
On Mindset.
Mindset: the established set of attitudes held by someone.
I’ve found that mindset is an important component to achieving any goal. When I think about my mindset linguistically, it is in terms like strength, power, determination, suffering and joy. These words are ultimately meaningless and the idea of telling someone to “be strong” seems entirely ridiculous. While I believe mindset is necessary to taking the most secure first step, there are also some who may be able to do without it. They may be able to luckily white knuckle their way through some strife, and ultimately be ok, but there are formulas to circumvent this gamble, and they may be helpful to many.
Enter Tom Kier.
One of my favorite roles was playing D in the Hulu series Chance. The character D was based on Tom Kier.
Tom has been a combatives instructor for the past 30 years, he is considered a subject matter expert by USSOCOM (The Unites States Special Operations Command), he holds a master instructor/Tuhon rank in Sayoc Kali. Sayoc is a Filipino martial arts system developed by Pamana Tuhon Chris Sayoc.
Mindset is an integral part of Sayoc, and I thought it would be a good idea to get Tom in to share some of those principles. Coming from the perspective of a combatives instructor, many of these mindset formulas are laid out in terms appropriate to combat, but I have found them easily applied to anything I set out to do.
I have had the privilege and honor to spend a few hundred hours sitting and talking with Tom. There isn’t a subject yet that we have found uninteresting.
I hope you guys enjoy this one.
Sincerely,
Resolution Fail.
This week on the podcast, I speak with our friend Max Discher about his struggles with his weight.
He asked me to send him some advice on what he could do to stay on track.
Here is what I said to him.
On Pleasure.
“The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.”
- Moses Maimonides
“All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Photo by @burgersneversaydie
In life, I have repeatedly failed the marshmallow test.
The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification in 1972 led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University. In this study, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time. During this time, the researcher left the room for about 15 minutes and then returned. The reward was either a marshmallow or pretzel stick, depending on the child's preference. In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational attainment, body mass index (BMI), and other life measures. [Wikipedia].
I have always wanted the immediate gratification, the sudden burst of dopamine or whatever endocrinological burst of chemicals inform our meat sacks that we’ve made the right decision, assuming I - or any child given the marshmallow test - would really prefer two marshmallows to one. I have always preferred more, even somehow more of those things I don’t generally like. I cannot rationalize this, I can’t tell you that I’ve spent time meditating on this, figured it out, and have a cure - I don’t. I will always struggle with it, it will always be something I hope to overcome. That’s my lot.
I have been able to meditate on and rationalize my goals, I have been able to categorize and prioritize my intentions with pleasure. There can be no denial that I take or find or seek pleasure in eating, I do, I have, I will. I can and do recognize that, and I can and do attempt to embrace some kind of masochism in regards to it. I want to detach the association of pleasure with food, to strip it of its ability to take me away from broader purposes. Every day that I wake up without sore feet, without a fear of the physical exertion of the day ahead, is more valuable than the brief moment of thoughtlessly pushing something into my mouth that is almost immediately regretted. They’re nowhere near equal. And yet for so long I was burdened by an inability to look at this, to place these two ideas upon the value scale of my mind.
What do I want from food?
Of course in this moment I get an instant idea of a double cheese burger, large fries and a coke. So I have to push that first thought aside, there is no telling really where it’s come from, but I do know where it leads.
I try again, what do I want from food?
I want energy. I want fuel for my body. My body’s ability to navigate life is the current goal that food plays a part in. I have spent decades being anesthetized by almost constant pleasure in eating. There is so much available, so many choices. As an adult in America, I can have the MOST pleasurable food for every meal. I can only imagine that Disneyland would be REALLY FUCKING AWFUL if I went everyday. At some point we need a beak from the constant capitulation to our base instincts.
I don’t know why I’ve never gotten sick of cheeseburgers. I believe its something to do with the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis, because of historic and prehistoric famines, we evolved to not only store fat efficiently, but to overeat when possible.
We can beat this if we understand it, we can talk ourselves out of behaving in this way. I cannot think of anything else I enjoy doing that I would enjoy day in day out with the same relentless passion that I have for eating. NOTHING. I would get sick of any other act and need a serious break, not just from breakfast to lunch.
So I remind myself of these things.
Is the value of not being out of breath at the end of a single flight of stairs greater than the value of a few moments with something in my mouth that will not continue to satiate me once I swallow? YES! I can think of any instance from today walking up stairs, not being fatigued and feel a spark of pride and pleasure. I can use reason and logic to place these two forms of pleasure at odds with each other and I can and may have to remind myself and re-convince myself of this repeatedly.
Military strategist John Boyd came up with something called the OODA Loop, OODA stands for observe-orient-decide-act and the loop means you DON'T JUST DO IT ONCE! We can observe our impulses, orient them with our goals, make a decision based on this, and then act.
I try for brutal honesty with myself, once I am touching honesty, I can begin to determine my capabilities, and once I’ve got these two figured out, I can go about trying to beat my impulses.
Sincerely,
How Many Calories Do I Consume?
I hope I have made it very clear that I’m neither a doctor, a nutritionist or a dietician, I am merely an experienced dieter. A lot of you have asked what my weightloss program is, which I’m more than happy to share, but I think many of the specifics are irrelevant. For instance, my calorie intake, is entirely irrelevant to everyone who is not me. I do not believe there is some magical caloric number that’s right for everyone, but rather that if you’re counting calories, they should be based on YOUR OWN requirements. If counting calories, I’ve found that a deficit of 20-25% of the calories required to maintain your current weight, seems to work for me for slow and steady fat loss. But remember that as your weight goes down the calories will also have to gradually come down too.
I think one of the key things commonly overlooked is examining what diet is right, specifically for your goal. I was not finding success revealing abs on Keto, so I switched to high protein, moderate carbs and low fat, in a 20% deficit and this seems to have done the trick. I was able to steadily lose fat and maintain muscle. I would check this periodically with a DEXA scan, and shed a silent tear for every single ounce of lost muscle, luckily it was very few tears.
You will lose weight on a diet because your body is using more energy than you are providing from an external source, food. You cannot eat 10,000 calories between 4pm-8pm while intermittent fasting, only burn 5,000 total for the day, and lose weight. If you feel like trying out the carnivore diet, you cannot eat 10,000 calories in rib eyes over the course of a day, while your body only requires 5,000 calories, and lose weight. This will be true for all diets as we go down the list. This is physics. All diets function as tools for weightloss because you consume less than your body requires, and your body must cannibalize itself in order to find the required energy for survival. If part of your goal is retaining lean tissue (muscle) and targeting only fat loss, I’ve found that a high amount of protein is required. A high amount of protein will eventually throw you out of ketosis because of glucogenisis, a process where the liver (and to a lesser degree the kidneys) can take amino acids from protein and turn them into glucose, thus turning off ketosis. So, while I have found keto to be fantastically easy to lose weight on, that weight has consisted of both muscle and fat. (If this is too many words keep listening to the podcast, we talk about all of this!)
I am currently getting 45% of my calories from protein, 40% from carbohydrates, and 15% from fat, while maintaining a 20% deficit of what I would need to maintain my weight. Now when I go in for a DEXA scan, the weight lost is almost entirely fat, whereas before, I had been seeing up 25% of my loss in muscle, thus the ever elusive abs.
If you just want to see a lower number on a scale, there is a diet for that. If you want to lose fat and retain muscle, there is a diet for that. If you just want to fit into a tight pair of jeans for one night and don’t care if it means you’ll regain even more weight than you lost, there is a diet for that too!
What do you want? Get specific. Where do your preferences point you? I know that I found keto very easy to do, it didn’t require a whole lot of thought, and after a few days I just wasn’t as hungry as normal. You can try out any diet to see if it’s right for you. At worst it’s the cost of a book and a little bit of your time, at best it’s a google search and a bit of your time. Try something out without the demand that this is the last diet you’ll ever do. Try out a bunch of diets. One will feel better than the rest. That’s your diet.
Sticking to it could be tough, but if you have to go off, don’t do it emotionally, be analytical about it, and be prepared to get right back on.
If I caved and ordered a pizza tonight, and nothing was prepared for tomorrow for getting back on, that would be a WRAP! DONE! FAILED!
You can game the cheat: take the cheat out of it and make it a plan - figure out how you can increase your energy needs for that day. No longer a cheat!
I hope this was helpful.
Sincerely,
Let’s Do A Podcast.
My dear friend Kevin Connolly has created a podcast studio called Actionpark Media, and asked me to join in the conversational fun. I was very hesitant for some time, fear of being canceled for bad ideas, but eventually settled on Diet and Fitness. Seems relatively safe, right?
I have since heard about the concept of “fat shaming,” which has changed somewhat since I was truly morbidly obese. Back in my day, fat shaming was when the pre-k kids would stare quizzically at my rotund elementary school self and wonder aloud how and what exactly was going on here. Apparently today, fat shaming can be a host of things, not the least of which is sharing your success and perseverance on a given course.
I did not enjoy being fat. If you do, more power to you. I did not enjoy keeping folded paper towels in my pocket on cool days to mop my brow, or breaking non-reinforced furniture at my friends houses, or asking stewardesses (flight attendants?) for seat belt extensions, or the sad look of disappointment on my Dr’s face, each one, every time, or not fitting into the brands of clothes the rest of the world wore, or not wanting to eat in front of people, or every other thing in life that involved leaving my house and would in some way include the rationalization of my size. If these things don’t bother you, or apply to you, then I’m not talking to you. In fairness, at this point, I’m only talking to myself, and if there is a likeminded individual out there, maybe them too.
Hi.
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