After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight →

I have been really frustrated with weight loss lately. My eating has been good, my workouts have been great and I’ve been making progress. But it’s slow, and it’s hard to trust in the system when the metrics you have aren’t foolproof. 

The New York Times and several other outlets have been publishing stories like this on the contestants of the Biggest Loser, and oddly enough it makes me feel better.

The conclusion seems to be that the bodies of contestants actively fight such weight loss. A majority of the contestants had, after as long as 6 years after the show, gained the weight back.

The article focuses more on the body’s slower metabolism, but this article and a few others also lightly touch on behavioral changes. It’s the latter that I tend to concentrate on, whether it’s as applicable or not.

To me, radical changes, especially in dieting, don’t seem to cross over to long term change. I had a lot of success with eating earlier in this project, but ultimately even close to a year of behaviors weren’t enough to stick.

The goal for me isn’t short term, and short term can be years. The goal is permanent behavioral change, and that can sometimes take a long, long time. Which is exactly why I’m taking my time introducing change in this recent identity-based approach to eating.

As at many points in this project, it feels horrible. You see other people succeeding in all sorts of different directions quickly, and the urge to just do it all out is difficult to ignore. But I know I’m not like these guys, who showed immense willpower both during and after the show.

“This is a subset of the most successful” dieters, he [Dr. David Ludwig] said. “If they don’t show a return to normal in metabolism, what hope is there for the rest of us?”

The answer for me: None. I’m hoping that the excruciatingly slow approach is the answer. There really isn’t an option for me, not while maintaining other behaviors. And that is oddly uplifting because it forces me to trust this system I’m creating.

Will it work? Only time will tell. 

Day 167 - Move to Spain

I’m making this notation retroactively.

Had a 15 hour transfer time - 1.5 hours from Florianopolis to Sao Paulo. Then a 3 hour layover, then a 10 hour flight to Barcelona. I slept about 2 or 3 hours.

I didn’t have time to record, much less do any of my habits. But it was interesting because the act of not really sleeping really made me feel like it was one extremely long day. It didn’t even trigger the urge to do my meditation habit. And in fact, I don’t really have that sense of something missing when I normally miss a habit.

I spent the day walking, exploring, and taking care of necessities - getting my new apartment set up. It will be interesting to see whether or not any of my habits have been effected from this gap.

Day 23 and Don't Break the Chain

SRHI=44

Great night sleep, good wakeup

Don’t Break the Chain is a simple, minimalistic online attempt at habit formation, based on a technique allegedly used by Jerry Seinfeld. He would post up a big calendar, and draw a big red X through every day he wrote. The only thing he had to worry about is, well -  not breaking the chain.

This Lifehacker post talks about applying it to more than just writing comedy. The idea is to do little bits of a project every day, and that is cumulatively more helpful that short intense bursts that may not lead anywhere. 

I definitely like it as a simple motivator and its relationship to habit formation. 750 words uses this by keeping track of the unbroken chain of days you have written - and at large amounts you get special badges. And the fact Fitocracy doesn’t do this is one of the things I dislike about it.

What I don’t like is that it is natural to miss days, and the next day, getting back on the bandwagon is incredibly difficult. If missing days is an inevitable, then getting back to the routine to continue the action is the most critical point of the entire endeavor - and it should be rewarded.

Our habits and our completion of goals is more contingent on what we do in our moments of weakness than on the moments of strength.

When we are we weak and “break the chain” that is the point when all our demons come out, telling us that it’s not worth doing anymore, that we can give up because we’ve already given up, that we are now justified in failure. 

I feel an optimal gamified program has to reward not just good behavior, but good behavior in weakness. That truth is the heart of all difficult endeavors.

Day 19, Gaps in Record Keeping

SRHI = 28

Great night sleep, great wakeup with no grogginess.

So this is the part I was waiting on - the inevitable place in the cycle of a habit where it goes to crap. The last few days I didn’t record. But not only did I not record my habits - I lost track of the non-recording - I had no idea 3 days were lost!

This of course knocked my SRHI down - all those questions like “Do you find it weird when you DON’T do the action?” had to be scored really low.

Personally I think this shows that Philippa Lally’s conclusion that you get the most out of the first few days out of a habit is wrong. Of course I’ll need more info - but I don’t believe that the smooth curve she gets out of her data sets is correct. There is no way that it just gets easier and easier the more you do a task - you inevitably get a crash where you are knocked down - and that’s the point where most people give up on a habit. And there are a lot of broken attempts at habits out there.

This makes record keeping a vital habit - from what I’ve read she didn’t get the full amount of data she needed because people kept not recording it.

All I can do in MY project is to keep chugging along. By my quarter mark theory (that habits get extremely difficult from a quarter to the halfway mark in their lifecycle) I stopped at day 16, so midway would be about day 30, and the full habit cycle will be 60 days.