What I think about diets

Seeing I’ve put on some excess pounds, I’ve taken up the goal of losing some this year. As part of my research into the available diets – all of which claim to work, of course – I couldn’t help but notice that most – if not all – of them claim that we should hold on to these particular diets for life, by just varying the amount of calories we eat and whatnot.

Then on the other hand, I hear the opponents of this one particular diet, or the proponents of another claiming that that one’s no good because it’s high in fat and fat means cholesterol, and cholesterol means a wide variety of diseases, or it’s high in sugars (carbohydrates) which is also bad for a long list of reasons.

What is the single constant I’m running into? All diets have its downsides and therefore they have opponents. There is only one advice which is always given: eat healthy and exercise. The thing that varies is the definition of “healthy.”

So now as I read about calorie restriction and about Raymond Kurzweil’s dieting program (not related), I come across a comment on Amazon on Ray’s book which claims that it is historically inaccurate – in 1900, it says, people didn’t die of cancer and heart disease at such high rates as they do today. Therefore, he concludes, these diseases are caused by processed foods.

Being the intelligent man I am, I don’t believe this without some data. So I figure that it would be prudent to check out the life expectancy at that time, and compare it to today’s life expectancy – after all, it is older people who die most frequently of such diseases, ages 40 and up (of course, it happens earlier too, but not as often).

It appears that in 1900, a life expectancy of a white male infant was 48.23 years. Today, or rather 2004, this has grown to 75.7 years, which is nearly 30 years more (data from here). So, that person’s “argument” is invalid because there weren’t enough people alive back then who were of the age when people actually die of heart diseases or cancer.

Improved technology and quality of life – AND better foods (they wouldn’t process foods unless they were actually better that way) – made it possible for us to live longer. With longer life, new diseases became a problem.

If evolution is to be consulted in matters of life expectancy, then everyone over the age of 30, maybe 35 should be dead already. For the most of our past, we humans have lived in caves or in huts, eating foods filled with dirt and sand. Having a lifestyle primarily of hunters, people were happy if they saw the age of 20. Today, many of us live to see the age of 50, not to mention 60, 70, 80, heck some even live to be 100 years old and more!

It is easily concievable that with this drastically prolonged lifespan, our bodies will go bad more frequently. During such a relatively long lifespan, EVERYTHING is a factor determining how long we are going to live and what we are going to die of, including our diet. If we’ve eaten too many fats, we might get high cholesterol and die of a heart attack. If we’ve smoked, we might die of cancer. If we’ve eaten too many carbs, we might die of some infectious disease that our immune system can otherwise handle.

I say “might” because our genetic makeup is also a factor. Some people’s bodies just handle their bad habits better than other people’s do. Some people eat too much and then they die of lung cancer. Some people smoke too much and then they die in a car crash.

So, no matter what diet you follow, or no matter what diet you try to follow and then fail, you can bet anything that what you ate – whatever you ate – is going to play a role at some point in your life, all other things being equal.

In short, diets can’t increase your life span – how could they? You can’t know how long you’re gonna live anyway. This can only be measured statistically, not individually. Some can only increase the probability that you’ll live longer than the average, but in the end – again, statistically speaking – that very same diet will be the end of you, provided your death isn’t a violent one.

Prioritasking

They say it’s stressful to live in today’s world. True, sometimes you feel swamped with work and you can’t cope with it efficiently. It can even get to the point when you start pulling out your own hair, and screaming in frustration. The concept I’ve come up with, which I’ve called prioritasking, may help you get all the threads in your hands, do things one at a time and still not miss deadlines. Image from nobody asked…

One of the most common problems people face when they try to get their affairs in order, to finish up their jobs and get into that blessed state in which they can solve problems as they come rather than have them pile up while they are doing something else, is that they realize that they are swamped with a vast variety of jobs which need to be completed. Some of those jobs have deadlines that are nearing closer by the minute. Others are jobs which demand that they be done right now and any delay may immobilize you completely. Both of these incapacitate your ability to go about doing your tasks systematically and pick them off one by one. The fact that by the day you get more and more tasks which need to be done one way or another makes it practically impossible to think that these tasks should be done one by one. For this reason we often take up what is called multitasking.

We begin doing things all at the same time. Or at least we attempt to do them all at the same time. Maybe we decide to sit down and be systematic about everything, so we come up with a plan. Three hours of task 1, two hours of task 2 … three hours of task n, where n is the number of tasks; follow this plan for m days and all our affairs will be in order. Then we’ll reach that blessed state I talked about earlier.

However, there is a problem. It doesn’t have to be us, we can have all the motivation in the world to go through with the plan. However, x < m days into our ultimate plan something happens, completely unexpected and we have to sort out a new problem. We lose 5 hours solving it. We think constantly about our plan and how we don’t have time for dealing with these unexpected matters and that we, in fact, have more important problems, such as getting to our blessed state. In any case, our plan is ruined. We can’t move everything a day ahead because we planned to finish most of those jobs by the time they need to be done (deadlines, remember?). In other words, our plan crumbles to dust and the rest of the days we spend working only on those jobs which have a deadline. All the other things are on hold.

By the time the deadlines are over, we already have more things with deadlines on our hands. We also have more tasks to do which have no deadlines. We sit, plan, and think nothing – NOTHING will stop us this time. But it does, because unexpected things happen all the time. And so we find ourselves in this circle where we work a lot, but rarely actually get anything done. Moreover, the piles of work we need to finish grow constantly. We eventually find we have no time to do anything other than this multitude of tasks.

We think that somewhere must be that magic plan that will resolve us of this constant cycle and give us more control. We try to think that maybe we need to simply not do some things which we think we need to do, but soon realize that these things are all too valuable to us to just abandon them. However, at this point we shouldn’t be looking at the magical ultimate plan; we should question our premises. What are our premises? That the way we are going about solving our tasks is the correct way. Is it? Is multitasking really possible to man? Can a person really do multiple things at the same time?

To answer this, let me turn to computers, which is where the concept of multitasking comes from. How do computers do it? Computers are excellent at multitasking. The fact that you’re reading this proves it. Just opening your browser involves the creation of a multitude of processes in the computer which the user is not aware of. Also, the CPU will constantly switch from executing one program to another, then back again, then to the third one, etc. (the pattern is generally unpredictable). Each time the computer does this switching, it does something that is called “saving context”. Saving context means placing all the data concerning the execution of the current process into memory. When the CPU decides to resume the execution of a certain process, it simply reads the previously saved context, and it’s all ready to continue with instruction execution. So, when switching processes in a CPU, it means first saving context of the current process, then reading context of the process to which the CPU is switching, and then working on this new process.

Switching processes in a computer literally saves the state of the CPU at that point in the execution of the process. This means writing the contents of several internal registers into memory. Reading context means reading the previously saved data back into registers. When the computer does that, it “knows” (so to speak) which instruction in the process is next in line for execution, and it “remembers” all the information which was vital to that process’ execution.

Now let us try and apply this concept on a human being. At the very thought of context saving we run into a problem. How do you “save” the state of your mind at a certain point of execution of a certain task? Do you take out a paper and pen and write it down? What do you write down? Your mind has no registers whose contents you need to copy. Your mind, in fact, does not work by following instructions. Working is a highly creative process, especially work which isn’t routine, and we constantly make up and refine our solution to a certain problem as we go about solving that problem – even when it’s all thoroughly planned (if the plan of how to solve a problem gives you absolutely no freedom in how to refine a solution it predicts, then the plan itself is already a solution to a problem; this is why instruction-executing entities will always be tools we use to solve our problems, rather than entities which actually solve problems). So, there is no hope of successfully saving the context of your own mind, unless you have an enviable ability to recall exactly what your state of mind was when you stopped solving this problem and switched to a different problem, and do the same for n different problems.

So, now we’ve dispensed with the concept of multitasking. What does that leave us with? Single-tasking! Doing one thing in a given period of time, from start to end. However, a thing that qualifies as a task needs to be somewhat better defined. Whatever you’re doing, you’re always doing some things aside. Brushing your teeth in the morning is one of those things. Going to work is another. Buying your kid a new pair of sneakers because he’s destroyed the old one is the third. Sleeping is one thing you need to do every day (although most people won’t complain about it). These are all some sort of tasks. However, they are all more or less automatic. We can do them while we are intellectually engaged in solving our problems at work, or at home, or wherever it is we have a bunch of work to do. It is exactly these kind of tasks – the non-routine tasks, into which we have to invest extra effort and extra thought, and might I say – extra time – that I’m talking about. These are the things we need to single-task while we perform the routine at the same time. It is our focus and attention which need to remain on one thing, and let the things which we can do without paying much focused attention to be done while we’re consciously elsewhere.

But, there is one big problem with this scheme. It is almost just as bad as multitasking. It could be even worse if unexpected things happen very often to us. What to do when, just as you’re writing a climax of a novel, your wife decides to give birth to a baby? You can’t leave her in labor until you’re done with the novel, can you? This is where I introduce to you the concept I called “prioritasking”. It is quite obvious which words make up this one, but let me mention them just the same. “Prioritasking” comes from the word “priority” and “tasking”; namely it’s single-tasking. It’s a single-tasking method, but improved in such a way that it recognizes your priorities. If you are doing thing A, which has a relatively low priority, and suddenly something happens and you have to do thing B which is of higher priority, then you start doing thing B. However, if you’re assigned to do thing C while doing thing A, and the deadline for thing C is, to make this simple example simple, 10 years from now and it’s about, say, learning how to mow grass more efficiently with this special new tool on the market, then you continue doing thing A regardless, and simply make a mental note on your To-Do list that you need to do thing C at some point in time as well.

Now, the tricky part about this method is assigning priorities to tasks. The example above (with your novel and becoming a father) may be trivial, but there are situations in which certain things seem to have equal priorities and you don’t know which to do first. Choosing priorities, however, is not the topic of this post and you will have to make due with what is already available on the Internet, or what you already know about it. But let’s assume, for the sake of me being able to continue explaining this topic, that you can choose your priorities well. When we suddenly need to perform a higher-priority task in the middle of the task we’re doing now, do we not have the same problem, as we do with multitasking, where we suddenly need to switch from doing thing A to doing thing B?

The short answer is – we are. However, we are happy with that because it pays to do it this way, because if you reevaluate our only alternatives – single-tasking and multitasking, prioritasking is much better. It is better than single-tasking because we are able to react quickly to unexpected things that happen to us in life, and it is better than multitasking, because even though we need to at some point switch from doing one task to doing another, we do not do this switching as often as we do while multitasking. This is a trade-off which we have no choice but to be happy with, unless we like pulling our hair out and scream with stress.

Even if you are a procrastinator, employing this method may lead to improvement. You may be a bit stressed out at first because you don’t think you’ll meet your deadlines. However, if you’ve chosen your priorities well, you should do much better than if you’ve chosen the path of multitasking, because multitasking will often lead – even with best of intentions – to no tasking at all.

Finally, here’s a couple of technical advice about prioritasking. If while you’re doing task A you’re interrupted by a higher priority task B, it would be nice if you simply jotted down task A as being incomplete. Stack your incomplete tasks. Each time you complete a task, simply fetch a task from the top of the stack and continue doing it. However, the problem will arise because some tasks have dynamic priority, i.e. yesterday they weren’t as urgent as they are today. This is why it would be wise to take the whole stack of problems at the start of the day in your hands and reshuffle it in such a way as to keep the task with the current highest priority on top of the stack. Do it every now end then, perhaps when you are taking a break. Just seing the tasks you need to do will make it easier for you to remember where you were when you start doing them again.

I like to come up with the title of each thing I need to do, which is informative to an extent, and when I stack it I write that title on a piece of paper and just put it on a pile which serves as a stack. So, what are you waiting for? Make the list of things you need to do, prioritize them, stack them up and get ready to rumble!

The Perfect Diet

There are several facts about all the diets currently in existence. They can all be summarized in a few words: nobody knows if they work or not. In fact, most don’t; and all the rest are dubious. The best one out there is the weight watchers diet, but in my opinion it is a waste of time. Calculating points? Oh please! Meetings to help you while you’re dieting? There’s nothing a person can say to debunk the number on a weighing scale in good condition; in fact, your weighing scale is all the company you need when losing weight. That and perhaps someone to service it once in a while.

A quick look on this “market of diets” reveals it for what it is – complete chaos. There are diets telling you to starve yourself; then diets that tell you to eat as much as you can (Atkins). Then, there are diets telling you to eat or not to eat a particular product, and the ones telling you the direct opposite. Some require you to count every calory and every vitamin you digest; but on the other hand, that can lead to being too nervous about losing weight – so nervous, in fact, that you start eating out of control to stop the depression; or so nervous that you become anorexic.

Can you believe the nonsense we are being sold? Products that will melt your fat away (yeah right), pills which will allow you to eat vast amounts of food and still stay slim (oh, dear), and various teas and preparations (which I like to call “magic potions” – and I don’t believe in magic) which will supposedly accelerate your metabolism (what hogwash!). I’m sure there are products that don’t even fall into these categories, yet they promise you the impossible.

I can’t then help but wonder how our ancestors – those who didn’t count calories and vitamins – survived? If all those people who are proposing various diets are correct, then I submit that all our ancestors and their closer and farther relatives died of heart attacks, and not a single one lived to see 60 years of age. Heck, by this standard all my grandparents are actually walking corpses.

This, of course, isn’t true.

But, let’s get back to the problem of diets. There is a recent research which says that our organism is genetically adapted to process the kind of foods our ancestors ate. Therefore, eating traditional foods, or foods your ancestors ate, will make you healthy – because your organism can thoroughly and effectively process these kinds of foods. And therefore, again, you should eat such foods – buy locally, ask your grandparents about their favorite and their most common meals, then eat that. Don’t stuff yourself with it though.

There are two more undeniable facts about eating. The first is that no matter how much you eat, your overall weight after a meal will not be larger than your mass before that meal, plus the weight of that meal. This goes for everything you consume – a bar of chocolate, a glass of water or milk, chips, mashed potatoes, chicken, hamburger, beef, etc. Another fact is concerned with calories. No matter what you do – whether you are sitting, sleeping, walking, running, studying, or building a skyscraper – your body spends energy. It spends energy over time, which – in physical terms – means that it has some output power. Depending on what you’re doing, your output power is either greater or smaller. In nutritionist terms, you are burning calories faster or slower. It’s the same thing, really. Whatever you eat, it contains some energy, or calories if you prefer it that way. Burning calories means that you are spending these calories over a period of time. This means that some part of that food you ate will linger in your system until it turns into energy. Understanding digestion, you also know that you will throw some of it away as feces. How long the usable part will stay depends on how fast you burn your calories.

Now, to connect these two important facts, all that needs to be said is that – considering the mass of that part of the food you eat which you throw out in form of feces as negligible – when you burn the amount of calories you’ve taken into your body, you’ve also spent its total mass, i.e. your body should then weigh the same as it did before your meal. However, this is only true if you’ve gotten rid of the feces and the urine generated by the intake of these foods, i.e. you’ve heeded the nature’s call. However, these things are difficult to know, because food in such form can linger in your system for days.

However, tracking down each molecule of food you eat is a waste of your time. It is both impossible and undesirable. Amidst all the diets, then, there is only one way to diet successfully and lose or not lose weight at the same time. Here’s how.

Basically, you don’t need to buy anything special for it. Just eat what you usually eat. If it’s McDonald’s, then eat that. But I would recommend not to eat junk food, because of other problems it may cause to your health in general. If you want to, you can count your calories and vitamins and whatnot. But it won’t really help you lose weight – these things, in my opinion, play only the motivational role in dieting.

Now, even though you may eat whatever you like, the amount you eat is limited. It is not limited strictly, though. At times, you can even overeat, but don’t do it often. Track your weight every morning and optionally in the evening. You will find great oscillations of your weight every day, particularly if you track it in the evening too. Take your morning weight as your referent weight. Create a chart of these oscillations, so you can compare your current weight to that of previous days. You don’t have to do this, though. This is motivational, but also it can give you directions for what and how much you should eat today.

So, let’s say that you’re overweight and now you wish to lose weight. The first thing you need to do is to determine your ideal weight. Calculating this using the formula for the BMI is good enough, although not entirely accurate, because the formula is based on statistics. If you have great muscle mass, but low fat, the formula may say that you’re overweight, even though you’re healthy. A doctor, or perhaps a nutritionist, might tell you your ideal weight. When that’s done, you need to start acting. The only certain way to lose weight is – to be hungry.

That’s right. Be hungry. The first step to successful dieting is to determine exactly when you are going to eat and stick to that religiously. Don’t even try to limit the amount of food you eat in those meals – the only way for this to work is simply by sticking to your schedule. The most important thing is not to allow yourself other meals or even snacks in between. Also, don’t be too generous, and say that you’ll eat ten times a day. Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. In between meals, you’ll just have to be hungry. This may be a bit hard to overcome, so if you want to, you can consider buying some pills that diminish the feeling of hunger. If you do, try to get rid of them as soon as possible – you’ll just have to learn to be hungry on your own.

Consider also the fact that if you are not terribly overweight, going from step one won’t work for you – in fact, you might even gain weight if you implement step one. So, simply choose a step that most suits you, i.e. which is a logical extension of your current eating habits.

The next step is to implement the hara hachi bu principle. This means to eat until your hunger is sated, and not until your stomack is full. In mathematical terms, your belly should be about 80% full when you should stop eating each meal.

After you’re comfortable with that (and you still haven’t reached your target weight), start controlling the kind of food you take. Cut down on sugar and chocolate. Replace it with fruits and vegetables. Do try harder to stop eating junk food. Replace any high-calory food with low-calory foods. It may seem you’re eating more this way, but in fact you will be taking in less calories, which means that even if you burn the same amount of calories, the subtraction of calories burned from calories taken will be further in the negative – which means more weight loss.

The final step is to eat less. Try to go without chocolate for a week every two or three months. Then every one or two months. Reduce your intake of it in whatever way you can. Don’t get upset if you fail. Just try again. Before I went without chocolate and sugar for a week my first time, I’ve limited my daily chocolate intake drastically. Before I started dieting, I ate vast amounts of chocolate. I’d eat more chocolate in a day than the rest of my family did in a week. Then I limited that to only a bar of chocolate each day. Only after that I decided to have a week without of chocolate.

There are also four general rules you should follow with this diet, and are essential to it. The first rule is the rule of leniency. In any stage of your diet you can allow youself occasional large meal. Don’t be too lenient, though. You may allow yourself a larger meal, or some extra chocolate or sugar around once a week on average. This may seem counterproductive to your goal, but in fact it works to prevent the yo-yo effect, i.e. having all your lost weight return after you’ve stopped dieting. It is also motivational – not because you lose weight, but rather because you aren’t hungry, and you get to enjoy what you eat. Most other diets won’t allow that, except perhaps the Atkins diet, but then again it’s never been proven to work, and it’s dangerous to your health (and, dr. Atkins died weighing over 260 pounds).

The second rule is the rule of planning. After measuring your weight in the morning, you should determine whether you weigh more or less than yesterday morning. While also following the rules of the current stage of your diet, determine whether you need to eat less, about the same, or more than yesterday. Yes, you should even decide sometimes to eat more, because losing weight too fast can lead to serious health issues.

The third rule is the rule of water. You should drink a lot of water, because it is important in processing food in your system. Drinking more water may even be what helps you lose weight faster. Besides, it’s healthy. Don’t overdo it. A simple guideline is to drink half an ounce per pound of your weight when not physically active. So, if you weigh 180 pounds (81 kilograms), you should drink 90 ounces (2.66 liters) of water each day. If physically active, you should drink two thirds of an ounce per pound. This is just a general outline. Note that at first you might have to use the toilet quite often, but that’s natural. If you feel bloated by drinking this much water, then go slow. Drink less at first, until you are accustomed to it, then increase your intake of water, until you reach your goal. It might take several weeks to get accustomed to the increased intake of water. Also, if you decide to measure your weight in the evening too, you will note that with the increased intake of water, you weigh more in the evening. Don’t worry – you will lose more over night.

The fourth and final rule is the rule of exercise. Be active. Losing weight while lying in a couch is pointless, even though it’s possible. Remember that being slim does not automatically mean being healthy. Fat also builds up around your internal organs and there it can be fatal – particularly around your heart. Exercise helps burn this internal fat as well, and effectively. Start exercising immediately. Exercise until you can’t do it any more. Sweat it out a little. Do it at least three times a week. The best sports for this are running, hiking and rowing. And remember that if you don’t exercise, all your dieting is a waste of effort.

So, to revise, here’s a short list of rules:

1. Rule of Leniency – allow yourself a big meal or extra chocolate/dessert once a week.
2. Rule of Planning – determine whether to eat less, equal, or more than the day before.
3. Rule of Water – half an ounce per pound when not active, and two thirds of an ounce per pound when active.
4. Rule of Exercise – run, hike and/or row daily, or at least three times every week.

The same principles apply when you are simply trying to maintain your weight, although to a more comfortable degree. For example, you can allow yourself more leniency, check your weight only once or twice a week and plan accordingly, etc. However, you simply must exercise and drink water. You can, perhaps, exercise less – instead of running intermittently for an hour, you can reduce this to half an hour, or row just once across the lake and back instead of twice. Reduce it so that it fits your schedule, but don’t neglect it.

Notice how your weight oscillates constantly. Sometimes you weigh more, sometimes less. It’s impossible and pointless to keep your weight constant. Your body can handle these oscillations. It may take a very long time to see whether the trend of these oscillations actually falls towards your desired weight. So, don’t worry if your weight today is higher than the weight yesterday. However, if the trend shows growth above your ideal weight, it is time to take some measures. For this reason, don’t be too restrictive on your target weight. Allow yourself about 6 pounds more or less than your ideal weight and only take measures to lose (or gain) weight if you’ve moved outside of those.

Never attempt to force yourself into a diet you are not accustomed to. Not only is it uncomfortable – it is also dangerous. Go into it gradually. You will note that using the steps I’ve written above, you are in fact gradually eating less, and more healthy. It gives your body time to accustom to changes, and if changes aren’t too fast, then they won’t be very uncomfortable either. This is why you should wait until you get accustomed to each step of your diet for your body to adapt to it, before moving on to the next one. As a rule of thumb, such adaptation will take 30 days.

Finally, don’t take everything I say as scientific fact. I’ve built this weight loss scheme for myself, and for me it worked. I’ve never worked with other people on losing weight, so I acknowledge that my system might have errors. However, I firmly believe that I’ve got the principles right – be hungry to lose weight, start dieting gradually instead of suddenly, exercise and track your weight oscillations over a period of time, rather than from day to day.

Oh, and have fun. Don’t get too nervous dieting. Take it nice and slow. Being nervous about it, or setting a deadline is unhealthy.