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Lose Weight - Tip #2: Aim for Excellence, But NOT Perfection

7/29/2014

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"Perfect is the enemy of good." 

This famous quote, attributed to Voltaire, is a useful reminder when we embark on doing something new. Because no mindset works against us more when we start something new than the perfectionist's mindset. 

Know a perfectionist? You probably do. We all know somebody who decided to do something new, hard, and noble -- quit smoking, learn how to play an instrument, or eat from a new diet. It is all that person would talk about. She or he talked about it all the time because she was obsessed, and also because she was trying to keep herself true and perfect to adopting this new thing in her life. 

What happened then when she made one little mistake? When she lit up a cigarette after being good for 3 and not having one, or when she did not pick up the guitar for 2 days after being good about strumming it daily for two weeks, or when she ate a sandwich after swearing off bread and being good about avoiding it for a week? 

This perfectionist, after one such small mistake, she quit her noble cause. Why? Because she put way too much pressure on herself. She created way too high expectations for herself on being able to follow through this new thing perfectly. And thus, she set herself up to fail. 

So what then is the best mindset when doing something new, hard, and noble, like adopting new foods into what you eat everyday and letting go of old favorites to lose weight and become healthier? 

The answer is the mindset that let's you feel okay failing on occasion. In fact, build failure into your diet. Use Pareto's principle of 80/20, where you do things right 80% of the time, and 20% of the time you give yourself leeway to do the wrong thing. 

If you plan to eat the right foods and not any bad ones for 4 weeks, I encourage you on 1 day to eat all the crap food you like. For 6 days, eat the right food. And if on one of those weeks, you eat the wrong food on 2 days, be okay with it. Just go back to eating right 6 days a week.


The wrong mindset tells you to try eating right for all 7 days a week, all 4 weeks a month,. The pressure and expectations to follow through everyday is much too high for our human nature, so you will quit doing the right thing altogether. Try to be perfect, and oddly enough, you will be far from achieving your goal of losing weight and become healthier versus if you tried to perfect most of the time and imperfect on a day or two each week. 

So the Healthy Indian knows this well: Aim to be almost perfect, but never perfect, when doing something new, hard and noble like eating better food and not the old crap food you liked so much, in order to achieve success.

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Lose Weight - Tip #1: Change your environment to easily change your habits

7/22/2014

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Think about this for a minute. Imagine you had a kid (maybe you have one) and you had just baked cookies for some occasion, and you put them on the countertop to cool down. 


Your kid comes home, and you greet him. Then you tell him to stay put because you need to clean his shoes, so you leave. He sees those cookies waiting there. He smells the sweet aroma. And you're not there. Guess what he does next? He eats those cookies (and makes a mess doing it), which you already know. 

You may have laughed a little when imagining this scenario because you recognize how universal this kid's action is. You also recognize the human nature underlying it, and in this may you see the kid as a caricature of us adults. 

Yes, you and I, logical adults with big frontal brains that help us control our impulses and direct our behavior (so we think), guess what would we would do in a similar scenario, when coming home from work, hungry, and see crap food sitting out in the open when we walk in? We will eat that crap food.  

It's human nature. And importantly, we act on our impulses -- despite knowing we should not do this -- because our environment gave us a cue to act toward seeking the pleasure gained by eating this crap food. 

Making habits is also human nature. Habits are routine behaviors we tend to do automatically, without thinking about what we're doing. Following habits is the easy thing to do, because if we had to think though every possible action every hour of every day, we would tax our brains too much, we would become overwhelmed, and end up doing nothing. 

Our habits help us live, and our they largely center on cues available in our environment. For example, say you want to form a new habit of working out. And your gym is 30 minutes away. You probably will not make a habit of going to the gym regularly. It's too far, it's not in the immediate environment, and too much energy and motivation will be needed to make the action of going to the gym a habit. 

But say if you move. Then your new gym is only a 2-minute walk away. You will probably make a habit of going to the gym all the time, because not only are you motivated (like you were before). Now the action is easy to do as it is only a short walk away. What I am trying to illustrate in this  simple example is this: it is easier to form a habit when you change your environment to make it easier to do the action you're hoping to make a habit.

Same with the food we eat. If we keep junk food in the home and it is easy to see, then you will eat junk food. No matter how much you commit to eating healthy food, you will eat the junk food because you're environment is set up that way. 



If you hide the junk food, but put the good food out so the eyes can see it, then you're far more likely to eat the good food and not the junk. More importantly, you're far more likely to make it a habit, because the cue in your environment is "Hey, here's some food." The food just happens to be good. And habits are important because it makes us who we are.

So don't do the hard thing. Don't try to make a new habit by keeping the old environment around you. If you have crap food out where it is easily grabable, then you'll have to think "Don't eat this" a lot, you'll strain your brain thinking about this even at a subconscious level, and you may give in to the crap food because there is only so much psychic energy to battle your desires. Trying to change your habits in the same old environment is like swimming upstream, which is hard work and sometimes impossible.



Swim downstream, not up. Do this. Move the crap food out of sight. Hide it in the darkest corner of your cupboard or closet. Or throw it away. Put some good food like nuts and fruits where the crap used to be, so your eyes can easily feast on it. It will make it much easier for you to follow through and start eating better, not just today, but tomorrow and for the future.

So the Healthy Indian regards this tip highly:
Change your environment to help you make better habits, instead of trying to make better habits in the same old environment.

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National Geographic on Sugar & Obesity

7/15/2014

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National Geographic Magazine ran an article on sugar in their August 2013 issue. What makes it interesting and worth a read (available for free here) is you learn much of the history and social aspects of sugar production and consumption. For example, did you know sugar was being refined and turned into the white powder we are familiar with today -- back in 500 A.D.?

But what makes this article really interesting to me is it's perspective on sugar's effect on health. This passage is the tastiest morsel, but I encourage you to take the whole course. 

"[Fat] makes up a smaller portion of the American diet than it did 20 years ago. Yet the portion of America that is obese has only grown larger. The primary reason, says [kidney doctor Richard] Johnson, along with other experts, is sugar, and in particular fructose... 

Table sugar (called sucrose) is half glucose and half fructose. Glucose, which is used by nearly every call in the body for energy, also stimulates the production and release of insulin, the hormone that signal our fat cells to become fatter. 

Fructose, on the other hand is the sweeter sugar found in fruits and also processed foods, is metabolized primarily by our liver, which makes blood fats called triglycerides. To quote the NGM article:

"Some of these fats stay in the liver, which over long exposure can turn fatty and dysfunctional. But a lot of the triglycerides are pushed out into the blood too. Over time, blood pressure goes up, and tissues become progressively more resistant to insulin. The pancreas responds by pouring out more insulin, trying to keep things in check. Eventually a condition known as metabolic syndrome kicks in, characterized by obesity, especially around the waist; high blood pressure; and other metabolic changes that, if not checked, can lead to type 2 diabetes, with a heightened danger of heart attack thrown in for good measure. As much as a third of the American adult population could meet the criteria for metabolic syndrome set by the National Institutes of Health."

On this blog, I have focused on the harmful effects of glucose because that is what our experts have studied and understood well. Fructose though has largely been ignored, but at our peril. Luckily experts like Dr. Robert Lustig are shining the light on fructose. 

Bottom line is still the same: sugars are bad for us, and eating too much causes us to become fatter and eventually obese. And thus we should avoid processed foods with easily digestible sugars (as they have little to no natural fibers to slow down sugar digestion, unlike most fruit).

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Why Carbs are Worse than Fats

7/7/2014

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The best infographic that tells us in simple language why foods with lots of easily digestible carbs (white rice, breads from white flour like chappati, potatoes, and fried snacks) are worse than foods with lots of dietary fats. (Courtesy of Massive Health.) Enjoy!
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