How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (22 page)

Exercise
has two very different benefits that are hard to untangle. The exercise itself releases natural pain-relieving substances, endorphins,
³
and that gives you a direct feeling of well-being. But exercise is also a mental escape from whatever was stressing you before you laced your athletic shoes. That’s why I recommend forms of exercises that occupy your mind at the same time as your muscles.

Exercise also helps you sleep better, so that’s a double benefit.
⁴
Of the big five factors in happiness—flexible schedule, imagination, diet, exercise, and sleep—my pick for the most important is exercise. If exercise sounds like a lot of work, wait for my chapter on the easiest way to become active.

If the list of five elements for happiness seems incomplete, that’s intentional. I know you might also want sex, a soul mate, fame, recognition, a feeling of importance, career success, and lots more. My contention is that your five-pronged pursuit of happiness will act as a magnet for the other components of happiness you need. When you’re fit, happy, and full of energy, people are far more likely to have sex with you, be your friend, and hire you, sometimes all in the same day.

If you’re chubby, tired, horny, and unhappy, then your best long-term solution probably isn’t
Match.com
. I’m a proponent of online dating services because the evidence shows they work. But a smarter approach is to take care of yourself first and use that success as leverage to get everything else you need.

I’ll cap this discussion by telling you the story of how I felt when my cartooning career reached its high point. It was the late nineties and I had just deposited the biggest check of my life, thanks largely to a multibook publishing deal. I had the precise job I had wanted since childhood. I was officially rich. I was as famous as I wanted to be. And I was suddenly and profoundly sad. What the hell was going on?

After some self-reflection I realized that I was feeling adrift. I no longer had a primary purpose in life because I’d already achieved it. It was an eerie feeling, unreal and unsettling. I had no kids at the time, so I had no reason to achieve anything more. I’d dipped well below my baseline happiness and I wasn’t rebounding.

The way I climbed out of my funk was by realizing that my newly acquired resources could help me change the world in some small but positive ways. That was the motivation for creating the Dilberito, which I hoped would make nutrition convenient and perhaps contribute to a trend. In the long run, the Dilberito didn’t work out. But it
was 100 percent successful in giving me a meaningful purpose, which allowed my optimism and energy to return.

Unhappiness that is caused by too much success is a high-class problem. That’s the sort of unhappiness people work all of their lives to get. If you find yourself there, and I hope you do, you’ll find your attention naturally turning outward. You’ll seek happiness through service to others. I promise it will feel wonderful.

Barry Schwartz, author of
The Paradox of Choice,
tells us that people become unhappy if they have too many options in life. The problem with options is that choosing any path can leave you plagued with self-doubt. You quite rationally think that one of the paths not chosen might have worked out better. That can eat at you.

Choosing among attractive alternatives can also be exhausting. You want to feel as if you researched and considered all of your options. That’s why I find great comfort in routine. If you ask me today where I will be at 6:20
A.M.
on a Saturday morning in the year 2017, I’ll tell you I will be at my desk finishing the artwork on some comics I drew earlier in the week. That’s what I was doing last Saturday at that time and what I plan to do this Saturday as well. I can’t recall the last time I woke up and looked at my options for what to do first. It’s always the same, at least for the first few hours of my day.

Likewise, I always have a banana at about 6:05
A.M.
, my first sip of coffee at about 6:10
A.M.
, and a protein bar to keep me from getting hungry again until late afternoon. I never waste a brain cell in the morning trying to figure out what to do when. Compare that with some people you know who spend two hours planning and deciding for every task that takes one hour to complete. I’m happier than those people.

Recapping the happiness formula:

Eat right.

Exercise.

Get enough sleep.

Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it).

Work toward a flexible schedule.

Do
things you can steadily improve at.

Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself).

Reduce daily decisions to routine.

If you do those eight things, the rest of what you need to stimulate the chemistry of happiness in your brain will be a lot easier to find. In fact, the other components of happiness that you seek—such as career opportunities, love, and friends—might find their way to you if you make yourself an attractive target.

This is a
good time to remind you that nothing in this book should be seen as advice. It’s never a good idea to take advice from cartoonists, and that’s a hundred times more important if the topic is health related. I don’t know how many people have died from following the health advice of cartoonists, but the number probably isn’t zero.

So don’t view this chapter, or anything else I write, as advice. In the coming pages I’ll make reference to some interesting and useful studies about diet. And I’ll describe my own experiences. That will address two dimensions of your bullshit filter—scientific studies and the experience of a smart friend—but just to be on the safe side, talk to your doctor before embracing any ideas in this book.

My value on the topic of diet, if any, is in simplification. The simple diet plan that works for me is this:
I eat as much as I want, of anything I want, whenever I want.
I weigh a trim 145 pounds and have literally never felt better. My healthy weight is not a genetic gift. In years past I have weighed as much as 168 pounds, which looks portly on my smallish frame.

Obviously there are some tricks involved with my too-easy-to-be-true diet plan. The tricks are simple, but they will take some explaining. Let’s start with the part about eating “anything I want.” The trick there is to change what you
want
. Yes, that’s possible, and it’s probably easier than you imagine. Once you
want
to eat the right kinds of food for enjoyment, and you don’t crave the wrong kinds of food, everything else comes somewhat easily.

You
probably need some convincing that people can reprogram their food preferences. But consider how different food tastes when you are famished versus when you have a full stomach. It’s the same food, but your enjoyment level is radically different. The best meal I’m ever tasted was a week after dental surgery because I hadn’t had solid food for days. An ordinary dish of angel-hair pasta tasted as if it had been delivered by a deity and carefully paired to my DNA. A month later, the same meal was boring.

I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences in which bland or even bad food tastes great when you’re hungry. Your taste preferences are more like a suggestion from your brain than a result of hardwiring.

You have also observed that your tastes in food evolve as you age. A kid who can tolerate nothing but mac and cheese matures into an adult who can’t get enough sushi. And I imagine you’ve had the experience of getting sick soon after eating a specific type of food and the finding that the coincidental association completely alters your preference for the food later.

You also might have discovered that some foods you thought were awful tasting can be delightful if prepared and seasoned to your liking. Technique has to be factored into your taste preferences as well.

Your food preferences change continually throughout your life, but you’ve probably never put much effort into
deliberately
changing your preferences. I’ll describe some tricks for doing just that. If the tricks work, you too can eat “whatever you want” because eventually you’ll only want food that is good for you.

I used to crave ice cream in a big way. At one point in my life I consumed up to two heaping bowls of vanilla-bean ice cream per day. During those years, broccoli seemed like the sort of thing that jailers forced prisoners to eat as punishment. Over time I trained myself to reverse my cravings. Now ice cream is easy to resist but I’m not comfortable going two days without a hit of broccoli. This transformation in cravings was the result of a deliberate effort to change my preferences. I set out to hack my brain like a computer and rewire the cravings circuitry.

If no longer craving your favorite food sounds like a sacrifice, it isn’t. That’s an illusion caused by the fact that it’s nearly impossible to imagine losing a craving of any kind. Cravings feel like they grow directly from our core. They feel a part of us. My experience is that cravings can be manipulated. I’ve successfully erased cravings for a
wide variety of less-healthy foods. I do them one at a time, and it’s a lot easier than you might think.

It also works the other way; I can instill cravings for healthy foods where I previously had no such desires. There’s a limit to this trick, in the sense that you probably can’t get past a truly nasty taste. But most healthy food is closer to bland than obnoxious.

Healthy food has a bad reputation with most normal eaters because we associate healthy food with the worst tastes and textures in the category. If healthy food makes you think of tofu, rice cakes, and anything that tastes like soap, you’re probably not too keen to develop a craving for healthy eating. Think instead of delicious salted nuts, a buttery ear of corn, or a banana, and you’re closer to the mark. (I’ll talk later about the trade-offs of consuming salt and butter.)

Changing your food preferences is a fairly straightforward process, and it starts the way all change starts: by looking at things differently. It’s my job to do the hard part and show you a different way to look at the familiar topic of diet. Your part will happen naturally as your own thought process gently nudges your behavior along a predictable and controlled pathway of cause and effect.

My experience, as odd as it sounds, is that I can change my food preferences by thinking of my body as a programmable robot as opposed to a fleshy bag full of magic. This minor change in perspective is more powerful than it seems. Most people believe there is no strong connection between what they eat and how they feel. I call that perception the Fleshy Bag of Magic worldview. When you think of yourself as a fleshy bag of magic, you either assume there is no direct connection between what you eat and how you feel or think your diet has some impact but it’s unpredictable because life is complicated and there are too many factors in play.

Most adults understand the basic cause and effect of their diet choices. They know that overeating makes them feel bloated, beans make them gassy, and spicy food might make their noses run. Those causes and effects are so obvious that they are hard to miss. But have you ever tracked your mood, problem-solving ability, and energy level in relation to what you recently ate? For most of you, the answer is no. You probably think your mood is caused by what’s happening in your life, not the starchy food you ate for lunch.

If
you look at your life from some distance, you can see that today is a lot like yesterday, and tomorrow won’t be that different either. Our lives stay roughly the same, while our moods can swing wildly. My proposition, which I invite you to be skeptical about, is that one of the primary factors in determining your energy level, and therefore your mood, is what you’ve eaten recently.
*

Don’t take my word for it. The food-is-mood hypothesis probably doesn’t pass your commonsense filter. It’s the sort of thing you need to experience for yourself. You’re wired to believe that your mood is determined by whatever good or bad events have happened in your life recently plus your genetic makeup. My observation, backed by the science, is that the person who eats right won’t be bothered as much by the little bumps in life’s road, and he or she will have greater optimism, too.

When bad luck comes around, your reaction to it is a combination of how bad the luck is plus how prepared your body is for the stress. You can’t keep all bad luck from finding you, but you can fortify yourself to the point where the smaller stuff bounces off. Your mood is a function of chemistry in your body, and food may be a far more dominant contributor to your chemistry than what is happening around you, at least during a normal day.

Remember the first time someone told you it would be hard to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time? You probably didn’t believe it until you tried it yourself. Some types of knowledge can be acquired only by experience. Diet’s connection to mood is one of those categories of knowledge that must be experienced. Nothing I can tell you in a book will convince you that food is a huge determinant of mood if you’ve lived your entire life without noticing that potatoes make you sleepy, and probably cranky as a result. The only way you’ll believe that food drives your mood is by testing the claim
in your daily life. By that I mean simply asking yourself how you feel at any given moment and then making a mental note of what you ate recently. Look for the pattern.

You might wonder why, if food controls mood, you haven’t noticed it already. The biggest reason is that you probably eat meals that are a combination of lots of different ingredients. You rarely isolate one kind of food just to see how it feels. You probably believe the reason you’re sleepy after a big meal is simply because you ate a lot and your body is diverting its energy from your brain and muscles to your digestive system. You think you’re sleepy in the afternoon because someone told you that’s what lunch does to people. You’re not a scientist who isolates one kind of food and does rigorous analysis. You eat when you’re hungry and try to sleep when you’re tired. The deeper truths about diet do a good job of hiding.

The best way to test the food-is-mood connection is to enjoy a hearty lunch at a Mexican restaurant—a virtual paradise of carbs—and monitor how you feel in a few hours. Check your energy level at about 2:00
P.M.
Do you feel that you would prefer exercising or napping? I’ll tell you the answer in advance: You’ll want the nap.

Do you think your sleepiness in the afternoon might be a simple function of the time of day? That’s easy to test. Wait a few days and try the same experiment with breakfast instead of lunch. Order pancakes and hash-brown potatoes. See if you can stay awake until lunchtime. It won’t be easy. That experiment will tell you whether the time of day is more important than what you eat.

If you’re thinking the “heaviness” of the meal or the quantity is the cause of your sleepiness, try your Mexican-food experiment again another day but only eat half as much. You’ll discover that quantity doesn’t matter as much as you thought.

For the sake of comparison, experiment for a few days by skipping bread, potatoes, white rice, and other simple carbs. Eat fruits, veggies, nuts, salad, fish, or chicken. Now see how you feel a few hours after eating. I’ll bet the idea of exercising will sound more appealing after eating those types of foods compared with the day of your Mexican-food experiment.

Don’t take my word for anything on the topic of diet. People are different, and it seems we learn something new about nutrition every week. You should also have a healthy skepticism about diet studies because they are notoriously bad at sorting out correlation from causation.
People who eat caviar probably live longer, but it’s not the caviar keeping them alive; there’s a known correlation between income and life expectancy. Diet studies are hard to trust because there are so many contradictory ones and often they are looking at specific populations and not the average person.

Whenever it’s practical and safe, consider your body a laboratory in which you can test different approaches to health. Eat something specific, such as a bowl of white rice, and see how you feel later. Or eat lots of carbs and weigh yourself at the end of the week. Look for the patterns. Which foods make you energetic and which ones make you sleepy? Which ones can you eat without gaining weight and which ones make you expand like a Macy’s parade float? When you get a handle on your own diet cause-and-effect patterns, you might discover they differ from my experience. For example, you might have wheat or gluten sensitivity or a lactose intolerance, or maybe you never get tired in the afternoon no matter what you eat. It’s important to figure out what works for you. And that will require experimenting.

In my case, eating simple carbs depletes my energy so thoroughly that a few hours after consuming them I can fall asleep within thirty seconds of closing my eyes. I literally use white rice like a sleeping pill on evenings when I’ve had too much coffee. But your body might respond differently or less dramatically to both coffee and white rice. You need to experiment to know for sure. Just remember that it is chemistry, not magic controlling your energy.

I haven’t mentioned pasta in my list of simple carbs to avoid, and that’s intentional. In my experience, pasta doesn’t make me sleepy and cranky like other simple carbs. I first discovered that pasta was mood neutral by eating a lot of it over the years and paying attention to how I felt later. While potatoes send me straight to my napping chair, pasta is a perfect preworkout snack. When studies later confirmed that pasta isn’t especially high on the glycemic index, the finding matched my own experience and passed my personal bullshit filter. Generally speaking, when it comes to diet, you want to stay consistent with science but also look for confirmation in your personal experience.

Peanuts are another example in which science and my own experience lined up. The science says that because peanuts have a high concentration of fat, they satisfy your appetite efficiently and provide fuel.
²
The unpredicted outcome of adding fat-laden peanuts to your
diet is that it improves your ability to lose weight. My experience matches the science exactly. Peanuts do satisfy my appetite, and the pattern I notice is that I eat smaller meals on days I eat peanuts.

Likewise, I find I can eat as much cheese as I want—I eat a lot of it on most days—and it does a great job of satisfying my hunger without making me tired. And as long as I do a good job with the rest of my diet, I don’t gain weight. I don’t believe science backs me up on the benefits of cheese, and if my cholesterol were high I would steer clear. I have some doubts about cheese, but for now I enjoy the taste and I appreciate the hunger-squashing utility of it. I’ll keep looking at the science as it evolves. Ask your doctor before you follow my lead on cheese. I mention cheese only because it illustrates my approach to choosing foods, not because I necessarily choose right. I’m trying to provide a rational template for diet choices, not a specific prescription for each of you.