breakfast with cron [11/13/2006 11:24:21]

I propose that a diet is a heavyweight methodology.

In the past, I've looked at dieting and getting in shape, and asked myself: what is the constraint? On a very physical level, the constraint is exercise: there's only so much exercise you can do, and you can consume calories far faster than you burn them. So if you don't subordinate your eating habits to your exercise capacity, then you wind up getting fat.

Once you have this concept in place, you can follow the various steps for dealing with the constraint, by exercising more, or doing more intense exercise in the same amount of time, or lowering your caloric intake, or finding other ways to burn more calories, such as adding muscle, inducing a fever, or taking stimulants like ephedra. It's pretty easy to work out the math behind all this, or even just use common sense, and come up with a plan. Generally it's something along the lines of: eat right and exercise.

And yet I'm still dealing with this problem. I'm a hundred pounds heavier than I was in college, and I've been gaining and losing weight for years. Almost three months ago, I set a goal to lose 80 pounds within a year, but instead of losing a comfortable seven pounds a month, I've been gaining two pounds a month, despite hours and hours spent riding my bike. I know I've packed on some leg muscle, but that doesn't account for the 27 pound difference between where I am and where I could have been by now.

Obviously the problem is not that I don't know how to lose weight. And it's not that I've been struggling with willpower. I do sometimes have the willpower battles with myself, but they're rare. Most of the time I just follow my old habits and rationalize them so quickly that it doesn't even occur to me that I'm not moving toward my goal.

The real constraint in losing weight is focus. Focus is a limited commodity, because we've only got so much brainpower, and only so many hours in the day. And even if we turn our phones off and lock the doors, we've still got hardware interrupts that keep us from focusing too long: we get hungry and tired and so on.

This is actually a major problem for me, because I can have a great day where I stick to my goals and stay focused, and yet I have to go to bed at some point, and when I wake up, there's no guarantee that I'm going to get back on track.

In some ways, life was a whole lot easier when I had a boss, or when I had a business partner, or when I had a personal trainer. I meet once a week with a friend to discuss goals, and those meetings have helped me get back on track several times when I've wandered off into unproductive territory. But weekly feedback is not enough. Daily feedback isn't enough.

On a team, when you have people working in the same building or same room, you have instantaneous feedback. Working alone, you miss out on that. If I want to take an hour out of my day to read a book or write a long rambling blog post, I can do that. I would not feel comfortable doing that if I had a boss, or even an employee in the office. It would be shameful. And yet I don't feel that as I sit here and type this. That's kind of crazy. In a company of two or more people, my brain implicitly understands the idea we're here to work.

It's much harder to cope with the idea that I'm here to work. I don't consider writing this post work, but I see value in it because it's helping me clarify a concept that I hope will make it easier to reach my goals.

To put this in another light, I have a lot of flexibility to focus on different areas of my life. I can be thinking about fitness, or my company, or relationships, and my priorities shift between them throughout the day, either because I choose something to focus on, or because I get caught up responding to something: a customer complaint, an idea that popped into my head, or a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Often, health and fitness fades into the background and I forget to think about it until I'm sick to my stomach because I just ate a large pizza and a pint of ice cream. That's happened many times over the years.

So, when I had a boss and coworkers, the nature of that relationship forced me to focus on work, but nobody ever seemed to notice that I was neglecting my health and packing on the pounds (least of all, myself).

It wasn't until I had a personal trainer that I was able to sustain my focus on health. Before (and after) her, I'd fizzle out after a few weeks of lifting weights. I'd just lose focus, and eventually I'd completely forget that I was working out. The same thing happened during the exercise itself. When I lift weights by myself, I get bored and my mind wanders. A 40 minute workout often takes me an hour and a half, most of which is just me staring off into space during the pauses between sets. I have all kinds of little tricks to fight those tendencies, but they're just not the same as having Kate around telling me to push.

I need to learn to handle that stuff by myself. I want to say that if you can keep appointments with a trainer, there's no reason you can't keep an appointments with yourself, but there is a reason: it's easier to change my own schedule than to change someone else's. So while I would think twice about changing an appointment on someone else, I'd be much more flexible changing one that was just for myself. That's kind of what the weekly meetings are about: we share the agreements we make with ourselves, so that someone else has at least a small interest in making sure we keep them.

But it's not just keeping appointments. It's remembering to make the next appointment. Whenever Kate and I were done with a session, we always figured out our next appointment. When I had a boss, he knew to expect me every weekday unless we made other arrangements. But on my own, the schedule's always up in the air. You can only plan so far ahead before the plan becomes useless, and eventually you have to make the next plan. So the planning process itself often falls prey to distraction and gets derailed. I think the three months I've kept my current list of goals intact is a new record. Even so, I still worry I'll forget about the list before I complete it, or that I'll keep the list but never quite finish the goals.

So the real problem of a diet, or any big goal, isn't figuring out what to do to reach the goal, but rather figuring out how to make yourself do it. In many cases, you're up against years and years of entrenched habit.

Habits are a byproduct of the way groups of neurons work. A neuron is sort of like a switch that's plugged into a bunch of other switches. When a neuron fires (switches on), it tells its neighbors. Depending on how they are connected, neuron A might excite neuron B, or it might inhibit neuron B, making B more or less likely to fire. These connections can become stronger or weaker over time through a process we call learning (when it happens on its own) or training (when we guide it along). Our senses and thoughts are constantly causing neurons to fire, which cause other neurons to fire in elaborate chain reactions. Habits are nothing more than really really long chain reactions of neurons, and that's why they're so hard to overcome without external feedback: changing a habit is like trying to replace your car's engine while you're driving it.

This is why I think diet is a heavyweight methodology. It's about dictating an extended plan of action that runs counter to the way the brain works, and it doesn't take into account the needs and capabilities of the team members (i.e., your internal organs). Then there's the constant need to plan and prepare (at the grocery store, for example). It's a massive undertaking.

I think a more agile approach is to create a feedback mechanism, external to the brain, that manages focus. This could be as simple as an egg timer, except that you have to remember to set the timer. Even better would be an electronic device that helped you manage your focus long enough to develop new habits. This is why I want cron for my brain.

Imagine having a device that, at a certain time each morning, vibrated or played a ringtone until you agreed to a plan for the day. Then it would help you create the plan.

Planning might include asking a question like, "What's the next action you need to take in order to create a strong, healthy body?" The answer could be exercise or a healthy breakfast or buying groceries or getting a good night's sleep. The answer to a question like that is never going to be order a pizza or pig out on chocolate.

Whatever it is, you'd schedule that action at some point in the future - generally in the next couple hours, and you'd commit to following through. But that's all you'd have to commit to. The system reminds you about the agreement with an alarm just like any electronic planner, but then you tell it how long you think the action is going to take, and when that time is up, it fires off another alarm: the one telling you to schedule the next action.

Now, you're creating a system to manage your short term focus and behavior, one that doesn't depend on willpower or habit to use it. It's essentially an alarm clock for goal setting. And really it could apply to any goal, not just fitness.

Anyway, my next action for creating a healthy body is to go for a quick bike ride down at the park, so that's what I'm going to do. :)