The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all
psyche.co
psyche.co
For me dealing with food in just one (1) meal/sitting a day is way easier than cutting meal sizes and incredients 5+ times a day. I also "know" that I will be sated 1 time per day, so no prolonged hunger phase anxiety. "Opportunity makes the thief" so just limit the opportunities.
So to speak "marshmallows are secured" in any case, except that over time I learned that high carb foods/sweets will make me hungry much earlier again.
I'm sticking to this for 374 days as of today and lost ~44kgs/97lbs with regular medical support of my GP (recent blood work was really great).
Thought I'd offer a few of my own tricks in case anyone finds them useful:
Coffee and seltzer water get me through the more difficult hunger pangs. Doing any sort of cardio also makes me not hungry (YMMV). Pairing IF and ketosis has been great to treat hypoglycemia and not feel hungry in general.
I wasn't obese, but I was ~20lbs / 9kg overweight at one point. IF + keto has changed my body composition in a really profound way. I'm still a similar weight, but with ~10% less body fat (25% -> %15, not exact, no dexa scan).
Keep going OP!
High fat diets, while energy dense and more satiating, can be responsible for increased cholesterol, or worse, pancreatitis. Having recently fallen into that latter camp I’ve become acutely aware of that side of my eating habits.
I’m also a keto counterpoint. Because of my fat-restrictive diet I’ve lost a great deal of weight the past two months. At first because I was struggling to even keep up with my coalition requirements but even still. I’ve increased my carb and protein intake to make sure I’m getting enough calories while I aim for no more than 30-40g of fat a day. (Fat content of about 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil)
I’m 5’11 and in May I was ~220-225lbs and I’m currently 188 (Mind you over 2 weeks at my most sick I lost a lot of muscle as well).
I continue to lose weight at a slow but regular pace on this diet.
Calorie restriction is likely the main contributor in my case—made easier by not underestimating the energy content in higher-fat foods.
The notes about cholesterol and pancreatitis are, to my knowledge, not factors in people who properly follow the diet, i.e. 70% fats composed of mostly poly/mono unsaturated fats and sparing saturated (bacon, etc.). If you can cite a large scale study that demonstrates this, I would read it.
Five years in, my blood work is amazing.
Types of fats have no weight in that discussion. “Good fat” not “bad fat”—it doesn’t matter. It has to do with the work imposed on the pancreas in a high fat diet.
I should clarify that a high fat diet is not a direct indicator of future pancreatic issues, but is one of several leading risk factors.
I’d highly recommend going over the diet with a doctor before undertaking it to make sure there are no preconditions that might make a high fat diet put too much strain on the pancreas. It’s known as the “angry organ” for a reason.
I was on a high fat/high protein/low carb diet with plenty of gym time before possibly unrelated inflammation exacerbated by my diet (and since I was a drinker, that as well) in my pancreas resulted in a massive acute attack that caused partial organ death. That’ll be with me for life since transplants don’t sound like a great option for most cases. (Even worse, pancreatic issues can harm surrounding organs including the lungs, liver, spleen, and kidneys. Not something any active person would want to have to live with)
Prior to the attack my blood work was brilliant as well. After the attack my lipase levels were high, my white blood cell count was through the roof, and I was anemic (though I had always fluctuated hemoglobin levels with B12 deficiency, but never so low).
The worst part is you won’t see or feel it coming, and it will hit you like a brick wall. So my comments are only meant as precautionary—which I think is always the best course with any fad diets.
What people don't seem to realize is that real keto diets have strict limitations on protein intake, as your body just breaks protein down into glucose. I believe it's something like 85% of your calories each day need to come from fat, not protein.
Luckily, it's actually a good thing that people aren't actually in ketosis. It's an extreme diet developed as a treatment for epilepsy, and it can be very hard on your body's systems. The circulating ketones turn your blood acidic, which starts leeching out calcium from your bones. A lot of people get their fat from sources high in saturated fat (animal fat), which is bad for your body long-term. And with no real fiber intake, your gut flora will suffer. I don't believe a single nutritionist recommends real keto for adults trying to lose weight.
For sure most of us could stand to reduce our carb intakes a bit, but our bodies literally run on glucose. We have evolved to survive on carbs, it's okay to eat them! The healthiest countries in the world eat LOTS of carbs. [edit: 'lots' meaning, a high percent of their macros each day, not lots as in large portions] I in general dislike HuffPo as a source, but a quick google found this which I thought was an interesting read: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/japan-healthiest-people-in-th...
Now on the otherhand, I love IF. I used it without knowing it had a name to lose ~65 lbs at the end of highschool. I think it's super effective and what I recommend to others who ask for advice.
Nutritional ketosis as practiced by anyone doing "keto" is generally considered to be somewhere between 1.0 to 3.0 mmol/dL BHB. Getting there is not hard for anyone on a fat-adapted diet.
You have a lot of scientifically inaccurate statements in your comment. You are confusing keto with keto acidosis. Dr. Phinney, MD, Ph.D and chief scientist of Virta Health has very good lectures on youtube going over these terms which will dispel many of your misconceptions. They also have 30 years of data on keto diets.
On keto, The goal is to keep fat calories to 70-75. In our ancestral environment, we did not have grains, fruits or sugar in most forms. Ancestral forms of fruits like banana had seeds and were barely sweet.
You are. There's a difference between medical ketosis and nutritional ketosis. It's always worth researching[1] something if you don't fully understanding it.
I'm not going to dive into the rest of your comment because it's a dumpster fire of misinformation.
1 - https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324237
edit: I also lived in Japan for two years and they are slowly becoming unhealthy due to the younger generation beginning to succumb to sugary products, i.e. the current bubble tea craze. There's also a culture of not sleeping, drinking daily, and smoking. I believe their health is due to how the country forces you to walk everywhere.
Would you mind expanding on this? Or maybe some general links as to what "keto" is about.
In my experience seltzer water ends up making me even more hungry. Is this typical?
On days when I have to eat breakfast/brunch/lunch for social reason I notice a 'food is around, I better eat it' urge afterward all day long.
It feels like I just lost 15 IQ points right after a meal. I also get kind of sleepy and unmotivated after.
The meal is also a great way of demarcating work. Before I eat, I'm working. After, I'm chilling. Simple as that.
I quite often do a 1hr power ride on Zwift at around midday on an empty stomach and feel less hungry than when I started now. Before I would have felt that I deserved a high calorie meal and eaten more than I should of. Now I listen to if my body is actually, really hungry. Quite often I feel less hungry after a workout, so I might go through till dinner without any food if that’s what I feel like. Sometimes I might have deep hunger pangs, so I’ll eat straight away after in that case.
Something that shifted my approach to food dramatically was a 7 day fast two years ago. My approach to food has never been the same since.
That’s the large meal effect.
Small meals work better for me and I get sluggish and mentally slow when I’m hungry. As soon as I eat, I perk up and have lots of energy.
But I’m also at 11% or so of bodyfat so maybe my body is just less willing to dip into reserve energy stores.
I mean it might not be. There might be long term consequences.
Creating an environment where you're triggering only one insulin secretion per day will help do exactly that. Eating unprocessed, nutrient-dense foods in that meal helps too, of course.
Congratulations, you're eating more optimally than the vast majority of the world, keep it up!
Power on and I’m sure you will hit your goal!
I imagine you feel like a million bucks. wish you all the best. this is seriously hard ass and immensely a strong will.
I'd also note that not having any food in the house was a major help in this as well. Even if I had a non-stop mini-market 2 minutes walk away, the small friction of having to go there stopped many a cheat meal.
That said, after the first couple of weeks my taste buds somewhat changed and I taste sugar in raw cooked vegetables (carrots, brokkoli, brussel sprouts). I now love raw, frozen vegetables without any additions steamed in the microwave or steam cooker. Great vitamin and fibre source and one can add even a high-fat dipping sauce or some cheese without screwing up the calories.
Have you done this? Water fasting is something you just "do for a month" nor should you casually recommend it. I've done a three day water fast and it was rough and nearly fainted on day three.
Quick wins make for quick failures. OP has found something sustainable and doesn't need a 40kg trick.
Losing weight is one thing but manage the weight long term is the really hard one.
Let's ask me again in 2-5 years about it.
More electrolytes would help with this, specifically salt. And if you drink plain water, it depletes your electrolytes pretty quickly through urination.
But YMMV, as always.
If you're not used to keto, switching may be physiologically hard. Gradually transitioning from carbs to fat, and then or later to fasting may be easier on the body, though a prolonged hardship for the mind.
Once you get used to it, switching is a normal thing to do, though again YMMV.
I think if one works from home during COVID-19, then starting on Friday, going over the worst during the weekend, and then just functioning normally during the week is a perfect way to lose weight without any measurable effects on one's work performance.
A drink made with 6 level teaspoons of sugar and 1/2 level teaspoon of salt dissolved in 1 litre of clean water.
Be very careful to mix the correct amounts. Too much sugar can make the diarrhoea worse. Too much salt can be extremely harmful to the child.
Making the mixture a little too diluted (with more than 1 litre of clean water) is not harmful.
Ideal consumption ~30ml every few mins (or ~90mim for the 1L)
I left the child reference in as a copy/paste from... I can't remember which medical source I got it from - although my use has only been for when I or someone else wants to minimise a hangover. I once made this mix for somebody in front of a GP (doctor) who said "wow, that's exactly the 'basic rehydration recipe' we teach when we go to parts of the world where they don't have the education / equipment we have in the UK".
But that's the MVP for oral rehydration. A little potassium is good to include, and looking at the commercial tablets I have (that mix with water) they include potassium (193mg / 200ml water) and chloride (350mg / 200ml).
I should note that anything aerobic like running was easy, anything anaerobic (like karate sparring) was not, but it wasn’t painful either.
I did pay attention to electrolytes - especially magnesium and potasssiun - I got cramps when water fasting and not supplementing.
I know my body well, and I think that’s essential to be able to continue - e.g. to know it is magnesium that’s needed now, and not (as one might think) the body is eating itself.
Don’t know how to learn that skill though.
Am I the only one who has, many times, encountered people who say "I don't buy junk food because if I do I'll end up eating it?"
This is one of my gripes with psychology articles/self help books. So so many topics are simple 'revelations' that many of us have figured out by the time we are 20. Can't eat a cookie if you don't have any cookies.
I've read some good psychology books ("Thinking fast and slow" was great), but most of the others I've read I could have have read the one page summary and realized I don't need to read it.
I recall Scott Alexander talking about this on one of the SSC posts -- can't remember which -- about the fact that people miss developmental milestones for reasons. And you can ask the question: What developmental milestones am I missing? Or: which cognitive tools do I need for my toolbox?
It's good to teach things that "you should already know", because maybe you're one of today's lucky 10000.
But not all. What is condescending to one is a necessary insight to another. Personally, I am very grateful to people who are willing to say obvious things.
I also occasionally re-listen to the audio of self-help books in order to remember things I learned which are simple yet hard.
So, like the sibling comment about prayers, I’m trying to build a system that collapses those insights into a small enough space that I can review them regularly. Kind of like regression tests for mind function.
> Maybe the purpose of the whole oral tradition
A poem is a text which has been hand-optimized to fit in human memory.
I think this is a fairly general explanation of why smart people do dumb things.
Also of why reading self-help writing can seem like it's revealing important stuff to one person, seem obvious from a different perspective, and not really help anyway.
People can do a very wide variety of things at any given moment, but temperaments or tendencies cannot be changed so easily. Large problems come from a persistent but small or even tiny bias, such as consuming slightly more calories than you burn. A ten pound weight gain in a year is less than 5% over 2000 calories maintenance. 20 years of that and you might be close to 400 lbs. Saying "why can't that person just not eat that..." is denying the problem of balancing something over a lifetime when the homeostatic feedback mechanism people rely on is out of whack.
I don't mean to suggest that weight control is unique, lots of things in life are about the accumulated benefits or harms over time. In management of an organization, not just individual problems, too.
Also, typical how to loose weight advice does not talk about reducing temptations ar all. Instead, it focuses on strong will and self control - blaming people for failure to follow instructions but never giving advice on how to make following easier.
So, even if some know that, a lot of people do not act on it.
Give her the key and ask her to lock all her junk food up. It works.
Life is too short.
On the topic of self-control, I'm actually surprised that the results turned out the way they did. I would have expected the opposite result; that "exercising" your discipline solves the problem once and for all, while reducing temptation is just asking for a relapse when temptation inevitably presents itself again.
If you can't resist purchasing junk food off the shelves, then put a limit on your credit card, or leave your credit card at home and only bring enough money to the store for essentials. And if that's not enough, then limit yourself to only shopping at health food stores where the options are less tempting, and so on.
TBH it was a revelation to me. I did stumble upon it but somehow "be virtuous, exercise self-control" trope keeps reasserting itself. I find myself straining against something then realzing, wait, just throw this thing out and poof, done.
Excerpt:
Here’s what I mean when I say there’s no such thing as willpower, despite having just defined it. Paraphrasing Laplace, I can explain all behavior simply in terms of responding to incentives. You want this whole pie in your body right now, and also you want to be two sizes smaller by next summer. Conflicting preferences are normally no big deal. You just, y’know, weigh them, make your tradeoffs, and reach a decision. But when the preferences apply at different timescales (pie now, thinner later) humans suffer from a massive irrationality which philosophers call akrasia and economists call dynamic inconsistency and normal people call … being stupidly short-sighted, or in the case of time management: procrastination.
Commitment devices are a way to change your own incentives so that willpower is a non-issue. They make your short-term and long-term incentives line up. There are many less drastic things you can do as well.
PS: Also the whole "willpower is like a muscle" theory, known as Ego Depletion, failed to replicate.
I used it some years ago. You have to figure out how to use it and for what things it will work for you. As an example, for me having any daily task tracked with Beeminder was a huge hassle. I don't want to have to open an app and update several items I'm tracking every day. Others are fine with this. For me, goals with a longer cadence ("once a week") work better on Beeminder.
Also, initially you'll not know what you really want to track in Beeminder and what you don't. I did find myself cheating on occasion. If that happens to you, consider whether you should even be tracking this at all via Beeminder.
Beeminder can give you a bit of hyperfocus. That task that will cause you to lose money today if you don't do it? Becomes top priority for you that day. I found the items I was Beeminding were getting done, but perhaps other more important items I was not putting into Beeminder weren't. In a sense, after a few months of use, you could say that Beeminder will give you an idea on the importance (or lack of) of the things you are Beeminding.
For these reasons, I did stop using it. I'll probably return to it one day when I figure out my priorities. I heartily recommend it to others, though.
As for the friction of adding data, we have smartphone apps and an email and SMS bot to try to help with that. But ideally you automate it. There are dozens of apps and gadgets we integrate with (RescueTime, Fitbit, Trello, Garmin, GitHub, etc etc) and we have an API, or you can make an IFTTT or Zapier recipe/applet/zap/whatever.
Oh yeah, and I should point out https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating
Finally, good point about being careful what you beemind. We try to minimize the danger of that with our one-week "akrasia horizon". You're never on the hook for more a week into the future, i.e., you can stop or change a goal at any time, with a one-week delay. So you haven't lost much if you realize you're beeminding the wrong things.
Or if it's just that more important things are getting crowded out, our self-serving advice is to just beemind those things as well!
Thanks again for this comment!
In my case, though, these were not automatable. As an example, I would have a Beeminder for decluttering 10 items in the house per day. Nothing can detect I've done it. I still have to somehow enter this daily.
On that note, another (dubious?) positive of my using Beeminder briefly: Although I rigorously stuck to the "decluttering 10 items per day", I was not happy with the outcomes. It still seemed a chore. Eventually I realized that this just wasn't a great way to keep my room/house decluttered, and focused on finding other ways - and my house now has much less clutter (without using Beeminder).
The "positive" is that Beeminder helped me try an approach that I thought would work. It turned out it didn't, but I would not have realized this without the service. Had I not used Beeminder, I would have not been so religious in decluttering daily, and would blame my lack of discipline as the cause. Beeminder made me disciplined, and I then learned that discipline was not the solution to this particular problem.
Do you guys still stick to "one user-visible improvement per day"? For those who don't know, the Beeminder team themselves used it to improve Beeminder - and one of their goals was to have at least one user visible improvement per day. I think when I last checked, the cost of missing that goal was close to a $1000.
We do! http://beeminder.com/changelog -- 3485 UVIs and counting...
what has worked for me is thinking in terms of positive choices, rather than goals or restrictions.
It’s not “I am not going to eat that cookie”
Rather it’s
“I am choosing to lead a healthier life..”
Isn't this more like a fight between instinct and rationality?
Wanting the pie is rarely a rational decision, while on the other hand wanting to be healthy so you can live longer is absolutely rational.
Hence willpower is one's ability to rationally control their own anamalistic instincts and emotions.
Sure wanting to eat the whole pie might be irrational, but that's seldom the way people think about it. I can't eat a whole pie at once, but I can definitely eat the bite on my fork, add one more slice to my plate, etc.
This mistakes thinking long-term vs thinking marginally, which is the larger point being made.
I could certainly be convinced otherwise but it’s interesting to think about.
If you do it out of instinct and immediately think "oh yeah, forgot I only need to look one way" then it wasn't logical.
But if you know it's one way, yet think "I've witnessed bikes and even cars going the wrong way before, better check both directions" that seems like it could be a perfectly logical action.
A reason alone doesn't make something rational. A paranoid thought that aliens are trying to abduct you may be backed up by the reason "because secret weather balloons are tacking me". It's a reason. It's not a rational one. Having a reason is not synonymous with being rational.
But those are the exceptions. Mostly it's the other way around, as you say. People undermine their own long-term interests with procrastination or impetuousness.
is not necessarily
> wanting to be healthy so you can live longer
the behavior necessary to lose the weight would have positive results toward a goal that IS rational, but the impulse that actually spurs the behavior necessary to be two sizes smaller by next summer could just as easily be "i want to wear this dress to my sister's wedding next summer and they don't make it in my size."
Though your argument would honestly just move one dimension up since it takes a certain motivation and condition to go and seek that kind of discipline training.
The ultimate end of the Buddhist meditations is to let go so you’re right but in the beginning there’s a sort of healthy shedding of dealing with delusions and ideas that create Desirees and ice that do not service which is a bit behind incentive incentive itself becomes being free of those desires, A sort of seeking liberation.
You actually /can't/ just weigh the tradeoffs of being disctracted and reach a decision of not being distracted.
No -- it's meaningfully and sustainably easier to make good decisions when bad options are removed from the table (sometimes literally.)
A commitment device provides an incentive, including the incentive to eliminate distractions by going somewhere quiet or whatever else you need to do to follow through on what you've committed to.
As for the underlying neurobiology, I think [0] is a decent study for identifying the relevant regions involved in procrastination in particular, and [1] is a good review about PFC plasticity. Of course that individually doesn't indicate a higher level effect, but dismissing it altogether in the same breath as ego depletion also doesn't seem right.
A simpler way to get the same result is to make the future present by surrounding yourself with pictures of your goals.
I think mostly there's plenty of short-term cost to derailing a Beeminder goal and getting the alert "we are now charging you $X". Not as good as handing over cash but still pretty good!
I definitely disagree that surrounding yourself with pictures of your goals is comparable. I mean, it can't hurt and maybe for some people it's enough, but for me personally, for example, things like that just fade into the background for me and lose their effectiveness. A commitment device (monetary or otherwise) doesn't let that happen!
when I made my bets to places I don’t approve of—-well I would never lose a bet where I had money to the KKK on the line, I’ll tell you that
PS: As you know I'm a huge fan of Pavlok -- https://pavlok.com/ -- and definitely don't think that my arguments against anti-charities apply to it even though they're both very punishment focused. Pavlok (obviously I'm saying this for others, not Maneesh, founder of Pavlok!) is more about classical conditioning while Beeminder is more operant conditioning.
Ideally you want something the person doesn't like to happen, that way you feel like you're doing real good (preventing harm) by accomplishing your goal. Like an alarm clock I saw once that donates a dollar to a political party you hate every time you hit the snooze button.
We get that a lot ("where does the money go? wait, you do _what_ with it??") but I'm surprised to hear that pushback on Hacker News. Is the existence of Beeminder not "something positive"?
Also when we / Beeminder derail on our own goals we pay our users.
Not sure if either of those things make it feel ok. I guess we're keen for you to feel like we're any other SaaS that you're happy to pay for. Beeminder makes you awesomer and you pay for that, just at random times, or when you most need a kick in the pants, instead of a fixed monthly amount (though that too if you want a premium plan). If Beeminder isn't worth it overall then you'll stop using it; it's not really the perverse "make money when your users fail" that it seems prima facie. There's a myopic sense in which that's true but overall it's quite the opposite! As must be the case for us to have stuck around for 9 years.
But as I said to Maneesh above, I think anti-charities are anti-good. https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/
Resisting temptation requires strength. So it is viewed as a virtue in and of itself. There is a heroic struggle. Avoiding temptation is sometimes seen as a sign of weakness. The implication is you're only avoiding it because you can't resist it. Almost like running away from a fight instead of facing your enemy.
Ultimately, I think it's more constructive to employ both strategies. You need to develop the ability to resist temptation because there are times when you cannot avoid it. But there is no sense in sabotaging your success by dealing with temptation when you don't need to.
I wonder if it will ever change.
Build systems into your life that lead to desired outcomes naturally. Don't put yourself into situations that are likely to lead to bad outcomes.
The easiest way to get results is to live a life that gives you the desired results by default.
Excerpt (quoting Adams):
If you do something every day, it's a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal. […] Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good everytime they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
Also related: SMART goals.
https://www.scottadamssays.com/2013/11/18/goals-vs-systems/
Alternatively, as a ~5-minute video:
Thing is it's hard to create that context. Maybe copying good ideas or joining forces..
She over simplified. Her Grit model is a good example. Grit is an awful metric that tries to boil down complex and independent behaviors to a single number. And the measurement tools are short 8 or 12 question assessments. In my experience the results are meaningless. (Source: I conducted a study of a population & their success at a task that takes 2 years. The result? Grit had no predictive value. Others have been equally unable to obtain results.)
In this article, her model of self-control is both too complex and over simplified at the same time. The last 3 stages-- attentional, appraisal, response-- are presented as 3 discrete phases. In reality, these often blur together into a single split-second decision. The proposed solutions to each stage are laughable: Instead of sitting staring at cookies, read book! Instead of thinking about how good they taste, tell yourself they look old! (you just bought them) Instead of eating the cookies, don't eat the cookies! Ridiculous.
Recall the experiment: kids who resisted gobbling the marshmallow in order to earn 2 marshmallows went on to be awesomer adults. The original explanation is that kids with the ability to delay gratification (or who come up with beeminder-y tricks to distract themselves from the tempting marshmallow) will be served well by that skill the rest of their lives.
But another explanation – https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121011090655.h... – is that those seemingly impulsive kids are just the kids who don’t trust the adults who promise the 2nd marshmallow. They’re like “yeah, I’ve heard that before” and gobble while the gobbling’s good. In other words, they’re not failing to delay gratification, they’re responding to the situation perfectly rationally based on their past interactions with adults. To put it overly dramatically: flaking out on your kids ruins their lives!
(I’m not sure how much credence to give that interpretation, and suspect that there’s truth in the original interpretation too. But it kind of feels right to me. Flaking out on anyone is really bad. But kids especially.)
PS: More recent partial replication of the Marshmallow Test: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797618761661
There are the kids who immediately eat the marshmallow. And then there are those who try not to eat it and fail. The latter is relevant. The former is not.
Willpower is better defined as presence. More specifically it is a knowledge of self in the present. For example high willpower in the cerebellum allows awareness without a separate cognitive effort of where are your hands and feet are right now and what they are doing.
Impulse control in the cognitive sense of desire regulation suggested by the article is a limited example of cognitive self-awareness and possibly thought of as deliberation. In that sense impulse control is just one of many benefits of increased willpower.
Increased willpower has many benefits from increased motor-coordination, increased effectiveness of interpersonal engagement, career management, and even data/trend analysis. Willpower is perhaps the defining characteristic of perceived intelligence bias in the absence of a formal intelligence measure.
See volition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volition_(psychology)
- Asanga, from Abhidharmasamuccaya
This seems like a bad presumption. I suspect skim milk may have lead our hypothetical binger to drink more of it and eat more cookies.
Whole milk is known to be more filling. [1] And I believe it's the healthier option:
> In the past, whole milk was considered to be unhealthy because of its saturated fat content, but recent research does not support this recommendation. [2]
[1] https://www.eatthis.com/skim-milk-vs-whole-milk/
[2] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/whole-vs-skim-milk#sect...
The article is about removing temptation being a better strategy than exercising self-control in the face of temptation (This is then "cultural/religious conservative morality" theory for protecting against immoral behavior).
Judaism calls it "building a fence around the boundary of the law".
Being preoccupied with one distraction is like having a bucket in your foot. Every additional handicap - being tired, irritable, distracted by the environment, piles on top with a multiplier. It makes us rash, or stupid, or both,
I suspect we know this subconsciously, and it’s cheaper to just entertain the preoccupation and get it out of your head.
Building up patterns, habits that keep such things off of your radar is costly in the short term but cheaper in the long term. That problem rarely ends up hanging out in working memory.
– Lord Darlington, in Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan.
Some other great lines from the same play:
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.
My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
[What it a cynic?] A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.
It'd be a bit of work to figure out how much I might weigh if I hadn't reduced it that much, but likely 20 pounds or so?
Ego depletion, the premise this article is based upon, has had a lot of issues with reproducibility:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...
If you want to get better, work on your B-game, not your A-game. The goal is not to excel even harder on days that are good. The goal is to move up the baseline performance. This will probably lift up your A-game as well. But more importantly it gives you a base to build on.
It stops me from over-reaching. It stops me from being disappointment most of the time because I don't reach my lofty goal. Instead, it gives meaningful improvement, and many small successes.
1. Brainwash yourself. Taking the cookie example this would mean brainwashing yourself about the evils of sugar to the point that you really don't want the cookies anymore. This has to be consistent though, we're very good at forgetting uncomfortable things.
2. Building beneficial habits. If there's something that takes willpower to do, try building a habit of doing it. Takes around 40 days to achieve, and there are plenty of apps that can help. Once a habit is set though, the activity takes no willpower whatsoever. It's just something you do.
With regards to 2. that has never worked for me by itself, unfortunately. What I do instead is to find a way to be intrinsically motivated. For example, with exercise I notice that the gain in alertness feels like drinking coffee. So I now tell myself to drink coffee (and by that I mean exercise), that really works well in my particular case and makes me intrinsically motivated to exercise as the alertness gained by exercise is its own reward. Though, I do need the right setup for this, I'm currently house sitting and I'm not exercising because I don't have my weights. So how habit formation for me does help is that the more I practice a routine, the easier it is to execute. Which is why I'm not exercizing right now as I'd need to do body weight exercises and I'm used to weight exercises.
Situational strategies: temptation with the opposite sex? Segregate education by sex, make women wear burkas, forbid shorts, etc.
Distraction: "if you feel tempted, pray/read the Bible/think about God" is a very common religious tip.
Reappraisal: reminding yourself of the consequences of sin, confession, atonement.
Not defending any of that (I'm not even religious), but I just find the coincidences interesting. Are psychologies reinventing things that religions have known for centuries?
Take it a step further. Most of this is common sense. There's a reason a lot of religious from different areas have similar ideals - it comes from man.
It becomes such a natural flow that no discipline is needed to keep it up. And if you're wondering, before this I used to be what can be accurately described as a "food extremist."
If they are in front of me or accessible, I can rarely resist, because my body (designed for food scarcity and occasional abundance) wants to eat it all.
The easiest solution I have found to this is just not to bring anything like that into my living area, so that I am not tempted.
If I come across it in my day, I may be tempted and succumb, but I make sure that I don't carry it with me.
The way I quit was by purchasing a brand new pack, unwrapping it, and placing them in the glove-box of the truck I worked out of all day, doing construction. I believed as long as they were always in close reach and I could still resist, then I could likely resist all other times.
It worked.
Old school resilience and persistance is what you will miss all the way into "I will do as I please to do things".
Not good. Many, many things require years to be built. For example, if you want to study medicine, you're up for maybe 10-15 years of hard training, long hours of dedication, most certainly you won't see any "light at the end of the tunnel" before a decade into the challenge.
But also most certainly you will have the impulse to just throw away all your efforts, not one, but dozens of times, but, if you remain commited to your own path and true to what you would really want to do in life, you will get to the end.
How far in similar challenges would you think a person with a "lets go to whatever direction I want to go "right now" " approach?, will get?
Most certainly not the astronaut, highly trained all kind of professionals (scientists, military specialists, even politicians), type.
The cover page says "accidents are not happenstance". ("Unfall – kein Zufall!")
p.8 shows the strong correlation between workplace safety scores and accident rate.
p.19 ranks various safety measures from most effective to least, with a mnemonic "STOP" that works also in english.
S - (most effective) Substitution. Use completely different processes or materials so the safety issue can't occur.
T - Technical measures. Make the workplace safe for the worker (via "idiotproofing")
O - Organisational measures (education, safety rules and checks)
P - (least effective) Personal protective measures. Rely on the worker to make the workplace safe. (via their own efforts and equipment)
With that in mind, I'd say TFA wants to observe that T is more effective than P, adding a pyschological interpretation.
Just a couple years ago, I weighed 25lbs less. I could bench press 200lbs, although I only weighed ~170lbs. I could do 10 pull ups with a super wide grip with a belt on my waste and two 45lb plates hanging off that belt.
As I’ve progressed further in my career, my priorities have shifted to the detriment of my health. With COVID, I stopped working out completely and began eating garbage. I went back to the gym two weeks ago and could hardly bench press 135lbs.
After getting married, my spouse purchases foods that I previously never ate before. Genetically, she’s inclined to be more naturally fit. On the other hand, I have to massively cut carbs and do cardio to avoid forming love handles.
So with all that extra stuff in our pantry and the stress I now have from work, I naturally grab potato chips and whatever else to call my nerves (not that it really helps buts it’s immediate comfort)
> Just a couple years ago...
... that's a well-known phenomenon called: getting old. Fourthly:
> I went back to the gym two weeks ago
... aaaand you're all set - just keep it up now. It doesn't matter if you bench 135lbs or 90lbs. Frankly, after a certain age it's one step forward two steps back, all the way.
Just know: you'll be on a bit of a slope from now on. Observe that the work you put into it is still paying off anyhow. It's encouraging, ain't it? Best of luck to you.
Take video games.
Sure, you could throw out your Playstation and the temptation is no longer there. But what if you want to play just 1 hour a day, instead of 5?
How doe you remove the temptation for most of the day, but allow it to be there for part of it?
Gotta get more creative I guess. Work somewhere else. Or something...
Few times I did that I was surprisingly effective (and the original impulse disappeared in an instant)
Unrelatedly, if you want to maximize weight loss, use appropriate pharmaceuticals.
...But do a cost-benefit analysis first.
Frankly, the whole edifice of psych research is built on top of a statistical lie that only 1 in 20 experiments will fail to replicate, when it's more like 1 in 3: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/08/27/this-is-what-happened-w...
― St. Augustine