Just About Everthing Works
If you read my biography on this website, you will realize that about fifteen years ago I lost over one-hundred pounds of bodyweight, and I have kept it off ever since. In future editions of this blog, I will outline in some detail the process I went through to get the weight off and keep it off. For now, however, I just want to make three points from the proverbial thirty-thousand-foot view:
(1) It is primarily about diet.
(2) The key to diet is compliance.
(3) The key to compliance is easily followed rules.
Let’s take these up in turn. First, it’s mostly about diet. I had worked out since I was twelve years old. I had been an athlete my whole life. The problem, however, is that, even though I had intentionally built some good dispositions for exercise, my dietary habits were terrible. No matter how much you are working out, it is not hard to out-eat your exercise regime. I can happily burn up 1200 calories during a long trail ride on my bike, but I can easily undue that burn with a couple big meals later that day. The margin for error is pretty small, and it’s very easy to cancel your exercise with bad dietary habits. Moreover, I have always found it easier to say “yes” to difficult challenges, such as a hard workout, than to say “no” to easily available pleasures, such as junk food. Thus, the habit of exercise, in my experience, is much easier to build than good dietary habits. Even though I was an athlete and dedicated to working out, I still got fat because I was equally “dedicated” to eating like I had a death wish. My body composition did not significantly move until I got the diet piece of the puzzle in order. Of course, exercise is a necessary part of the puzzle too, but I think it’s the easier piece to obtain and its importance relative to diet is often overestimated.
Second, I believe that the specific diet you follow is less important than your compliance to whatever diet you choose. Yes, there are some daffy diets out there (as there are likewise useless and even dangerous gimmicks among exercise programs), and I’m not saying every diet works. In the last fifteen years, however, I have tried a lot of different dietary programs, e.g., calorie counting, macronutrient counting, meal replacement strategies, Paleo, Keto, frequent meals, fasting, etc., etc. I haven’t tried all these different approaches because I’m looking for something that finally works. No, I just like to experiment. Really, they all have worked for me pretty well (though some better than others), both in terms of body composition and performance. I think the reason is that all these approaches mostly eliminate the garbage in the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.!), and I complied to them meticulously. Even if you are counting calories, you will find in a hurry that a bowl of oatmeal and a couple eggs is a much better investment of your precious few calories for the day than a fast-food breakfast sandwich. Thus, my view is that it is less a matter of which diet you use, but how well you stick to it. Compliance and discipline are the keys. There’s just no way around the fact that adhering to a structured plan over the long haul is the only real path to success.
Finally, compliance is greatly enhanced by simplicity. One of the raps against calorie counting is that it is very tedious to have to read labels, weigh portions, make quick calculations on a paper napkin at a restaurant, adjust your calorie allowance for your change in body composition, etc. etc. True enough, that is all a pain! I made it work, however, by completely routinizing the process. I had the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner for twenty of the twenty-one meals I ate each week (I gave myself a Friday night cheat meal): Breakfast – oatmeal and eggs; lunch – sandwich, salad, and fruit; dinner – lean meat and veggies. I had the same shopping list every week. I could easily meal prep, but I also picked options that didn’t take much prep. Boring? Yes. Easy to follow? Yes! Effective? YES! I found I had little problem sticking to this plan, since it reduced my dietary choices to easily followed rules. It was boring, but I didn’t notice because it all became routine. Is brushing your teeth every morning boring? No, it’s just what you do now. Of course, I still had to stick to the rules – you’ll always need discipline! – but I eliminated a lot of the opportunity to cheat by cutting the options to the bare bones. The simpler the rules you have the follow, the more likely you are to follow them and subsequently build the habits that make things easier. I ate this way for a couple years, and I got great results. This is more or less the approach I outline in my book, Ageless Athlete.
I have been eating a ketogenic diet coupled with intermittent fasting for the last few years. I’m not saying you should do this, but only noting that it is working for me extremely well. I think the main advantage for me is that the practice is held in place with a set of VERY simple rules: I don’t eat starchy/sugary carbs, I don’t eat before 12:00 PM or after 5:00 PM, and once each week I fast for twenty-four hours. There are other subsidiary principles, e.g., high on good fats, lots of veggies, etc., but those three rules are the mainstays. This actually makes life pretty easy for me. I walk into a restaurant, and I can eliminate most of the menu options. Is it before noon? Well, I just don’t eat yet. Is it my complete fasting day? Well, I just don’t eat all. There’s no decision to make as long as I stick to these rules. Constraint is a good, when your goal is compliance. The more options I have, the more opportunities I have to go wrong. These very simple commitments block almost all those bad paths. After following these rules for years, it’s all basically on autopilot for me now. I really don’t think much about my diet during the typical day, which makes it easier to stay on track. These rules dictate my grocery shopping too, so they eliminate a lot of the temptations from my daily environment. The game is rigged! The system does most of the deliberating for me, which takes my tendency to go astray out of the loop to a very high degree.
I don’t say any of this to recommend a particular diet. The point is that diet is the biggest piece of the puzzle and to find a dietary strategy you can maintain for the long haul by the application of very simple rules. Develop a system that rigs the game for you!
The same does go for exercise too – you need to have programs and workouts with a low cognitive cost of entry, i.e., simple to execute and stick to. It will be hard to stick to an exercise program, if it requires you to make complicated decisions on a daily basis, travel to specific locations, have access to extensive equipment, and so forth. Your workouts should follow some basic principles that are flexible enough to be executed even when your day doesn’t go perfectly as planned. If you find something you can comply to easily, your chances of success are much better. You can find that sort of thing here.
The Bottom Line: We need options that off-load the deliberation onto a system of easily followed rules. You have to stick to the rules, but once you get that habit in place it all gets pretty easy!