Hey hey!
Hope your weekend has been a blast so far. I’ve had a good couple of weeks - training is going well and reading is going well too.
I love the concept of mental models. They help you frame certain concepts differently and understand them better. I’ve used one in my writing for this week and I hope you find it useful.
Before we get started, thanks for spending your time here. And if you think it’d be relevant, I’d appreciate a share.
Alright, the 3 things for today are
How to hack portion control. Or are you eating what you need, or eating according to a pre-set pattern?
3 quotes, featuring Einstein, Jarmusch, and Sivers.
How you can hit your escape velocity. And get way way way ahead of square one!
How you can hack portion control
Eating at home
Eating at home means eating familiar food. Stuff you've been eating for years and years. There's a lot of nostalgia involved. And there is a lot of preset patterns involved too.
My dad used to tell us this story of him growing up. Living in a communist family with 6 mouths to feed, portions were strictly rationed. As the eldest, his quota for breakfast was 3 idlis. His father, my grandfather, comes from a village in the Kumbakonam district and they would visit frequently. Back at the ancestral home, things worked differently. There was food in abundance. When my dad would sit with the other kids (not just his siblings but all the other cousins and what-not), he would stop at 3 idlis. When asked if he wanted more, he apparently responded "But I already ate 3". After much laughter, he was served more. And more.
Like my dad, we all have a number set in our heads. While circumstances may be different (today we have the issue of surplus. too much food!), repetitive patterns and years of eating have set this number.
If it is dosai for dinner, you already know the number of dosais you eat. If it is paratha for dinner, you know how many you are going to eat. If it is rice for dinner, you know you are going to have sambar, rasam, and duh, of course, some curd rice too.
Your appetite has been trained by you, more or less. Your stomach size is also developed over the years. So, come at dinner time, you know what and how much of it is going in. But how can that be?
If you are someone who wants to eat a bit more intuitively and slowly, this is the post for you.
Patterns again
This preset number, this pattern of "the clock strikes this o'clock and so I am going to eat this much food" is useful but when our current eating habits are the issue, this is a ripe place to change.
Conversations with not just my students but with my aunts and uncles and acquaintances who are not into what I do, a pattern becomes obvious. Most of you eat more than you need. This has to do with a combination of factors - habits and patterns, as well as eating a meal that is low in nutrients and fibre.
I want to address the first part of this post.
For the latter, up your food quality aka eat more protein and vegetables. You know the drill.
Eating signals
If we eat when we are hungry and based on how hungry we are, we determine the quantity, it is a big shift.
If you had a heavy workout, you are probably gonna have a bigger appetite.
If you had a day where you were stuck in front of your laptop and moved minimally, you need lesser food than a normal day.
Eat when you are hungry. Eat until satiety. These are 2 guidelines that can liberate you from your pre-set patterns of not just overconsumption but consuming the wrong amounts.
But maybe this is a bit too open-ended. How can we improve on this?
Setting a timer
Training wheels are useful.
What if you set a timer on your phone for 20 minutes when you started eating? You can ignore your timer after but your goal is to finish approximately around the 20-minute mark.
Remember, these are just training wheels.
You will not need to eat with this timer for the rest of your life. Just you being aware of the pace you are eating at will create change.
And let's add one more guideline. How about you wait 5 minutes after finishing before you decide on a second helping?
Putting it together
The broad guidelines we start with are
Eat when you are hungry.
Eat until satiety.
But these guidelines fail many times. Eating at a schedule, eating as a family, social obligations - all of this might not allow us to follow #1.
Eating to satiety is a hard skill because of the delayed signals the gut sends to the brain, to stop eating. By then, you've already had a bit more food than you needed.
So, we hack the meal with the following two guidelines.
3. Set a 20-minute timer and eat. If you finish early, wait for the 20 minutes to be over.
4. And wait a further 5-10 minutes before you get your second helping.
These take a bit of getting used to. But you'd be surprised by how your portions change when you follow these guidelines.
After all, we are what we ate. Years and years of mild overeating can cause us to put on some kilos. Hacking our habits to chip away at it is a game-changer.
Try this out for 2 weeks and let me know how it goes.
Think long-term. Think habits.
3 quotes
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
– Einstein
We are not the same person we were 1 year ago. Definitely not the same person 10 years ago.
And yet, we behave as if we were.
To solve a problem facing us, we must grow/change/evolve and expect to solve the problem.
Nothing is original.
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.
Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows.
Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.
If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
Authenticity is invaluable;
originality is non-existent.
And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it.
– Jim Jarmusch
This was sent across to me from a friend and regular reader. I love this.
Back in my youth, whenever I'd get an idea, I'd be convinced of two things. One, it was revolutionary and the bestest idea ever. Two, it was original and no one had ever thought of it.
Today, whenever I get an idea, I scribble all around it and wait a day or two. And then once I am done vomiting everything out, I search the Internet for other people who've had that idea and what they've done with it.
Ideas are (mostly) useless. It only matters what you do with them. Just because someone else has already thought of your great idea does not mean you cannot take it somewhere. Dream!
Whatever excites you, go do it.
Whatever drains you, stop doing it.
– Derek Sivers
In addition to doing the occasional time logs, I've recently started doing energy logs. There are some days when I feel great. And some days when I feel absolutely drained. Some days when my brain does not fire at all at the end of the day and I am just staring at a book, and then eventually close it and go watch TV. And other days when I cannot put the book down or stop writing thoughts and ideas.
It all has to do with the energy balance. I think.
Escape Velocity
Square 1, Square 2 ... Square -3
You lose 5 kilos. You've started the year on a roll. Freshly motivated and rejuvenated from taking some time off, you've realised this is what you want to do. This is the time when you nail things.
And a few months later, you find yourself in the same old place. Back to square 1.
Why the fuck does this keep happening to you?
And as you look at photos or training videos from 4-5 years ago, you realise that maybe what you think as square one is actually square -3. What the fudge?! This situation is getting worse.
When you look at your diets, your bursts of motivation with a narrow time window, say 4-12 weeks, you've always done a great job. You've knocked it out of the park.
But when you zoom out and look at them with a 6-12 month window (let's not even get into longer than that), sheesh, it makes for terribly unflattering viewing.
Maybe fat loss is not what you've been grappling with. I always start with it because that is what the vast majority, including me, grapples with. Especially at the start. Until one learns to get past square 1.
Maybe you've been trying to put on a few kilos of muscle. Maybe you've been trying to kick your sugar habit. Or your alcohol habit. Or maybe just do a lot less of this, as opposed to "I'll NEVER EVER do it again."
Whichever way you spin it, when you zoom in - great. When you zoom out - terrible.
Why? How? Can you get out of this square? When do you win this game?!?
Or is this going to be a perennial game of snakes and ladders - inevitably coming back down? Do you just make peace with that as the game?
How does a rocket leave the Earth?
For an object like a space shuttle to leave the Earth's gravity, it needs to create a tremendous amount of energy in a rather short duration.
The Earth pulls all things on it towards its centre. To escape its gravitational reach, one must hit escape velocity. Which is calculated as ~11 kilometres PER SECOND. At that speed, you can travel from Delhi to New York in well under 2 minutes.
What the heck does that matter? Well, I want to introduce the mental model of escape velocity and why that is pertinent to you and your journey of fat loss (or muscle gain or get out of square 1 permanently).
For the Earth, this is the escape velocity. For a larger planet, like Jupiter, the escape velocity is much higher (~5.3 times). Meaning the speed required will get you from Delhi to NYC in under 20 seconds!
You are what you ate
As Coach Dan John says, you are what you ate.
You are not in your present condition because of what happened yesterday or last week. But everything you've been doing or not doing for a much much longer time than just last week or month or year.
You are your habits.
The reason you keep getting pulled back is that you are not able to hit the requisite escape velocity. People who you see pull it off successfully, either they've managed to create it. Or the size of their baggage aka gravitational pull, and thus the required escape velocity is lesser than yours.
It is irrelevant.
What matters is only you, and your escape velocity.
The escape velocity is too high
Trying to undo years of sub-par habits, years of accumulation of baggage, years of moving into the negative space - it has a cost.
And all of you want to hit escape velocity in a few weeks, just like leaving the Earth. But for most of you, that is way too high.
You think you hit it with your 6-week diet, or your month of no-sugar, or even something longer and harder and more restrictive.
But you are not out of the Earth's gravitational pull. You think you are when you lose those 5 kilos or make a significant dent in your goals. You think you've made great forward progress.
Yes, you most definitely have.
But you have not hit escape velocity.
Once you (eventually) hit escape velocity, it does become a lot easier to keep flying towards the Moon. Or Neptune. Or to other galaxies.
Remember, this is a mental model. This is a metaphor. It does not translate 100%, nor should it.
Because you truly only escape when you change your habits. And this happens naturally, it happens inevitably as you get rid of your baggage, as you escape the gravitational pull.
You cannot replicate all of your current habits, the ones that are keeping you on square 1, and expect not to fall back down to Earth. It will happen.
The good thing is, you won't. Not once you've hit escape velocity.
Your habits will be vastly improved. Yes, you will of course have beer when you want and ice cream when you want and all that. But it will be different.
Where does this leave you?
A short-term burst, like a rocket launch, is required.
But that's not enough to hit escape velocity. Because for most of you, for most of us, we are on Jupiter and not on Mercury.
We have to keep at it for longer.
And trying to blaze fully, at 100%, for long durations is excruciatingly hard.
That's why habit change and consistency rule. You have to keep making forward progress, bit by bit. Some weeks, you blast off. Some weeks, you inch ahead. A couple of times, you slip up. But before the gravitational pull gets you, you inch ahead or you blast ahead.
Escape velocity is different for you than it is for a rocket ship. But the mental model is relevant. Think about it.
How does this change your thinking for 2022?
How does this change your thinking for November?
How does this change your thinking for next week?
Thanks for reading/listening. Do share this with a friend! I’ll see you next week.
