More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I joked that the major fears of modern man could be boiled down to two things: too much e-mail and getting fat.
Charles Munger likes to quote Charles Darwin: Even people who aren’t geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits.
NO EXERCISE BURNS MANY CALORIES. Did you eat half an Oreo cookie? No problem. If you’re a 220-pound male, you just need to climb 27 flights of stairs to burn it off.
The caloric argument for exercise gets even more depressing. Remember those 107 calories you burned during that kick-ass hour-long Stairmaster™ session? Don’t forget to subtract your basal metabolic rate (BMR), what you would have burned had you been sitting on the couch watching The Simpsons instead. For most people, that’s about 100 calories per hour given off as heat (BTU). That hour on the Stairmaster was worth seven calories.
This, dear friends, is referred to as “parking lot” science, so-called after a joke about a poor drunk man who loses his keys during a night on the town. His friends find him on his hands and knees looking for his keys under a streetlight, even though he knows he lost them somewhere else. “Why are you looking for your keys under the streetlight?” they ask. He responds confidently, “Because there’s more light over here. I can see better.”
Think “all-natural” is safer than synthetic? Split peas are all-natural, but so is arsenic. Human growth hormone (HGH) can be extracted from the brains of all-natural cadavers, but unfortunately it often brings Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease with it, which is why HGH is now manufactured using recombinant DNA.
Is it possible that the arrow of causality is reversed? Example: do people who are naturally ripped and muscular often choose to be sprinters? Yep.
Are we mixing up absence and presence? Example: if the claim is that a no-meat diet extends average lifespan 5–15%, is it possible that it is the presence of more vegetables, not the absence of meat, that extends lifespan? It most certainly is.
Is it possible that you tested a specific demographic and that other variables are responsible for the difference? Example: if the claim is that yoga improves cardiac health, and the experimental group comprises upper-class folk, is it possible that they are therefore more likely tha...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The point is to be skeptical, especially of sensationalist headlines. Most “new studies” in the media are observational studies that can, at best, establish correlation (A happens while B happens), but not causality (A causes B to happen).
His trainer at the time, Marty Gallagher, has stated matter-of-factly that “maintaining peak condition year-round is a ticket to the mental ward.”
Forget balance and embrace cycling. It’s a key ingredient in rapid body redesign.
Did fatness genes get passed on, or was it overeating behavior? After all, fat people tend to have fat pets.
The word aerobics came about when the gym instructors got together and said, “If we’re going to charge $10 an hour, we can’t call it jumping up and down.” —Rita Rudner
Aerobics classes? The reason you’re sold: aerobics is more effective than alternative X. The real reason it’s promoted: there’s no equipment investment and the gym can maximize students per square foot per class. Many “new and improved” recommendations are based on calculating profit first and then working backward to justify the method.
These are two categories of words that you should neither use nor listen to. The first, marketer-speak, includes all terms used to scare or sell that have no physiological basis: Toning Cellulite Firming Shaping Aerobics
The word cellulite, for example, first appeared in the April 15, 1968, issue of Vogue magazine, and this invented disease soon had a believer base worldwide:
Cellulite is fat. Nothing special, neither a disease nor a unique female problem without solutions. It can be removed.
Less obvious, but often more damaging than marketer-speak, are scientific-sounding words that are so overused as to have no agreed-upon meaning: Health Fitness Optimal
“I just want to be healthy” is not actionable. “I want to increase my HDL cholesterol and improve my time for a one-mile jog (or walk)” is actionable. “Healthy” is subject to the fads and regime du jour. Useless.
Rule #1: It’s not what you put in your mouth that matters, it’s what makes it to your bloodstream. If it passes through, it doesn’t count.
The creator of the “calorie” as we know it, 19th-century chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater, did not have the technology that we have today. He incinerated foods. Incineration does not equal human digestion; eating a fireplace log will not store the same number of calories as burning one will produce. Tummies have trouble with bark, as they do with many things.
Rule #2: The hormonal responses to carbohydrates (CHO), protein, and fat are different.
One such study, conducted by Kekwick and Pawan, compared three groups put on calorically equal (isocaloric) semistarvation diets of 90% fat, 90% protein, or 90% carbohydrate. Though ensuring compliance was a challenge, the outcomes were clearly not at all the same: 1,000 cals. at 90% fat = weight loss of 0.9 lbs. per day 1,000 cals. at 90% protein = weight loss of 0.6 lbs. per day 1,000 cals. at 90% carbohydrate = weight gain of 0.24 lbs. per day
Marketers have conditioned women to believe that they need specific programs and diets “for women.” This is an example of capitalism at its worst: creating false need and confusion.
On average, women have less than one-tenth (often less than one-fortieth) the testosterone of men. This biochemical recipe just doesn’t support rapid muscular growth unless you’re an outlier, so, for the duration of this book, please suspend any fear of “getting bulky.”
you should eat and train for your desired outcome, not to accommodate your current condition.
Several of the better-known tech CEOs in San Francisco have asked me at different times for an identical favor: an index card with bullet-point instructions for losing abdominal fat. Each of them made it clear: “Just tell me exactly what to do and I’ll do it.” I gave them all of the necessary tactical advice on one 3×5 card, knowing in advance what the outcome would be. The success rate was impressive … 0%. People suck at following advice. Even the most effective people in the world are terrible at it.
Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. There has been no “Harajuku Moment.”
There are no reminders. No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change. Consistent tracking, even if you have no knowledge of fat-loss or exercise, wil...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
But what is this all-important “Harajuku Moment”? It’s an epiphany that turns a nice-to-have into a must-have. There is no point in getting started until it happens. It applies to fat-loss as much as strength gain, to endurance as much as sex. No matter how many bullet points and re...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“For a long time, I’ve known that the key to getting started down the path of being remarkable in anything is to simply act with the intention of being remarkable.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. —Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Prize–winning physicist
γνωθι σεαυτόν [“Know Thyself”] —Inscription at Temple of Apollo at Adelphi
It takes just one such incident to ruin an entire program and months of progress.
Simple: logic fails. If you were to summarize the last 100 years of behavioral psychology in two words, that would be the takeaway.
there are four principles of failure-proofing behavior. Think of them as insurance against the weaknesses of human nature—your weaknesses, my weaknesses, our weaknesses: 1. Make it conscious. 2. Make it a game. 3. Make it competitive. 4. Make it small and temporary.
The researchers concluded that photographs are more effective than written food diaries. This is saying something, as prior studies had confirmed that subjects who use food diaries lose three times as much weight as those who don’t. The upshot: use your camera phone to take a snapshot before opening your mouth. Even without a prescribed diet, this awareness alone will result in fat-loss.
It turned out that, with each change, the workers suspected they were being observed and therefore worked harder. This phenomenon—also called the “observer effect”—came to be known as “the Hawthorne Effect.”
That is, how many times do you need to log data to get hooked and never stop? In the experience of the brilliant Nike+ team, and in the experience of their users, more than 1.2 million runners who have tracked more than 130 million miles, that magic number is five: If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they’re massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they’ve gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves.
Aristotle had it right, but he was missing a number: “We are what we do repeatedly.” A mere five times (five workouts, five meals, five of whatever we want) will be our goal. When in doubt, “take five” is the rule.
There is another phenomenon that makes groups an ideal environment for change: social comparison theory. In plain English, it means that, in a group, some people will do worse than you (“Sarah lost only one pound—good for me!”) and others will do better (“Mike’s nothing special. If he can do it, so can I.”). Seeing inferior performers makes you proud of even minor progress, and superior performers in your peer group make greater results seem achievable.
Make it small and temporary: the immense practicality of baby steps “Take the pressure off.” Michael Levin has made a career of taking the pressure off, and it has worked. Sixty literary works later, from national nonfiction bestsellers to screenplays, he was suggesting that I (Tim) do the same: set a meager goal of two pages of writing per day. I had made a mental monster of the book in your hands, and setting the bar low allowed me to do what mattered most: get started each morning.
Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, wrote his graduate dissertation with a far less aggressive commitment. Even if he came home from a party at 3:00 A.M., he had to write one sentence per day. He finished in record time while classmates languished for years, overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.
If you want to walk an hour a day, don’t start with one hour. Choosing one hour is automatically building in the excuse of not having enough time. Commit to a fail-proof five minutes instead. This is exactly what Dr. Fogg suggested to his sister, and that one change (the smallest meaningful change that created momentum) led her to buy running shoes and stop eating dessert, neither of which he suggested. These subsequent decisions are referred to in the literature as “consonant decisions,” decisions we make to be aligned with a prior decision.
Remember our target to log five sessions of new behaviors? It’s the five sessions that are important, not the duration of those sessions. Rig the game so you can win. Do what’s needed to make those first five sessions as painless as possible. Five snowflakes are all you need to start the snowball effect of consonant decisions. Take the pressure off and put in your five easy sessions, whether meals or workouts. The rest will take care of itself.
Phil had a simple method in mind: “I wanted to see what effect being precisely aware of my weight would have on my weight.” This is where we depart from the common. Phil lost 28 pounds in six months without making the slightest attempt to change his behavior.
Awareness, even at a subconscious level, beats fancy checklists without it. Track or you will fail.
RULE #1: AVOID “WHITE” CARBOHYDRATES. Avoid any carbohydrate that is, or can be, white. The following foods are prohibited, except for within 30 minutes of finishing a resistance-training workout like those described in the “From Geek to Freak” or “Occam’s Protocol” chapters: all bread, rice (including brown), cereal, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, and fried food with breading. If you avoid eating the aforementioned foods and anything else white, you’ll be safe.
Just for fun, another reason to avoid the whities: chlorine dioxide, one of the chemicals used to bleach flour (even if later made brown again, a common trick), combines with residual protein in most of these foods to form alloxan. Researchers use alloxan in lab rats to induce diabetes. That’s right—it’s used to produce diabetes. This is bad news if you eat anything white or “enriched.” Don’t eat white stuff unless you want to get fatter.
