How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (23 page)

Prior to reading this book, the way you probably looked at food was in terms of good versus bad, or fattening versus low calorie, or maybe carbs versus protein, or some combination of the above. All of those ways of looking at food have power to help you steer away from bad diet choices. The problem with the common view of food is that it will always make you feel as if you were in a battle with yourself. You
crave
bad foods because they are so darned tasty. You struggle to resist.

Science has demonstrated that humans have a limited supply of willpower.
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If you use up your supply resisting one temptation, it limits your ability to resist others. Struggling to do
anything
has a steep price because you don’t want to use up your willpower and energy on something as unimportant as staying away from the candy drawer. You might need your willpower later for something more substantial. What you need is a diet system that doesn’t rely on willpower. And that means reprogramming your food preferences so willpower is less necessary. I’ll explain how to do that in a minute.

Some of you will liken the idea of reprogramming your brain to self-hypnosis, and that might feel creepy or unlikely to work. A better approach, as I mentioned, is to think of your body as a moist, programmable robot whose outputs depend on its inputs, not magic. Imagine you’re an engineer who is trying to find the user interface for your moist robot body so you can make some useful adjustments. It’s as if you had one menu choice labeled “Make Sleepy” and another
labeled “Energize.” You can choose “Make Sleepy” simply by eating simple carbs.

The traditional view of weight maintenance is that you need to exercise and watch your diet to get good results. That’s mostly true, but a more useful way to look at the connection between food and exercise is not that they are equal partners. A more practical view is that food is the fuel that makes exercise possible. When you eat simple carbs for lunch, you find yourself wanting a nap more than you want to spend an hour on the treadmill. If you stuff yourself for dinner, you might cancel your plans to go for a run. If you manage your diet right, you’ll want to exercise more, and that will translate into doing so. The starting point for good health is diet. Once you get your diet right, your energy level will increase and you’ll find yourself more in the mood for exercise.

It can be doubly hard to change your diet and start an exercise program at the same time, at least in the usual way people do these
things, because both objectives require willpower. A smarter approach is to use a system to remove willpower from your diet choices—as I’ll explain in a bit—and let your increased energy guide you toward a natural preference for being more active. I’ll have more to say about exercise later. The main point for both diet and exercise is that you want to reduce the amount of willpower required. Any other approach is unsustainable.

The willpower you need to resist simple carbs such as white potatoes, white bread, and white rice has to come from somewhere, and as I mentioned earlier, studies show that using willpower for anything reduces how much you have in reserve for other temptations. The approach that works for me involves stealing willpower from the part of my brain that tries to avoid overeating. You might want to give my method a try. For a few months, eat as much as you want of anything that is not a simple carb. That frees up your willpower so you can use it to avoid those delicious and convenient simple carbs.

If you were hungry and I said you couldn’t eat the delicious bread in the breadbasket in front of you, it would take a lot of willpower to resist. But if I said you couldn’t have the delicious bread but you could have anything else you wanted, and you could have it right now, suddenly the bread would be easy to resist. An attractive alternative makes willpower less necessary. It frees up your stockpile of willpower for other uses. Under my system, all you need to do is eat as much as you want of anything that isn’t a simple carb and keep on that path for a few months.

Would this plan make you gain weight for a few months? For some people it might. But the short term doesn’t matter; you’re in this for the long haul. It’s a system, not a diet with a specific weight goal. Remember, goals are a trap. You want systems, not goals. The first part of the system is to break your addiction to simple carbs.

My experience is that after you break the addiction it isn’t hard to recover from the occasional french-fry binge. Food isn’t like alcohol, where one drink can set an alcoholic back to the bottom. Eating a piece of bread is only a pebble in the road for someone who has broken the carb addiction.

If for several months you give yourself permission to eat as much
as you want of the foods that don’t include addictive simple carbs, you’ll discover several things. For starters, you’ll have more energy without the simple carbs. And that will translate into keeping you more active, which in turn burns calories.

Another change you’ll notice after a few months without simple carbs is that your cravings will start to diminish. The sensation you feel as a preference for certain foods can be in reality more of an addiction than a true preference. For example, there was a long period in my life in which I couldn’t go a whole day without eating a giant Snickers candy bar. The first bite created a feeling of euphoria that I enjoyed in every particle of my being. But after a few months of eating as much as I wanted of healthier food, I lost the craving for Snickers bars. What I thought was some sort of deep genetic disposition to like chocolate was actually more of an addiction. After a few months of staying off the chocolate I lost the craving. Later, when I ate a Snickers bar just to test what would happen, I barely enjoyed it. It felt like nothing but unnecessary calories.

Just to be clear, I don’t include Snickers in the category of simple carbs that sap your energy. My experience was that the combination of chocolate and peanuts generally pepped me up, exactly as Snickers commercials suggest. My only problem with Snickers was that I binged on them.

I’ve had less success losing my desire for white rice and potatoes. Apparently I have a genuine preference for those tastes. But the desires aren’t so strong that I would pass up an apple to eat poorly. Today when I look at a pile of mashed potatoes, I automatically associate it with feeling crappy in an hour. And if that isn’t enough to keep the fork out of my hand, I give myself permission to eat as much as I want of good food instead. The diversion usually works.

In the interest of full disclosure, over the course of my life I have consumed far too much Diet Coke. I have routinely consumed as many as twelve Diet Cokes per day. All of this was in the context of nearly every medical and nutritional expert warning against it. My problem was that I truly enjoyed each Diet Coke I drank, and when I looked for the science about the health risks, I saw a lot of correlation but no clear causation. But I kept an eye on it just in case the science became settled on one side or the other.

A
few months ago, as part of my process for writing this book, I put my concept of cravings management to the ultimate test: I quit Diet Coke, cold turkey, after forty-plus years of extraordinarily regular consumption. The first week was hard, I admit. But I substituted coffee, which I also love, whenever I craved Diet Coke, and that greatly reduced my need to use willpower. Week one was a challenge. By week four, it was easy to resist Diet Coke. Eight weeks later, I see Diet Coke as a weird little colored water full of chemicals that I don’t need. My cravings are completely gone, and it didn’t require much of anything in terms of willpower beyond the first several days. I’m even enjoying my greater coffee consumption because I feel more alert all day. And coffee in moderation gets high marks from science for promoting good health.
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The reason I picked Diet Coke for my cravings-elimination test is that while I’m not convinced that diet soda is especially unhealthy for the occasional consumer, I wasn’t so sure that drinking twelve cans a day was contributing to a healthy life. And while the studies on the dangers of diet sodas stop short of being convincing, at least to me, at some point the sheer tonnage of negative health correlations reached a tipping point for my personal risk profile. So just to be clear, I am not personally aware of any
proven
health problems from an occasional diet soda. I just don’t like the odds.
⁵

One of the biggest barriers to healthy eating is the inconvenience factor. Life is so busy for most of us that convenience trumps most other considerations. We do what’s easiest even if we know it shortens our lives. What you want is for healthy food to be more convenient than unhealthy food. I’ll give you a few tips that can help. But first let me describe just how hard it is to even
know
what is healthy, much less find it.

My observation is that most people think they already know which foods are healthy. People know vegetables are good for you and cheeseburgers are not. But you don’t have to drill far down into the details of diet options before even well-informed people become unsure. Are eggs healthy this week? How about rye bread? How about butter? How about turkey? You quickly get into gray areas and areas in which even experts might disagree.

Suppose
you are so well informed that you could accurately sort food into categories of good and bad and get the right answer every time. That’s only a fraction of what you need to know. Within the category of healthy foods, can you further rank them? If you can, it would make sense to stick with the best of the best and avoid the lower quadrant of the so-called healthy foods. Is an apple better than broccoli? Is an avocado worse than a banana? How much healthier would you be if you ate the best of the healthy foods and avoided the less-good but still okay foods? Is it a big difference or a small one?

How hard is it to get variety in your diet? It might be easy to eat a variety of foods that have different names and different appearances, but are they that different on a nutritional level? Would you be better off eating an apple and an orange or an apple and a tomato? Which one gives you a more complete nutritional boost?

Any doctor or nutrition expert will tell you that eating a balanced diet will get you all the vitamins and minerals you need. That opinion is nearly 100 percent accepted by all smart people. The problem is that it’s mathematically impossible. You can prove that to yourself by Googling the nutritional information for everything you eat on any given day in which you’re sure you did a good job with both your food variety and healthy choices. I’ve done this experiment and found that you can’t get anywhere near the U.S. government’s daily recommended intake levels of vitamins and minerals. You would have to eat a wheelbarrow full of food to come close.

The nutritional shortfall of normal food is what prompted me a number of years ago to bring the Dilberito to market. I thought it would be a way to do some good for the world that had rewarded me so handsomely for
Dilbert.
The fortified-burrito business failed like most of the things I’ve tried. But during the process I learned a lot about vitamins and minerals. The main thing I learned is that nutrition presents itself as science but is perhaps 60 percent bullshit, guessing, bad assumptions, and marketing.

In
some narrow areas, nutrition science is reasonably solid. Researchers know that pregnant women need vitamin E. We know that vitamin C is needed to avoid scurvy. And the data suggest good things about vitamin D. There are other clearly beneficial vitamins as well. But if you look at any store shelf of vitamins and minerals, most of them haven’t been researched to the level you would want for health-related products.

Further complicating nutrition science is the inconvenient fact that no two humans are alike. Does a 120-pound vegetarian woman who is trying to get pregnant need the same vitamins and minerals as an obese coal miner with gout? No two people have exactly the same lifestyle, health, and genetics.

While my fortified burrito company failed for ordinary business reasons, I would have bowed out eventually as I lost my faith that the daily recommended intake levels of vitamins and minerals are sufficiently credible. During the Dilberito years it seemed as if every week a new study would come out that challenged what I thought I knew. It was deeply unsettling.

It is impossible to know with any precision what you should be eating and how often you should eat it. Nutrition science is shockingly incomplete. At best, you can avoid the obvious diet mistakes. But where science gives us uncertainty, sometimes you can creep up on the truth by personal observation and pattern recognition. If you know anyone who maintains an ideal adult weight without the services of a personal chef or a personal trainer, wouldn’t you like to know how? Ask anyone who has a healthy weight what he or she eats, then be on the lookout for the pattern. I’ll get the ball rolling by describing my own diet.