Coach AA's Sunday Newsletter
Coach AA's Sunday Newsletter
Sep 12, 2021
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Sep 12, 2021

Simple vs Easy. 3 quotes. Your eating is out of control.

Hey hey!

Hope your weekend is going well. Mine’s been a blast so far. I had a fun time coaching yesterday morning, and also had the chance to hang out with some of my favourite students at lunch and see them outside of class. And chilled, watched some football. And that's just yesterday!

Enough about me. On to the 3 things for this week.

  • Simple or Easy. What if we make 4 quadrants from there, copying Coach Dan John’s framework for viewing things, and see where it gets us?

  • 3 quotes, featuring Jiddu Krishnamurti, Derren Brown, Carl Rogers.

  • Is your eating out of control? Is that the problem? Or is the problem elsewhere? Let’s find out.


The Simple and Easy in 4 quadrants

We are wired differently. Certain things are more in tune with our unsaid preferences and prejudices that we find straightforward to comply with. Most times, it has very little to do with the actual task.

A few of you found sitting at a desk and listening to a teacher easy. Writing exams was simple. A few of you found sitting at a desk impossible, let alone paying attention. You froze when you wrote exams even though your prep was exceptional.

It happens.

Using simple and easy, I want to walk you through 4 quadrants.

Simple: not complex or fancy.

Easy: requiring or indicating little effort, thought, or reflection.

What I've seen is the less thought that's required to do something, the lower the barrier for entry. The less thinking and the more "Do This!" there is, the better the compliance and adoption.

Certain things are simple. Certain things are easy. Some are both. Some are neither. Understanding which quadrant they fall into will help you figure out what to dabble in and try out. And most of us will progress from Quadrant 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. A few might be able to make the jump directly to Q3 but that's dependent on some innate wiring going on already.

Quadrant 1: Simple + Easy

Walking.

It is simple. And easy. There's minimal skill requirement. There's minimal thought requirement i.e. what am I supposed to do and how am I supposed to do it.

Machine-based work at the gym falls here too. The machines have a low barrier to entry. It is hard to do them wrong.

Quadrant 2: Not Simple + Easy

Most diets fall here. Because of their strictly defined nature, it is easy to know what to do. It is easy to know when you've made a mistake.

Calorie counting seems to fall over here. It is tedious, requires a high level of detail, and it is beyond me to do it for longer than a week. But there are so many apps out there that make it easy for you to do.

Diets are clearly defined, thus requiring minimal thought. The effort involved is high but seems very doable for most beginners. They tend to be a bit complex, involving the removal of a food group or a lot of foodstuffs.

Once you get the hang of it, it gets even easier. But it does not get simpler - because there's a lot of complexity involved in navigating life. A ketogenic diet, for example, is not an easy diet to follow. Even a low-carb diet makes it hard and awkward in social situations. It is easy to follow but not simple at all.

Quadrant 3: Simple + Not Easy

The Daily9 system falls here. It requires you to know a lot more about your food, it requires you to eat a minimum amount of protein and vegetables. It requires you to get your sleep going. None of these is easy. For someone who has not eaten vegetables, upping the quotient is not an easy process.

But it is a simple system because it places extremely few constraints. You can follow any cultural way of eating, you can mix-and-match, you can eat one meal a day or 10. It doesn't matter. It conforms to however you want to eat.

There are a million ways to skin the system to make it work for you.

That makes life simple.

But it requires you to put your thinking hat on. Which means it is not as easy as calorie counting.

Contextualising is the difficult part for most of us. But once you do, it becomes simple and easy.

Quadrant 4: Not Simple + Not Easy

Transformations come here. They are neither simple nor easy. They require an inordinate amount of work, on top of ensuring all of your life is aligned and ready to take on the stress. You will need to follow a specific diet, most probably keeping a rather keen eye on calorie consumption and macronutrient consumption, have an intense training schedule, and of course, ensure you are getting enough sleep.

And you will need to do this for a few months.

What do you do with this?

For some of you, calorie counting might fall on simple + easy. That's what a lot of nutrition apps are betting on, and I can totally see how it leads there, after repeated use.

For some of you, walking might not be simple + easy. Maybe you have severe time constraints and solving that is not straightforward.

There's value in understanding what the toll of a task is. Some demand more time or more energy or both, and they form a barrier to entry. Calorie counting for me is impossible and D9 is second nature, but for a lot of folks, it is the other way around.

Knowing where things fall in your context is always a valuable tool. So, you know how much to invest and how long.

For the long-term, simple works. Easy works.

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3 quotes

In the same way that the Platonic Idea of, say, tree-ness is different from and so much better than any particular tree we may see (which may have branches missing and other imperfections), so a person will never embody the qualities we perceive in them as perfectly as we might imagine. While the loss of self that we feel when worshipping another can feel intoxicating, there is no doubt that it can bring much pain when the all-too-human qualities of the targets of our obsessions become crushingly apparent.

– Derren Brown

Hero worship. Having outlandish expectations. Pinning your dreams on someone else - your favourite sports team, your idol, your whatever.

Bruce Lee says this succinctly as well. About expectations.


The moment you are aware of confusion, of exactly what is, you try to escape from it. Those sects which offer you a system for the solution of suffering - economic, social, or religious - are the worst; because then system becomes important and not man - whether it be a religious system, or a system of the left or of the right. System becomes important - the philosophy, the idea, becomes important - and not man; and for the sake of the idea, of the ideology, you are willing to sacrifice all mankind, which is exactly what is happening in the world.[...]The system has become important. Therefore, as the system has become important, men, you and I, lose significance; and the controllers of the system, whether religious or social, whether of the left or of the right, assume authority, assume power, and therefore, sacrifice you, the individual. That is exactly what is happening.

– J Krishnamurti


The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.

– Carl Rogers

Only last year I made the realisation that I am a terrible listener. It is because I evaluate and judge that I am poor at listening to myself, and to others. To simply listen without judgment, to simply listen with awareness and to do nothing about it. It seems like a first step but sometimes, it seems that's all there is to do. But sure enough, I find myself trying to solve things.


Is your eating out of control?

popping candy

Work's been hectic. A bunch of your colleagues got laid off and your team has had to do more work to bear the brunt. You have calls at all hours, worse than usual. With remote work being the norm, the meetings and schedules have gotten worse. Your day is no longer your day. Nor does it have anything to do with daylight but according to when the day is at New York or the Bay Area.

Everything about your schedule is out of your control, or so you've been led to believe.

You have no time or energy to think about food and so food is whatever is there on the table, or whatever is easy to order and devour. You walk out of a meeting at 6 pm, already at the end of an 8-hour day but you still have 3 more meetings. Thanks to the recent festival/birthday/wedding, there's a boatload of tempting snacks and you pop in a few and go back to your desk.

clothes feeling snug

You feel more drained. Your work suffers. But you feel you have no choice but to work even longer and harder. Food becomes a fun get-away. You order your favourite foods coz you tell yourself you deserve them. You are putting up with so much shit at work that you deserve a break.

But it stops feeling as good as it used to, of course.

And is it your imagination, or are your clothes feeling a bit snugger than they used to?

Cut out all the ....

What the fuck?!?! All the hard work and discipline over the past few months have been destroyed because of this crazy phase. At home or at work, things have been so hectic that you did not have any energy and look what happens when you relax a bit. You've put on so much weight and the self-criticism becomes self-flagellation and unhealthy.

You decide to exercise extreme control. From zero control, you are on a DIET. Either you are cutting out most of your calories, or whatever the current enemy is - carbs or fats or whatever. And the pendulum swings all the way across.

Is food the core problem?

Imbalance is fine. We find balance over a time period filled with imbalances, constantly tinkering and titrating what we are up to. A bit of fun over the weekend, and a bit of work over the week - some kind of balance. A bit of fun in the evening after a long workday - balance. Whatever the time frame, we are used to this.

But this extreme lack of control over food to extreme control over food does not work. Why? From my experience, it is because we are not getting to the root of the problem. Is the problem about food? Most often not. The problem is about your day, your work, your frustration somewhere else that you are not willing to see or take ownership of. You have ceded control but maybe you should not have. Working 12-hour days or you'll lose your job? Is that so? Is that a job you want to be enslaved to? Are you truly okay to let that be out of your control? And because you are not, but at the same time unwilling to fix whatever that larger issue is, whatever the elephant in the room is, you are trying to control other smaller things. Which unfortunately can never fix the root cause. And so, everything goes unresolved.

Confront!

  1. Plan your weekly menu after a sumptuous, relaxed meal.

  2. Control your environment. Get rid of junk in your house and toss them in the bin.

  3. If you are at an extreme - stupidly eating everything in sight or severely restricted eating - recognise the red flag for what it is.

And know that the real issue is not your food. But something else in your life where you have relinquished control. But need to take control back.

Get back your workday. Get back your time with your friends or family. Get back to your routine. Get back your "me time". Fight for it. Sit down and confront what you are running away from.

And once you do, great!

Your out of control eating is a symptom of something else. Identify it. Confront it. Deal with it.

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Thanks for spending a part of your day here. Hope at least one thing tickled your brain.