Listening to the Hidden Brain podcast that narthur posted recently, I recalled that in fact this really isn’t AT ALL “all I do” – it’s the end result, but that’s not the mechanism. Here are some things that come to mind, there are probably more:
- Overall: will come as no surprise to people here, but I’m relying on a lot of tricks, not so much on willpower
- I forgive myself when I do occasionally go out of my limits, but when I’m outside the range, I do treat it seriously, so they quickly come back into range.
- Expanding on that; when I say “within 1 kg”, I don’t mean that every single day is strictly within that range. There are a few points out of range over a period of months and years – but not many, and again when it happens I take it seriously.
- The experience while actively losing a significant amount of weight (rather than weight maintenance involving short periods of a week or two of weight loss) of seeing the very predictable impact on the moving average over time of eating less gives you a very motivating sense of control. I say “motivating” glibly, but I’m not sure I fully understand exactly why this is so helpful. Not to be underestimated I think. Walker’s book explains this very well: you may understand this idea intellectually, but it’s worth reading his book to motivate yourself.
- Expanding on that: I find that knowing that you can get back to the right weight within a week or two makes sticking to eating less for a time much easier. You know at the end of that week or two, you’ll be able to eat what you like and still be doing fine on weight. So the smaller the weight range you pick, the easier it is to stick to, in this sense.
- I am still somewhat obsessed with looking at the chart every day. I enter my weight and then find myself sometimes staring for minutes at the chart, thinking how many days until my weight is exactly what I want it to be. I think this is a good thing since it still seems to help keep me in line.
- I weigh myself every day, that helps a lot with the statistics of the moving average, and of course with keeping up the habit of weighing at all, and with having it in your mind that you’re trying to keep strictly to some limits.
- When I need to eat less, I congratulate myself on having denied myself things. I pick stuff up, think “am I doing this or not?” then put it back on the shelf, and mentally congratulate myself.
- When I need to eat less, I often stick to exactly the same meals that have worked over time previously: for example I often make salad in basically the same way (though it always has a lot of different ingredients, and they vary depending on what I have, but the routine of making it is very familiar), I eat porridge in the morning with the same amount of skimmed milk in it, I skip lunch sometimes etc. This seems to help because then I know when to stop: it’s when I ate the same as I did on the other days when things were going OK on the weight chart. Knowing that also helps with the effort of stopping eating at the end of the day: you just become familiar with the idea that that’s that for today, and less often have to exercise willpower to stick to that.
- The rule is clear: the chart has literal (horizontal) red lines showing the weight range I have to stay within.
- When I was actively losing weight, and then later when I’d tend to yoyo inside the weight range I set myself and was heading down again, I had a cupboard where I put stuff that I could eat when I hit my target. (That was useful at the time, but I’ve mostly weaned myself off that now)
- Sometimes when I feel the need to stuff something into my face, I make popcorn (no sugar). Incidentally, I’ve also used that as a reward to do just when starting a stint on another habit that I’m aversive to.
- At some point years ago, I noticed that the same “putting stuff in your face” habit was transferrable from whatever bad stuff I was eating at the time to things like lettuce leaves, and I found that to satisfy the habit surprisingly well. (this reminds me of the stale popcorn experiment from the podcast)
One thing I wonder about with my approach is how healthy my pattern of gaining and losing weight within the range I’ve set myself is. For a few years it’s been to some extent a bit “yoyoing” – but within a smallish (1 kg) range. That’s one reason I’m trying to smooth it out and reduce the range recently (the other is I don’t want to ever have to wait a long time before I can say “sod it, today I’m eating what I like”). But since I don’t know a good explanation why “weight yoyoing” is bad, I really don’t know whether what I do counts as that or not. I think that’s a problem with the emphasis in recent decades on “evidence-based medicine”: Popper told us science isn’t really based on evidence at all, but rather corrected by it. Maybe somebody here knows more about why weight yoyoing is bad?