Screw motivation, what you need is discipline.

by Zbyhnev | posted in: Uncategorized | 0

If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it.

The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself.

The second, somewhat unpopular and entirely correct choice is to cultivate discipline.

This is one of these situations where adopting a different perspective immediately results in superior outcomes.
Few uses of the term paradigm shift are actually legitimate, but this one is. Its a lightbulb moment.

Whats the difference?

Motivation, broadly speaking, operates on the erroneous assumption that a particular mental or
emotional state is necessary to complete a task.

Thats completely the wrong way around.

Discipline, by contrast, separates outwards functioning from moods and feelings and thereby ironically
circumvents the problem by consistently improving them.

The implications are huge.

Successful completion of tasks brings about the inner states that chronic procrastinators think they need
to initiate tasks in the first place.

Put in simpler form, you dont wait until youre in olympic form to start training. You train to get into
olympic form.

If action is conditional on feelings, waiting for the right mood becomes a particularly insidious form of
procrastination. I know that too well, and wish somebody pointed it out for me twenty, fifteen or ten years ago
before I learned the difference the hard way.

If you wait until you feel like doing stuff, youre fucked . Thats precisely how the dreaded procrastinatory
loops come about.
 Source of picture

At its core, chasing motivation is insistence on the infantile fantasy that we should only be doing things we feel
like doing. The problem is then framed thus: How do I get myself to feel like doing what I have rationally
decided to do?. Bad.

The proper question is How do I make my feelings inconsequential and do the things I consciously want to do
without being a little bitch about it?.

The point is to cut the link between feelings and actions, and do it anyway. You get to feel good and buzzed and
energetic and eager afterwards.

Motivation has is the wrong way around. I am utterly 100% convinced that this faulty frame is the main driver
of the sitting about in underwear playing Xbox, and with yourself epidemic currently sweeping developed
countries.

There are psychological problems with relying on motivation as well.

Because real life in the real world occasionally requires people do things that nobody in their right mind can be
massively enthusiastic about, motivation runs into the insurmountable obstacle of trying to elicit enthusiasm
for things that objectively do not merit it. The only solution besides slackery, then, is to put people out of their
right minds. Thats a horrible, and fortunately fallacious, dilemma.

Trying to drum up enthusiasm for fundamentally dull and soul crushing activities is literally a form of
deliberate psychological self-harm, a voluntary insanity: I AM SO PASSIONATE ABOUT THESE
SPREADSHEETS, I CANT WAIT TO FILL OUT THE EQUATION FOR FUTURE VALUE OF ANNUITY, I
LOVE MY JOB SOOO MUCH!

I do not consider self-inflicted episodes of hypomania the optimal driver of human activity. A thymic
compensation via depressive episodes is inevitable, since the human brain will not tolerate abuse indefinitely.
There are stops and safety valves. There are hormonal hangovers.

The worst thing that can happen is succeeding at the wrong thing temporarily. A far superior scenario is
retaining sanity, which unfortunately tends to be misinterpreted as moral failure: I still dont love my pointless
paper-shuffling job, I must be doing something wrong. I still prefer cake to brocolli and cant lose weight,
maybe Im just weak. I should buy another book about motivation. Bullshit. The critical error is even
approaching those issus in terms of motivation or lack thereof. The answer is discipline, not motivation.

There is another, practical problem with motivation. It has a tiny shelf life, and needs constant refreshing.

Motivation is like manually winding up a crank to deliver a burst of force. At best, it stores and converts energy
to a particular purpose. There are situations where it is the correct attitude, one-offs where getting psyched and
spring-loading a metric fuckton of mental energy upfront is the best course of action. Olympic races and prison
breaks come to mind. But it is a horrible basis for regular day-to-day functioning, and anything like consistent
long-term results.

By contrast, discipline is like an engine that, once kickstarted, actually supplies energy to the system.

Productivity has no requisite mental states. For consistent, long-term results, discipline trumps motivation, runs
circles around it, bangs its mom and eats its lunch.

In summary, motivation is trying to feel like doing stuff. Discipline is doing it even if you dont feel like it.

You get to feel good afterwards.

Discipline, in short, is a system, whereas motivation is analogous to goals. There is a symmetry. Discipline is
more or less self-perpetuating and constant, whereas motivation is a bursty kind of thing.

How do you cultivate discipline? By building habits starting as small as you can manage, even microscopic,
and gathering momentum, reinvesting it in progressively bigger changes to your routine, and building a positive
feedback loop.

Motivation is a counterproductive attitude to productivity. What counts is discipline.

How to actually lose weight

by Zbyhnev | posted in: Uncategorized | 0

Wanna lose weight?

Odds are, you do. Sohow?

The worst offenders are well known sugar, fried stuff, soda, triplemocchaventimacchiatos, eating late at night
and lack of exercise.

We now also know that a major and historically underestimated factor are simple carbohydrates from bread,
pasta, rice, potatoes etc.

But even thats not all.

The problem is not that we dont know whats seriously unhealthy, it is that some kinda-sorta unhealthy
things are often considered healthy.

To be clear, the kinda-unhealthy foods are still fine for a person who runs fifty miles a week. However, for that
person, even pizza with Nutella is fine.

Put in enough effort, and you can do almost anything. But if you want a good cost/benefit ratio, then the proper
way is knowledge coupled with discipline, not effort.

Great athletes can benefit from better diet. In fact, it is spectacularly difficult to find a great athlete who does
not have a great diet. We can argue which way the causation goes, or whether its correlation with a
common cause (such as superior discipline). Sensible diet plus exercise is better than either on its own. theyre
complementary goods. But the point of this article is that you can get good results without counting
calories and living at the gym if you avoid a few common pitfalls.

They are especially:

Whole-grain bread a bit of extra fiber doesnt mean its not an ingot of starch with the
glycemic index of a cake. Brown bread is better than white, but only marginally, just like
being kicked in the nuts with a bare foot is slightly better than being kicked with a boot.
Perhaps slightly less bad, but definitely not good.

To make matters worse, brown bread is often just white bread with caramel colouring and bird feed sprinkled
on the outside, and multi-grain is the same as plain white, but with more (equally bad) types of flour.

Low fat anything, notably dairy products. Fats are, surprisingly, largely irrelevant
for dieting, which is one of those unintuitive epiphanies of switching to a science-based
diet.

Glaring examples are various milkshakes, yoghurt drinks and fermented dairy products with 0% fat, but 400
calories in simple sugars and only trace amounts of any real nutrients. Which means youre hungry ten minutes
later.

The only real advantage of dairy drinks probiotics, IE lactobacilli is available in pure form in every
pharmacy and drug store, without any of the disadvantages. If you care about your gut flora, get those instead.
 Fitness shakes and smoothies, which fall into two categories fresh and bottled. The
fresh ones, typically sold at gyms, are overpriced and bad for results. Naturally, a
glucose-starved athlete in ketosis will buy them, because his body is begging for sugar.
Unfortunately, thats precisely what must be avoided, if the athlete wishes to burn through
equatorial flab instead of free income.

You really dont need a gym membership. Sure, its extra motivation, and a sensible businessplan if youre there
for reasons other than exercise like MILF-hunting, waiting for that one hot girl to lower her standards,
standing at the bar talking instead of exercising, or oggling shredded dudes and wallowing in their musk.

The ice skater Martina Sablikova has won a wagonload of olympic gold medals and broke multiple records,
while training on a bumpy natural pond. Which means that a typical sedentary westerner doesnt need high-tech
torture tools to shed fat and keep in shape, either.

But people who care primarily about looking and feeling good (and preventing disease later in life) can save 50
dollars a month and simply eat smarter and exercise a bit. Or a lot. Go wild. The point is that effective exercise
is remarkably simple and cheap, and doesnt require complicated contraptions or fitness fads. Zumbayoga
bikramkickboxes are pointless.

But gyms business models are based on fads, selling the promise of a shortcut and replaceability of sweat by
brightly colored equipment. Doesnt work that way.

Let it be known once and for all:

THERE

ARE

NO

SHORTCUTS
Bottled fitness shakes and smoothies are basically bags of gummy bears or bars of chocolate with added
taurine, arginine and lecithin, which are about as useful to a casual athlete as a particle collider is to a
dormouse.

Salads inundated in a thousand calories of dressing. Cravings for simple sugars and bad
fats are a type of physical addiction. The body is creative when it comes to cheating itself
and circumventing rational decisions to get at what it wants.

One of the saddest sights in dining are defeated-looking people grabbing a small fistful of vegetables, and then
pouring a gallon of the worst-possible-transfats sauce and a slice of breads worth of croutons (IE particulate
toast) on it to make it more appetising. Those people would literally be better off eating a hamburger.

Then theyre shocked they cant lose weight.

Fried msli and breakfast cereals are literally confectionery marketed as a healthy
choice, while being nutritionally comparable to a donut.

Yes, fried msli with fruits, nuts and chocolate is yummier than plain old raw oatmeal. Which is precisely why
the asses of people who eat it are not yummy.
Surprisingly, printing the word FITNESS! next to a slim feminine figure on the box does not transmute the
contents.

Speaking of the box, it will invariably have a variant of this gem:

The nutritional info looks fine, until you notice the serving size wouldnt feed a toddler, while
feeding an adult requires eighteen (servings!). Which means a reasonably filling bowl of
breakfast cereal adds up to half the recommended daily energy intake for a grown human.

Protein is better breakfast scrambled eggs with bacon (yes, bacon) are much healthier than
fitness cereals.

Rice cakes are the ultimate example of a common fallacy. The logic goes like this:
Because tasty food is often unhealthy, the converse must also be true, and the nastier
the food, the healthier it is. Nope.

Rice cakes have the sad distinction of being both uniquely unappetising and uniquely unhealthy.
Its mostly air, but the rest is starch. Stratospheric glycemic index.

Fruit is healthy in moderation. However, watch the sugar. Fruit is basically dessert with
extra vitamins and fiber, but thats the extent of its difference from a Crme brle.

Fruit juice. Murderous sugar content.

 Sports drinks the most famous one, Gatorade has 25 calories per serving.
Unfortunately, the half liter bottle contains five servings. Which means that if you
finish your workout with a Gatorade, you could have stayed home.

The numbers mean that a bottle of a sports drink negates a kilometer of running, or a half hour on a bike, or a
full session of weight training (counting just calories).

Its an exercise neutraliser.

But it has electrolytes!

Electrolytes are irrelevant for a regular mortal doing a normal workout. Even professional athletes wouldnt
pour this stuff down their throats if it wasnt in their contracts. Why do you think they pour it on each others
heads instead?

So what should you drink before, during and after exercise? Water.

With extreme exertion like marathons, the best electrolytic drink is beer, and the best electrolytic food is a
banana.

Ice teas are herb-flavored sodas. The truly healthy and tea-y ones are recognizable
by their relative unpopularity, because they dont contain fifteen cups of sugar.

In reality:
Pro tip: make your own ice tea and train yourself to like unsweetened drinks. Seriously, weaning yourself off
sodas and sugary drinks alone is the single most important thing to do if youre even slightly overweight and
havent done so already.

Brown sugar like brown bread, brown sugar is 1 better than white sugar, but its
still fucking sugar.

This tempts a special type of aspiring dieters, who hope losing weight wont require any substantive change or
discomfort on their part, to substitute brown sugar for white in a cosmetic and inconsequential dietary change,
thereby obtaining a false sense of having done something for themselves. This then enables them to throw
their arms up helplessly six months later when nothing has changed, declare themselves exceptions to the laws
of thermodynamics, and go back to eating buckets of ice cream in their underwear because it doesnt matter
anyway. See also the above section on salad.

I call this Potemkin dieting.

Its completely idiotic to think browns fine and sweeten the fuck out of eveything. A plague sore in the nose
is better than one on the nutsack, but its still a plague sore. Sugars sugar.

(Sensitive readers will indulge the suggestive imagery shock therapy is ultimately for the good of the reader,
because a permanent change of eating, or any other deeply ingrained habits, requires bigger guns than rational
argument and gentle persuasion. Wish it didnt. Worldd be a better place.)

Those were the foods and drinks that are sometimes considered healthy, but arent. Now for those that are
sometimes considered unhealthy, but are actually surprisingly healthy:

Fats (the right ones. most of the time). Fats dont make people fat. Carbs do. Thats
because fats are complex molecules, difficult to process into useful energy, so the body
takes only what it needs.

By contrast, carbs are easily metabolised, and their entire calorie content passes straight into the bloodstream.
From there unless immediately used it deposits on your ass, thighs, hips and belly.

Too much fat in food = greasy poop. Too much sugar in food = ass visible from orbit.

Theres also growing evidence that nutrition has long-term effects on hormonal levels, and even metabolic
function the body gets used to preferentially using the source of energy it gets most often. Lots of fats
(and minimal carbs) in diet mean that the body will start burning fat earlier, and in a more beneficial ratio to
other types of reserves (importantly, muscle) when you exercise. Thats slanting the field in your favor.

Full-fat dairy. Unsweetened full-fat is vastly better for you than sweetened low-fat.

Meat is totally fine.

Wine (in moderation). Though researchers change their minds every two years about this,
everything within two glasses a day has benefits that outweigh any potential
disadvantages, including the 100kcal per serving.

In conclusion: look, we all need to take proper care of ourselves.

Aside from the obvious private benefits, there are society-wide considerations. With the skyrocketing costs of
healthcare, the only way to avert fiscal disaster in a few decades is massive preventive care via science-based
nutrition and exercise, now.

Plus it gives my readers a competitive and reproductive advantage, which means they will eventually become
the dominant demographic and elect me galactic president.

An aside about sides:

In the dark ages (= as recently as a hundred years ago), meat was comparatively rare. Mileage may vary in
different parts of the world, but European grandmothers will still tell you that meat was eaten maybe once a
week. There wasnt enough proper human food (IE animal carcasses) to go around and certainly not for a
daily requirement of 4000 calories while quarrying stone, tilling the fields or chopping down trees. To feed
everybody, and especially the peasantry after the nobility ate all the good stuff, a lot of cheap extra padding was
added to meals.

We call it side dishes.

The habits endure, and padding dominates many cuisines. The problem is that the calorie requirements of
todays sedentary lifestyles are half of what our ancestors needed, yet we still eat like medieval
lumberjacks. Cue the cellulite pandemic. Which brings us to the food pyramid:
Bonus: Dr. Zoidberg

Full disclosure: the author chewed on banana bread (with crumbs!) while writing this. Throughout the editing
process, pizza. With wine.

Time for another marathon.