Beating the Social Overeating Habit

Leo Babauta has compiled 12 tips for beating the social overeating habit. It’s a good list, and I particularly like this contribution from Alessandro Shobeazzo:

Cheat without guilt. For one or two occasions a year, allow yourself to eat as much as you want, which doesn’t necessarily mean to stuff yourself, but to eat without thinking too much about consequences. Two big meals on Christmas or similar occasions don’t spoil a year-long habit of healthy eating. Don`t overanalyze, just enjoy, without any bad conscience.

Step off, step on.

Decision Fatigue

John Tierney, writing about decision fatigue for the New York Times:

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice.

Via Justin Blanton

Get Back On Track

Leo Babauta has some advice for getting back on track after your holiday gluttony:

I indulge myself nearly every holiday, and feel guilty too — for about a minute. Then I realize that guilt does nothing to get me fitter. I realize the only thing that will get me fitter is eating healthy today — yesterday doesn’t matter — and being active and working out today.

I know I needed to hear this after my four-day weekend of living like a ravenous sloth. Fortunately, we have complete control over when and where we get back on the path, and right now sounds awesome.

The Gateway Bite

I totally thought I came up with the term “gateway bite”, but Mark Sisson has a great article on gateway foods:

True gateway foods can wreak havoc with more than just your intended portion size, however. Suddenly, other things start looking good that you’ve had no taste for in a long time. This particular surrender to temptation can become a catalyst for a broader descent like a gateway drug leading you to something bigger and badder. You’re one brownie away from inhaling half the dessert buffet.

I’ve written about this issue before. The trick is not letting one bite ruin your entire day.

Brain Dump: November

I don’t love November.

Traditionally, it’s a busy month for me, one laden with stress and anxiety. 2011’s version is proving to be no different.

This year’s November started off with a freak Halloween snowstorm, which left us without power for five days and nineteen hours. Let me tell you, no suburban plight brings you closer to moral collapse than sitting in the dark for six days with nothing but your thoughts, particularly when those thoughts center on the fact that you broke up with your girlfriend a week before your one-year anniversary. That sucks no matter who you are.

November also happens to be NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month, in which participants attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I’ve completed NaNoWriMo twice, but this year I find myself languishing with little time, energy, or motivation to produce anything other than emotional brain vomit: a nonsensical stream-of-consciousness rant largely concerning the aforementioned romance issue. At this point, I’m many thousands of words behind schedule, and there’s a good chance it’s not going to get done, which disappoints me. I’m not one to half-ass something.

I also haven’t felt like much of a writer lately regarding this website, which has resulted in increased link posting and far fewer long-form articles than I’d like. This is my fourth month writing QLE, so I guess a little slump is inevitable once the initial novelty wears off, but it still disappoints me that the site isn’t operating at a level I’m happy with.

November is also the month of our annual tournament in Old Sturbridge, Massachusetts, which attracts over 500 competitors every year. I’ve never loved competing. It stresses out my shy and introverted side, and my heart rate increases just thinking about it. I’m much more used to competing now than when I was younger, and I have to do it to set a good example for the students, but it remains a source of dread nevertheless.

And of course, underlying these issues are the usual drags: student loans are looming, the days are growing shorter and colder, and my thesis has taken a back seat to the above grievances.

However.

Times like these are when our perspective becomes most important. We may not be able to control the things that happen to us, or the obligations we have to go through, but we can control how our mind deals with them. Making it through to the other side comes down to two things: focusing on the positive, and reframing the negative so it doesn’t seem so bad.

For every stressor, annoyance, and bummer November throws at me, there are many, if not more, things to be thankful for and happy about. It is the month of Thanksgiving, after all.

For example, I love my Kindle. Thanks to this little $79 guy (and said power outage), I was able to rip through all 656 pages of the Steve Jobs biography in about two weeks. Finishing a big book like that was tremendously satisfying and gave me a feeling of accomplishment I haven’t had in a long time. I’ve now moved on to Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing, and I’m really enjoying it. The Kindle makes me want to find time to read. I do, and that feels fantastic.

I also love my yoga class. My dad had been going to our local yoga center for a while, so to get my mind off things, I decided to stop in and try it out. I had taken a men’s yoga class while working on my master’s degree and loved it, but it only lasted eight weeks. I tried doing P90X’s yoga video once a week at home, but at ninety minutes, Tony Horton quickly fell out of favor with me. Taking a class is so much more satisfying and rewarding. Yoga people tend to be very warm, calm, and inviting, so meeting them is a pleasure. You get to sweat like hell and forget about everything else bouncing around in your head for a while. Plus, the strength and flexibility training has been an invaluable asset to my martial arts ability. I’m going three times a week now, and I absolutely love it. Having something to look forward to on your schedule is always great for lifting your spirits.

As a nerd, I’m psyched that Apple finally released iTunes Match, which enables you to upload your entire music collection iCloud and access it on all of your devices. It took more than 24 hours for iTunes to match and/or upload my 13,000 song library, but now all of my music is only a tap away wherever I go. I don’t have to haul my dinosauric iPod Classic around anymore or deal with picking only 32GB worth of music for my iPhone. That makes my life easier and simpler, so of course I’m all about it.

My friend Rich has also been teaching me how to play chess. I’m terrible, but I still find the game very enjoyable, and it’s a good brain workout. A new hobby is a great distraction from what ails you.

Despite all these new sources of joy, the negative things can still find a way to overwhelm and get you down. The only way to overcome these pains in the ass is to reframe the way your mind thinks about them. I could stress out about not finishing my NaNoWriMo novel this month, or I could simply tell myself that it’s just for fun anyway. Whether I write 50,000 words or 5,000, that’s still more than I would have written otherwise. Something that’s supposed to be a fun creative endeavor shouldn’t stress me out.

As much as I can already feel the nervousness and anxiety of this weekend’s tournament, I can just as easily envision the feeling of relief when it’s all over. It’s just one day. One day of nerves and excitement, and it will inevitably come to an end. Those feelings aren’t going to last forever. When I wake up Saturday morning, every minute that goes by brings me closer to the end of the day, when I can finally breathe a sigh of relief and relax, win or lose. It’s going to be a big day, but when it’s over I can enjoy a long drive home listening to my favorite music, and then it’s smooth sailing to the holidays.

As for the breakup, I can’t have any regrets about my performance or the person I was for the past year. When you look at the big picture, it was really, really great. My expectations were a little mismanaged, but what can you do other than remember that for next time? If something doesn’t work out, something else will.

Sometimes there’s so much going on in our heads that it can be impossible to think straight, and that’s when we get overwhelmed. As I’ve said here before, there’s only a finite amount of space between our ears; keeping everything locked up and bouncing around in there is a recipe for a mental breakdown. That’s where the brain dump comes in: writing down every single thing on your mind in one huge list. Every phone call you have to make, assignment you have to do, errand you have to run, person you have to talk to, thought you need to capture, anything and everything. Once it’s down on paper, you can stop worrying about it. You don’t have to think about it, and you won’t forget it because it’s written down. It’s out of your head. Emptying your brain frees and calms your mind, which makes it much easier to breathe.

I still don’t love November, but emptying my mind out here helps me put things in perspective. The good things will last forever; the bad feelings are temporary. November is just a bump in a very long road, and it’s only a matter of time before December 1.

Primal Workouts

I posted earlier this week about Mark Sisson’s new book, The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation, and reading it has reminded me of one of the many things I love about the Primal lifestyle: simple workouts.

The underlying theme behind the Primal Blueprint’s quick and efficient fitness regimen is that 80% of our body composition is the result of diet, not exercise. It might only take 15 minutes to eat a 1000 calorie cheeseburger from McDonald’s, but you’d have to run for well over an hour to burn most of that off. Thus, killing yourself in the gym to make up for a poor diet is not only inefficient, but exhausting and unsustainable. It’s much easier to eat healthy and exercise less. As Mark says in the book, exercise should be about the movement rather than the calories. It’s about staying young and active, not compensating for ice cream cones.

Primal Blueprint fitness consists of three elements: moving slowly, lifting heavy things, and sprinting once in a while. The majority of exercise takes the form of low intensity activities, like walking or hiking. Two days a week are dedicated to bodyweight exercises, including pushups, pullups, squats, overhead presses, and planks. Finally, once a week or so, you sprint with maximum effort.

The best part of these routines is that they’re quick and enjoyable. Lifting Heavy Things only lasts about 45 minutes, and that’s with a high amount of reps. Sprint workouts only last ten or fifteen minutes. If you’re active most of the time — i.e. not at a desk for eight hours a day — and have a proper diet, little else is necessary.

I’ve tried Insanity and P90X, and while they’re great for a swift kick in the ass, by the end of the program, you’re going to be exhausted and burnt out. Find me someone who completes P90X and then exercises the next day. It’s unsustainable longterm. Overtraining is what causes us to fall out of healthy routines, and being too tired to workout sucks.

That’s why I love the Primal Blueprint. It doesn’t demand an hour of my time six days a week, and it’s much more fun than working out in front of my TV at night. My mood is elevated afterward, and exercise doesn’t become a source of dread. Coupled with the Primal diet, it all just works.

Mark Sisson's New Book

Today, Mark Sisson released his new book, The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation:

If you are new to the Primal scene, this book is one-stop shopping for all you need to know to enjoy the most life-altering benefits of living Primally within 21 days. If you are currently Primal-aligned and wish that somehow, some way, you could bestow the “secret” onto family or friends who are too reluctant or too busy, this book should definitely do the trick. It’s beautifully designed and illustrated and packed with over 100 color photos and concise section summaries – a page-turner even for the most attention- challenged among us in the digital age.

It’s available in paperback and on the Kindle. I’m almost halfway through it already, and I’m excited to pass it along to others.

Between my thesis, work, the changing season, and everything that’s happened at Apple recently, I’ve been a bit lazy with my Primal living, so I’m looking forward to getting back on the path.

On Caffeine & Alcohol

The other day, a friend asked me how my fondness for simplicity and minimalism affects my stance on things like caffeine and alcohol. Good question.

I don’t partake in either. Obviously, the two substances aren’t synonymous, but my reasons for abstaining apply to both.

1. Consumption. A central focus of minimalism is to break free from the bonds of our material-oriented, advertising-driven society. Minimalism is built on the concepts of less and enough. The goal is to stop consuming things you don’t need. This includes making unnecessary purchases and eating unhealthy foods just because a television commercial says you should. Consuming less frees you to do other things. Consuming less also helps you save money, and I would hate to make a habit of spending $4 at Starbucks every day or however many dollars at the liquor store every weekend. Water satiates all of my liquid-consuming needs, and it’s free.

2. Dependence. I never want to be in a situation where I need caffeine or alcohol to function properly. I never want to be one of those people who is “useless until I’ve had my coffee”. I don’t want to have to have a drink to become the life of the party, if I was actually interested in being that person. Dependence is limiting. By not needing these things, I become a little more free, and my life is a little bit simpler.

3. Health. This post isn’t meant to be a self-righteous indictment of people who enjoy caffeinated or alcoholic beverages. If it was, I’d have no friends. Clearly, there are appropriate ways to enjoy these things, i.e. in moderation. Several health-related websites I follow actually advocate caffeine for its purported health benefits, and you can find plenty of articles discussing the benefits of a glass of red wine with dinner. For my part, I certainly do enjoy a cup of tea once or twice a week. Alcohol, on the other hand, is poisonous to the human body, but I can understand how some people enjoy its effects, taste, or other properties. Being healthy in today’s society is challenging enough, though, and I’d rather avoid the added difficulty altogether.

4. Personal. Coffee smells delicious, but most of that stuff is disgusting. I make no apologies for this position. As for alcohol, I’ve just never seen the point, for all the above reasons. I’m not a party-goer, so I don’t need the boost in social skills. I can’t speak for taste, but most of it doesn’t smell good. The concept of being drunk holds no appeal to me because I can’t possibly fathom how you would want to voluntarily give up control of the one thing you actually have control over, which is your mind. Plus, my dad’s been a recovering alcoholic for many, many years, and since I’m a lot like him, I feel its best to follow his example and avoid any alcoholism in my family’s history entirely.

I think that sums it up. Again, these are just my opinions, and I encourage you to do what works for you.

Coincidentally, Ev Bogue just posted about why he untethered from alcohol. It’s a good read.

Sitting and Standing at Work

An ergonomics study at Cornell reveals that while sitting remains unhealthy, so do prolonged periods of standing. Their bottom line:


Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable, downward titling keyboard tray for the best work posture, then every 20 minutes stand for 2 minutes AND MOVE. The absolute time isn’t critical but about every 20-30 minutes take a posture break and move for a couple of minutes.  Simply standing is insufficient.

Good to hear, since most standing desks I’ve come across are quite expensive.

Via Daring Fireball

Get Primal!

Today is the first day of Mark Sisson’s annual Primal Blueprint 30-Day Challenge:

So what’s the challenge? To get Primal, of course! I hold this 30-Day Challenge every year to encourage Primal beginners to give this way of eating, moving and living a try because I know it works, I know how empowering it is, and I know it changes lives.

As I mentioned last week, Mark’s Primal Blueprint has been the only health regimen I’ve stuck with for any significant period of time. The 30-day challenge is the perfect opportunity to get started.

Making a big lifestyle change is really difficult, but that’s the great thing about 30 days. It forces you to start right now, and while you’re making a commitment, it doesn’t have to last forever if you decide you don’t like it. Give it a try.

The Importance of Mindless Activities

I spent the majority of Labor Day weekend home alone, camped out on my couch, playing an old video game from my childhood.

This was an odd occurrence, as I don’t do much video gaming anymore, but the urge to go back to the nostalgic pastime of my youth was unusually strong. I had just finished working a couple of six-day weeks, and I’d been putting a lot of time and effort into building this site for more than a month straight. I was tired.

At first, I felt a guilty about spending a long weekend inside, glued to a television screen. I thought, “I should go running,” or “I should write something new,” or any number of other more productive activities.

But then I realized that time off is a good thing. Joshua Becker, of Becoming Minimalist, just wrote a post about the underappreciation of rest in today’s society:

Rest has become confused with laziness. We live in a society that praises those who work 60hrs/week and makes faulty assumptions about those who work 40. We have confused rest with laziness. And while too much rest may indeed be an indicator of sloth, the regular practice of finding rest is not.

Sometimes, you need to do something mindless. It lets your mind and body recharge and recuperate so that you’re better prepared for what comes next. There’s no reason to feel guilty about not going to the gym once in a while. Your muscles — physical and mental — need time to recover. Forcing additional work from them when you’ve got nothing left in the tank will only run yourself into the ground, and then you’ll miss several days due to illness or injury.

When I was working in a cubicle and sitting at a desk for eight hours a day, I was exhausted. I’d wake up, drive 45 minutes to a building, sit there all day, go to class, and then drive 45 minutes home. Add in homework and finding time to sleep and exercise, and things weren’t all that enjoyable. I’d daydream about all the things I’d do once the weekend finally arrived and I had some time to myself. But when the weekend finally did show up, I didn’t do anything. I’d just spend it screwing around on the computer, not getting anything done that I’d wanted to. I was too tired to do anything but sit.

This is why the occasional mindless activity is so important. If you work too hard for too long, you get burned out, which can be depressing and actually make you sick. That’s your body forcing you to rest. When you take a rest voluntarily, be it with video games, or reading a book, or taking a walk, your mind and body get a chance to regain their strength. Once you’ve gotten enough rest, once you’ve done nothing for a while, you actually regain the drive and motivation to do things naturally, without having to force it.

After I finished my coursework for my master’s degree, I spent all of June and most of July doing a whole lot of nothing. I worked at my usual summer job, but otherwise I spent my time relaxing. Once I had gotten enough rest, I found that I wanted to start doing something, to start creating something, which turned into this website. If I hadn’t had that time to decompress and get back to neutral, I may not have created QLE. So those two months weren’t full of laziness, they were full of necessary rest, which gave me the strength to create something new.

So, don’t feel guilty about doing nothing once in a while, whatever your version of nothing may be. The gym will still be there tomorrow, and you’ll be able to hit it twice as hard. If we never stopped to rest, we’d still be doing everything we ever started, and that’s no way to get anything done.

Step Off, Step On

Yesterday, my family made pizza on the grill for Labor Day. I wasn’t thrilled.

When I was younger, I had a long period when I actually didn’t like pizza. I know: what self-respecting kid doesn’t like pizza? I wasn’t an overly health-conscious adolescent or anything, but something about it didn’t sit right with me. Maybe it was the scalding hot tomato sauce, which to this day never fails to burn my mouth, or the abrasive crust, or the guaranteed messy fingers afterward.

Whatever the reason, I did eventually overcome my fears and learn to enjoy pizza. I still do, but yesterday’s feast was a struggle for me, and it led to me thinking about the issue of exceptions and how to make them effectively.

First, a little background…

A couple of years ago, I broke up with my then-girlfriend and found myself with considerably more free time on my hands. Up to that point, I had been adverse to any kind of healthy diet. I just didn’t feel inclined to suffer through eating grass and tree bark. I wasn’t even overweight, although I probably could have been considered skinny-fat.

But in that post-breakup moment, wherein I needed something new to focus on, I decided that the past 22 years of eating garbage had run their course, and it was time to get down to business. So, I started trying to eat healthier and exercise on a more frequent basis. I scoured the internet and found a solution that made sense to me and seemed like a sustainable lifestyle.

It took me close to two years to fully assimilate to my new and improved way of life. During that transition period, being consistently healthy was a struggle. You never really realize how unhealthy society is until you try to break free from it. Junk food is everywhere. Friends want to go out to dinner. People bring trays of cupcakes into the office for literally no reason. And sometimes, your mind just convinces yourself that one little bite is okay, even when it turns into twenty.

I stuck with it though, and now I’m at a point where I actually enjoy eating healthy more than eating junk food. It’s still tough sometimes, but on most days, I have no trouble avoiding cookies or turning down cupcakes. Even though they’re everywhere.

Now, back to my mention of exceptions.

Some members of my family, who don’t adhere to my personal health philosophy, have a hard time understanding the parts that seem controversial by conventional wisdom’s standards. I understand this difficulty because I would have felt the same way two years ago.

So, I was informed in advance that we were having pizza for Labor Day, and there was, essentially, nothing I could do about it. At first, I said I would eat beforehand and then come over, but I was told we were having guests, and that would be rude. My mom asked, “Can’t you just make an exception this one time?”

Of course I could. Did I want to? Absolutely not.

I know how I feel after an off-day of eating. It bums me out. It feels like all progress up to that point has been shot to hell. It feels unfair that I should have to sacrifice for others’ unhealthy habits. Did I have missteps once in a while? Obviously, but I would rather save those for instances when I had absolutely no control over the situation. If there was a way to avoid a misstep, why would I voluntarily choose not to take it?

Well, to make an increasing long story short, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. I understand manners, and sometimes there’s no point in creating an unnecessary argument. Sometimes, you just have to eat pizza.

So, I ate the pizza, but I also managed to enjoy it by altering my perspective so that it wouldn’t bum me out too badly. Here’s how:

First, one cheat meal is better than an entire cheat day. People like to have a Pop-Tart for breakfast and say, “Welp, the day’s shot. Might as well start over tomorrow.” That attitude is detrimental and does more harm to your goal than need be. In the grand scheme of things, one cheat meal is only a blip on the radar, and it won’t undo months of progress. Several cheat days, however, will take much longer to recover from.

Second, I still had a great deal of control even though I was giving in to the pizza gods. I ate healthy all day so I wouldn’t be starving at pizza time, which would have caused me to overeat. I tried each kind of pizza, but I didn’t scarf down enough slices to make me uncomfortably full afterward. You don’t always have to kill yourself on an off day.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, after dinner, I went right back to my old habits. The path is always there, waiting for you to step back on. I didn’t think, “Oh, the day is ruined!” and stay up all night eating cookies and ice cream. One misstep doesn’t have to lead off a cliff. I stepped off the path, then course-corrected and stepped back on. Nothing worth agonizing over.

This is the mindset that has been most effective for helping me deal with those inevitable exceptions to my rules. I think it works for me because I’ve been trying to adhere to this lifestyle for so long that exceptions themselves have become unwanted. People who are just starting out, who haven’t fully transitioned and possibly don’t even enjoy what they’re trying to achieve, often want to cheat. They want and look for excuses to make exceptions.

The strategies above are not excuses for stepping off the path; they are mental adjustments for coping with stepping off the path when you wish you didn’t have to. The smaller the step off, the smaller the step to get back on.

How to Love the Taste of Water

When my sister and I were younger, she was a candy fanatic, but I was a diehard soda drinker. Give me a glass of root beer over some Skittles any day.

That changed when I moved away to college and realized that if I didn’t take care of myself, no one else would. So, almost cold turkey, I stopped drinking soda and began drinking water. I never liked water growing up because I thought it tasted boring, but now I rarely drink anything else.

Wikihow has a very thorough article called “How to Love the Taste of Water”. One tip reads:

Drink only water for a while. This might seem counterintuitive, but when you drink super-sweet beverages like soda pop and juice all the time, it is hard for water to compete. Your affinity for sweetness can decrease if you expose yourself to less of it.

This is exactly the experience I had in college. When you drink soda, gatorade, or some other sweetened beverage regularly, there’s no way water will win out. The article has a host of practical tips for helping you change the way you think about H2O.

Everyone knows you should drink plenty of water, but if you’re still struggling develop the habit, a change in perspective might do the trick.

Via Lifehacker

Sweet Agony

Jonah Lehrer’s “How to Drink Gatorade” over at Wired:

There are two lessons here. The first is that Gatorade is a waste of money. If you really want to improve performance, gargle with something that actually tastes good, since it was the activation of reward areas that allowed the cyclists to exert maximum performance.

The idea is that Gatorade’s sweet flavor distracts the brain and prevents it from focusing on the pain and exertion of intense exercise, thereby yielding better performance. Pretty fascinating.

Maybe I’ll bring a pack of gum along on my next run.