@kaler

The following is a list, in no particular order, of those activities that most commonly elicit Resistance:

…

3) Any diet or health regimen.

…

5) Any activity whose aim is tighter abdominals.

– Steven Pressfield. The War of Art.

Losing weight is easy.

Do 40 minutes of anaerobic activity like lifting weights three times each week.  Do 20 minutes of aerobic activity three times each week. Have egg whites and oatmeal for breakfast, tuna salad for lunch, and a chicken breast with rice for dinner.

3 hours of effort a week for a few weeks and you will have achieved your goal.

Simple, right?

Physiology versus Psychology

- If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.

Lao Tzu

I’ve been thinking a lot about problem solving lately and the effect our own brain has on that activity.  I am a technical person.  I tend to break down all challenges into engineering problems and start applying the scientific method.

Losing weight should be easy.  Expend more energy than you consume and you will have achieved your goal.  It is that simple from a physiological perspective.

It’s much more complex from a psychological perspective.  There are a lot of moving parts that you have to manage to achieve your goals.  The brain deals with many concerns over the course of a day.  We use words like focus, motivation, tenacity, determination, and persistence to describe all of this management.  I like to use another word:

obsession |əbˈse sh ən|

noun

• an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person’s mind : he was in the grip of an obsession he was powerless to resist.

Generally, the term obsession has a negative connotation.  The usual implication is that you don’t have control over your thoughts.

The plan is to tweak our brain just like we would tweak our diet or workout plan.

Before & After Pictures

I will spare you the shirtless pictures.  The first picture is my big, fat head from December 2008.  I peaked at about 197lbs.  The second picture is this morning.  I’m hovering at about 160lbs now.

Before

After

Measure

I have one cup of coffee exactly at 6AM and another one at 3PM.  These are the perfect times for me to drink coffee and the perfect amount.  I know this because I kept a spreadsheet with every coffee I drank for 3 months.

I then correlated it with my timesheets in Harvest.  I track all of my billable and non-billable hours.  I started by tracking just working hours.  It has now expanded into tracking almost every activity.

I also did this with the amount of water I drink and how much I sleep.

You can automate a lot of this tracking.  I use an App on the iPhone called LoseIt to track every calorie I eat.  There is now also a companion website.

I also use Track Your Happiness.  This service sends me an SMS three times a day.  A follow a link on my phone and fill out a survey.  I get a set pretty graphs at the end of the month that correlate how happy I am with what activities I was doing at the time.

Automate

The easiest way to make sure your brain doesn’t get in the way is to not think at all.

The spreadsheet with with your budget probably has a macro that automatically adds up your expenses for the month.  You probably have an email filter setup for that friend that happens to send three emails a day with the subject: “FUNNIEST JOKE IN THE WORLD. LOL”

The same principle applies to your brain.  Do the thinking once, up front and then don’t allow yourself to stray the next time.  If you’ve been to my apartment, you’ve probably seen all of the checklists that I have taped up everywhere.  I scribble on all the windows with dry erase markers.

These are the exact 6 things that I do in the morning.  Every morning.

Checklist

The Future

You probably are not as obsessive as I am.  So, how does this help you?  Well, it probably won’t.

You can start by measuring calorie intake and your happiness.  LoseIt and TrackYourHappines only take a few minutes each day if you carry around an iPhone.

However, the future is little devices that help you automatically measure all of this data.  You may have used a pedometer like the Nike+ system to count the number of steps that you take in a day.  The Fitbit, WakeMate, and Zeo are devices that measure how many calories you expend and how much you sleep amongst other things.

The onus is on you to realize that you are trying to exercise your brain and not just your body.

Conclusion

I did some ridiculous things to drop 37lbs.  I did hot yoga for 90 minutes a day for 30 days straight.  I did two a day workoutf for a month.  I wear 4 layers of clothing when I’m on the elliptical.

But really, that stuff doesn’t matter as much as keeping your head in the game.