(2024-02-09) Ferriss You Dont Need More Howto Advice You Need A Beautiful And Painful Reckoning

Tim Ferriss: You Don't Need More How-To Advice — You Need a Beautiful and Painful Reckoning. For most of us, the how-to books on our shelves represent a growing to-do list, not advice we’ve followed.

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%. (obesity)

1. Most people have an insufficient reason for action. (cf compelling, (2014-02-13) Hoy My Customers Don't Know They Have A Problem)

There has been no “Harajuku Moment.”

2. There are no reminders.

No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change

But what is this all-important “Harajuku Moment”? It’s an epiphany that turns a nice-to-have into a must-have. (compelling)

most folks will need a Harajuku Moment to fuel the change itself.

Chad Fowler knows this

He’d recently lost 70+ pounds in less than 12 months.

He’d been obese for more than a decade, and the change seemed to come out of nowhere

there are far better things to track than calories. But would I recommend tracking calories as an alternative to tracking nothing? You bet. Tracking anything is better than tracking nothing

I actually remember the exact moment I decided to do something. I was in Tokyo with a group of friends. We all went down to Harajuku to see if we could see some artistically dressed youngsters and also to shop for fabulous clothing, which the area is famous for

“For me, it doesn’t even matter what I wear; I’m not going to look good anyway.”

I heard myself say those words and I recognized them not for their content, but for their tone of helplessness.

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. (remarkable life)

Yet here I was, talking about arguably the most important part of my life—my health—as if it was something I had no control over. I had been going with the flow for years.

And now I recognize that this is a pattern. In the culture I run in (computer programmers and tech people), this partial-completeness is not just common but maybe even the norm.

Once I started the weight loss, the entire process was not only easy but enjoyable.

I started out easy. Just paying attention to food and doing relaxed cardio three to four times a week. This is when I started thinking in terms of making every day just slightly better than the day before

The number-one realization that led me to be able to keep doing it and make the right decisions was to use data.

I learned about the basal metabolic rate (BMR), also called resting metabolic rate, and was amazed at how many calories I would have to eat in order to stay the same weight. It was huge

The BMR showed me that (1) it wasn’t going to be hard to cut calories, and (2) I must have been making BIG mistakes before in order to consume those calories—not small ones. That’s good news. Big mistakes mean lots of low-hanging fruit

An important thing I alluded to earlier is that all of these numbers are in some ways bullshit

When you’re 50–70 pounds overweight (or I’d say whenever you have a BIG change to make), worrying about counting calories consumed or burned slightly inaccurately is going to kill you.

Here’s another helpful pseudo-science number: apparently, 10 pounds of weight loss is roughly a clothing size [XL → L → M].

Here are the main things I changed: breakfast within 30 minutes of waking and five to six meals a day of roughly 200 calories each

I put together an exact meal plan for just ONE week, bought all the ingredients, stuck to it religiously

I set up a workstation where I could pedal on a recumbent bike while working. I did real work, wrote parts of The Passionate Programmer, played video games, chatted with friends, and watched ridiculous television shows I’d normally be ashamed to be wasting my time on, all while staying in my aerobic zone

I got a heart rate monitor (HRM) and started using it for EVERYTHING. I used it while pedaling to make sure that even when I was having fun playing a game I was doing myself some good. If you know your heart rate zones (easy to find on the Internet), the ambiguity non-fitness-experts feel with respect to exercise is removed. Thirty minutes in your aerobic zone is good exercise and burns fat.

I started wearing my HRM when I was doing things like annoying chores around the house. You can clean house fast and burn serious fat.

Because of the constant use of an HRM, I was able to combine fun and exercise or annoying chores and exercise, making all of it more rewarding and way less likely I’d get lazy and decide not to do it.

Building muscle is, as you know, one of the best ways to burn fat.

So I hired a trainer to teach me what to do.

To some extent, the answer is just “diet and exercise.” There were no gimmicks. I used data we all have access to and just trusted biology to work its magic. I gave it a trial of 20 days or so and lost a significant amount of weight. Even better, I started waking up thinking about exercising because I felt good.

What is the cost of your inaction? This is important. What is your status quo costing you, and how can you make the pain painful enough to drive you forward?

What’s a single decision you could make that, like Chad’s one-week meal plan, removes a thousand decisions?