How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (25 page)

The next question people ask is how vegetarians get enough protein. The answer has two parts. Part one involves understanding that most adults get enough protein, at least in the United States.
⁹
A vegetarian doesn’t need to work too hard to get the minimum.
¹⁰
Check
that assertion against your bullshit filter by asking if you have ever heard of a vegetarian getting medical care for a protein deficiency. I’ve never heard of it. If vegetarians had no way to get enough protein, and it were a health risk, doctors would be all over it. A doctor might advise a vegetarian to eat more soy and nuts, but little more is needed.

What your doctor
will
do when you confess your vegetarian ways is recommend supplements, including omega-3 fats and B
₁₂
and B
₆
vitamins.
¹¹
Those are hard to get with a strict vegetarian diet, and studies show you need them. Your doctor might ask some questions about what you eat, to make sure it’s not all Wonder Bread and candy. But if you follow a sensible vegetarian diet, your doctor likely won’t recommend protein supplements.

The second part of the vegetarian protein question is what foods are the best sources. My main protein sources are …

The next question people ask is about the inconvenience of being a vegetarian. In truth, it’s plenty inconvenient, especially when the family eats meat or you get invited to dinner or you travel. Having been a meat eater for the first half of my life, I know how daunting it looks from the other side. Becoming a vegetarian looks like a lot of work and it looks socially awkward. But my experience is that once you take the plunge, your attitude about the inconvenience changes. The inconvenience never goes away, but there are always work-arounds, and as an adult, missing an occasional meal is more of a weight-loss opportunity than a tragedy. You learn to see it that way. I never feel like a victim of my diet preferences. I always feel like the lucky guy who didn’t overeat at the party and who has the option of scarfing down a huge bucket of buttered popcorn later that evening without caloric guilt. It all works out.

It’s easier for me to be a vegetarian in California than it would be, say, in the Midwest United States. I once stayed in a hotel in Kansas
City that had only two vegetarian choices on the entire room-service menu. I chose the french fries and the house salad. When room service arrived, the french fries were covered in beef gravy and the salad was covered in bacon bits. I don’t think I could live in that state. In California, and in most places that I visit, every restaurant has vegetarian options.

Once you start on a vegetarian diet, the inconvenience is more than paid for by the way your body feels after a meal and the holier-than-thou sensation that comes with doing something that looks hard to others. Bottom line, becoming a vegetarian looks a lot harder than it is. I’ve never once considered it a burden.

If you don’t drink coffee, you should think about two to four cups a day. It can make you more alert, happier, and more productive. It might even make you live longer. Coffee can also make you more likely to exercise, and it contains beneficial antioxidants and other substances associated with decreased risk of stroke (especially in women), Parkinson’s disease, and dementia. Coffee is also associated with decreased risk of abnormal heart rhythms, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers.
^12
,
13

Any one of those benefits of coffee would be persuasive, but cumulatively they’re a no-brainer.

An hour ago I considered doing some writing for this book, but I didn’t have the necessary energy or focus to sit down and start working. I did, however, have enough energy to fix myself a cup of coffee. A few sips into it, I was happier to be working than I would have been doing whatever lazy thing was my alternative. Coffee literally makes me
enjoy
work. No willpower needed.

Coffee also allows you to manage your energy levels so you have the most when you need it. My experience is that coffee drinkers have higher highs and lower lows, energywise, than non–coffee drinkers, but that trade-off works. I can guarantee that my best thinking goes into my job, while saving my dull-brain hours for household chores and other simple tasks.

The biggest downside of coffee is that once you get addicted to caffeine, you can get a “coffee headache” if you go too long without a
cup. Luckily, coffee is one of the most abundant beverages on earth, so you rarely have to worry about being without it.

Coffee costs money, takes time, gives you coffee breath, and makes you pee too often. It can also make you jittery and nervous if you have too much. But if success is your dream and operating at peak mental performance is something you want, coffee is a good bet. I highly recommend it. In fact, I recommend it so strongly that I literally feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t developed the habit.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that celebrities do a good job of staying thin. Obviously they have the free time and resources to do it right. And for them, fitness has an enormous financial upside. But I think celebrities have another ace in the hole too, because their lives are fabulous in general. The happier you are in one area of your life, the less effort you’ll put into searching for happiness elsewhere. And that can translate into caring less about the taste quality of your meal.

For example, if I gave you a choice between eating your favorite food and watching a boring television show, you’d probably choose the tasty food. But if I gave you a choice between your favorite food and a trip to your dream destination that has everything you want except great food, you’d choose the dream destination. Eating right depends a great deal on your nonfood alternatives. If you get your entire life in order, it will be much easier to have an ideal weight.

This is a circular problem, of course, because getting to a healthy weight is a big part of what can improve the quality of your career, health, and social life. You need to eat well to enjoy the rest of your life, and you need the rest of your life to be in good shape to more easily resist bad food choices. Everything is connected. That’s why I include diet and fitness in a book about success. If you get your health in order, success will come more easily. And if you get success without good health, you won’t enjoy it.

The Simple, No-Willpower Diet System

1. Pay attention to your energy level after eating certain foods. Find your pattern.
   
2. Remove unhealthy, energy-draining food from your home.
   
3. Stock up on
   convenient
   healthy food (e.g., apples, nuts, bananas) and let laziness be your copilot in eating right.
   
4. Stop eating foods that create feelings of addiction: white rice, white potatoes, desserts, white bread, fried foods.
   
5. Eat as much healthy food as you want, whenever you want.
   
6. Get enough sleep, because tiredness creates the illusion of hunger.
   
7. If your hunger is caused by tiredness, try healthy foods with fat, such as nuts, avocados, protein bars, and cheese, to suppress the hungry feeling.
   
8. If you’re eating for social reasons only, choose the healthiest options with low calories.
   
9. Learn how to season your healthy-yet-bland foods.
   

In time you will lose your cravings for bad food without feeling a sacrifice.

That’s a system for eating right over the long term. The surest way to identify those who won’t succeed at weight loss is that they tend to say things like “My goal is to lose ten pounds.” Weight targets often work in the short run. But if you need willpower to keep the weight off, you’re doomed in the long run. The only way to succeed in the long run is by using a system that bypasses your need for willpower.

As a boy
growing up in a small town, it wasn’t unusual for me to play four or five sports in a day, ride my bike for miles, go for a swim, and finish the evening doing gymnastics on the furniture. Playing sports and getting lots of exercise was a huge part of my life. It was hard to imagine a day without it. It was fun, so it all seemed easy.

When I became an adult, life kept getting in the way of exercise. I found it hard to carve out the time for fitness and even harder to find a way to enjoy it. If I played a pickup soccer game in the park on a Sunday, I would be so bruised and sore that I wouldn’t feel good enough to exercise again until Thursday. When I tried to turn myself into a recreational runner, the rest of my brain and body had other plans. It turns out that running only works for me if I’m chasing some sort of ball or if something with fangs is chasing me.

I tried tennis with some success, but finding a partner of equal ability and matching schedules and finding available public courts were chores. I was lucky to play once a week. I certainly understand why so many adults let their fitness slide. Exercise is hard work in every imaginable sense. When you add marriage and kids to the mix, exercise can become completely impractical for many people. I get that. So considering all of life’s natural barriers to remaining fit, is there any system that can work?

I think so. After a lifetime of trying nearly every exercise tip, trick, and fad and sometimes scientifically proven techniques, I have condensed the entire field of fitness advice into one sentence:

Allow me to acknowledge how spectacularly useless that sounds. I’m sure you already knew that being active is a good thing. You’re probably thinking that a cartoonist has nothing to offer on the topic of fitness. I’ll be the first to admit that you might be right. But stick with me for a page or two and I might surprise you. I’m not a health and fitness expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have a cartoonist’s knack for simplification. And simplification might be just what you need.

Simplification is often the difference between doing something you know you should do and putting it off. You don’t mind brushing your teeth because it’s simple. But you probably put off finding out why there’s a strange smell coming from the attic. That could get complicated.

Simplification done right also helps connect the important parts of exercise, diet, career, finance, and social life. If any of those things becomes too complicated, it forces you to borrow time, willpower, and resources from something else you also care about. I won’t try too hard to sell you on the benefits of simplicity because you see them in your own life every day.

If you are young and you don’t have crushing responsibilities, you probably have everything you need to exercise regularly. But after a certain age, life transforms exercise from one of your highest priorities to the thing you give up first when things get busy, and that can literally be a death trap.

My challenge in this chapter is to convince you that if you get one simple thing right—being active every day—all of the other elements of fitness will come together naturally
without the need to use up your limited supply of willpower.

That last part is the key. In my experience, any form of exercise that requires willpower is unsustainable. To stay fit in the long run you need to limit your exercise to whatever level doesn’t feel like work, just as kids do. When you take willpower out of the equation and you achieve a solid baseline of daily physical activity, your natural inclination will be to gradually increase your workout. You’ll do it because you want to, and because it will feel easy, and because you know it will feel good. No willpower will be needed.

If you walk two miles every day for a month and enjoy the leisurely
pace, your brain will automatically start to think that walking an extra mile might be even more fun or that running half the way and walking the rest might be interesting. That’s how you turn boredom into a tool. When you are active every day and your body feels good about it, it will become easier to increase your exercise level than it would be to stop it. Ask any dedicated runner, biker, or swimmer how they feel on the occasional off day. They don’t like it. That’s where you want to be. And the only way that happens is if you make fitness—of any kind—a daily habit. Once exercise becomes habitual, you won’t need willpower to keep going because your body and brain will simply prefer it to being a couch spud. And your natural inclination for variety will drive you to do more stuff over time.

You probably know someone who is a long-distance runner, putting in five to ten miles every day. If you’re not that fit yourself, you probably think those runners have extraordinary willpower. That’s probably more of an illusion than reality. Long-distance runners are people who are born with a certain genetic gift that allows them to feel good when running. No one needs willpower to do the things they enjoy.

Most normal adults, including me, find running to be little more than the most cost-effective way to be bored and uncomfortable. A dozen times over the course of my life I have tried to force myself to enjoy running, or at least to do it anyway for the health benefits, and each time my willpower crapped out a few weeks into it.

You wouldn’t flap your arms and try to fly just because you saw how well it worked for a bird. Likewise, I don’t recommend adopting an exercise plan just because people who have completely different bodies and brains seem to enjoy it. No matter how charismatic that exercise guru on your DVD sounds, don’t believe that someone else’s specific fitness plan will work for you. No one is like you.

What you need is a natural and easy way to evolve into a fitness routine that works for your specific brain and body. And you want to do it all without drawing on your willpower. The starting point for that journey is nothing more than being physically active every day regardless of the specifics.

I did an
Amazon.com
search on the key word “exercise” and got 125,508 book suggestions. I’m not trying to be the 125,509th variation on largely familiar material. I haven’t read many of those books, but I assume most of them require you to use a degree of willpower.
That’s a losing strategy no matter how you dress it up and no matter how inspirational the author may be. In the long run, any system that depends on your willpower will fail. Or worse, some other part of your life will suffer as you focus your limited stockpile of willpower on fitness.

The approach to fitness that I prefer differs from the norm both in its simplicity and in that it doesn’t require willpower at any stage. In fact, if you follow the system of being active every day, you’ll feel more energetic, and that may help you avoid drawing down your limited supply of willpower.

I use the word “active” in an intentionally ambiguous way. That’s what makes the rule a system and not a goal. As you know, goals are for losers. If the rule were “Run ten miles every day,” that would be a goal. And it would probably set you up for failure, since most people can’t do something specific every day. But almost everyone can be active in some way every day. That could mean anything from playing basketball to cleaning the garage to taking a walk. Under my system, any physical exertion counts, and none is better than the other. I’ll explain in this chapter how all paths can lead to optimal fitness if you follow a few simple rules for manipulating your willpower.

The most important and powerful part of the “Be active every day” system is the “every day” part. Everything springs naturally from that. And if you have trouble fitting exercise into your busy schedule, as most adults do, I’ll give you some suggested fixes for that too.

Fitness is a simple thing made absurdly complicated by market forces. If you want to make money as a fitness expert or by selling fitness products, you have to make a novel claim about the value of your product or service. Each new idea is layered on to the old ideas until the entire field is so complicated it becomes intimidating.

How often should you work out? What should you eat before and after working out, and should you have a different diet for cardio workouts versus lifting weights? How much should you customize your workouts for your age, gender, and condition? Will this abdominal exercise hurt your back or help it? How much rest should you get between days of weight lifting? Is long-distance running enough of a benefit to your overall health to justify the pounding on your knees? The questions and complexity are literally endless. Here are a few of the exercise “musts” you hear all the time.

1. Do
   thirty minutes of aerobic exercise daily.
   
2. Stretch.
   
3. Hydrate.
   
4. Eat protein within thirty minutes of strength training.
   
5. Carb load the night before a big exercise day.
   
6. Do resistance/weight training every other day.
   
7. Do three sets of ten to fifteen reps.
   
8. Get lots of rest.
   
9. Vary your workout to create “muscle confusion.”
   
10. Use proper form for lifting.
    

That’s just a partial list. The only people who can do all of that right are serious athletes, personal trainers, the unemployed, and the socially unpopular. For everyone else, it’s simply not practical.

For married people, an excellent way to fail at exercise starts like this:

By the way, if you assumed “spouse” means “wife” in those examples, you’re a sexist jerk. It works both ways. As soon as you try to satisfy two schedules instead of one, all of your optional activities, such as exercise, get pushed to the “later” bin. So what’s the fix?

There
are three practical ways to schedule exercise in a marriage or marriagelike situation:

1. Join an organized team.
   
2. Always exercise at the same time every day.
   
3. Exercise together (if you both really mean it).
   

When my wife, Shelly, tells me she has a tennis-league match scheduled on a Thursday night, it never makes me feel abandoned. For starters, I always have advance notice and I can make my own plans, which is great. But even more important, I know Shelly didn’t pick the specific date and time of the match. The fact that the game is scheduled by some unknown third party makes it okay with me because I know that Shelly didn’t make a conscious choice to be away at that specific time. Sure, sure, on some level it’s the same thing because Shelly knew in advance that matches would be on Thursday nights, and she chose to join the team. But it
feels
different. And that’s what matters. Whenever you can, join a team sport that has a set schedule. Your spouse will still be inconvenienced, but it won’t feel personal.

If team sports aren’t your thing, the next-best solution is to schedule your exercise for the same time every day. Shelly can tell you where I will be on any given Tuesday at 12:40
P.M
. I will be at the gym, just finishing my resistance training and heading for some stretching before cardio. Shelly finds my regular exercise schedule inconvenient at times, but it doesn’t feel personal because it’s my system. I don’t
decide
to be unavailable for a romantic lunch with my wife; I simply have an exercise
system.
On some level it’s exactly the same, but it sure feels different. And that’s the beauty.

I exercise at lunchtime because mornings are better for my creative work and afternoons are unpredictable in terms of work and family time. Other successful exercisers get up long before the sun to do their workouts. Still others go straight from work to the gym. In each case the key is to have a predictable system. The method that
never
succeeds is exercising whenever you have some spare time. If you’re like most adults, you haven’t seen spare time in years.

My system for staying in the mood to be active every day has several parts. I already explained the importance of diet in keeping your energy up. After that, the most important rule is that you should never exercise so much in one day that you won’t feel like being active the next day. To put that another way, the right amount of exercise today is whatever amount makes me look forward to being active tomorrow.

My old exercise system involved working out so hard that I could barely move the next day. No pain, no gain, or so I thought. I figured the harder I pushed myself, the better. But pushing takes willpower, and if I use up my willpower at the gym, I can barely drive past the doughnut shop without being sucked in.