When you only “sort of” want to eat something unhealthy, you’ll wait until you want to eat it.
When you eat something unhealthy, you’ll savor every bite and enjoy it more than anyone else.
What No Shame Eating Looks Like
When you eat something unhealthy, you’ll be far less likely to binge.
After you eat something unhealthy, it won’t affect your next decision (which is good).
After you eat something unhealthy, you will remain strong and confident in your weight loss journey, not crippled and devastated.
What Consistency Looks Like
When you eat healthy food consistently, the occasional unhealthy food has no impact on your success.
When you act in a new way consistently, you will form a habit and begin to prefer that behavior.
When you win consistently, you will expect to win and act like a winner.
What Never Giving up Does
Those who never give up will find their way to success. Persistence is the common factor in every success story. Just because you have success every day with your mini habits does not mean that you won’t have off days. It’s key to mitigate the psychological damage from such days, and that’s done by combining the above factors with the decision to never give up.
By going into parties with a calm, strategic mindset, you’ll be one of the few people there who can have fun and make progress. Over time, you’ll make better choices, which will lead to healthier preferences.
10
Conclusion
You’ve Tried Dieting Many Times, Try This Once
“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”
~ Sun Tzu
New Mindset
I used one push-up per day to become a frequent exerciser. It prioritized consistency in order to change the brain and familiarize it with exercise, increased short- and long-term motivation with early success, maximized momentum-based progress by starting the process of exercising every day, and improved my morale by ensuring a long winning streak. Those who see the one push-up tactic may compare it to something like the “100 push-up challenge,” which is to do 100 push-ups per day. Comparing these tactics without considering their underlying strategy often leads to the wrong choice. The strategy behind 100 push-ups a day is comparatively weak. The idea is to create rapid progress and snowball motivation, but it’s almost always thwarted by the slow-change nature of the brain, fickle motivation, limited willpower, and the unpredictability of life.
Most people who want to lose weight adopt some form of dieting as their tactic of choice. The strategy behind dieting is to lose weight by doing something more extreme than the people not trying to lose weight (one such tactic is intentionally creating a calorie deficit). This sort of change is counteracted biologically and neurologically in ways beyond our control. So even if you succeed with this plan, you’re likely to fail with your goal, as shown in the introduction. That’s how terrible the strategy is—when executed perfectly, it fails. Not only are extreme changes not necessary to lose weight, they are also counterproductive.
The new mindset we’ve discussed is recognizing that weight loss and behavior change are best done gradually. When change is gradual, we don’t trigger the brain’s countermeasures that make us revert to old habits or the body’s countermeasures that make us regain the weight (and then some). Instead, we will methodically shift the baseline fat set point lower and lower as we change our behavioral and dietary preferences (which are dictated by habit).
To go along with this, we’ve clarified that weight loss is not a matter of carbs, fat, or calories, but of food quality. To isolate any of those factors would be an incorrect, albeit popular, oversimplification. There are different types of each macronutrient, and they have vastly different effects in the body. Olive oil and coconut oil are healthy fats. Trans fats and vegetable oils are unhealthy fats. Fruits and vegetables are healthy carbs. Ultra-processed foods like chips, soda crackers, and fries are unhealthy carbs. Anyone can point to an example of an unhealthy fat or an unhealthy carb and say, “That’s it! It’s the carbs (or fat)!” This is like meeting one mean person and concluding that all people are mean. Some of us are nice! Observational science consistently finds that fats, carbs, and calories are sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on the quality of the source.
Some people say that we’re just eating too much food. That may be true, but if so, why are we eating too much food? Were our ancestors more adept at counting calories or buying sugar-free cupcakes? The factors that really matter are satiety, satisfaction, micronutrients, and phytonutrients. If you have two foods that are 100 calories, but one is 14 times heavier and more filling per calorie, how can you say that calories are all that matter? Strawberries are 14 times heavier per calorie than potato chips. To anyone who still believes in calorie counting, I invite you to put it to the test with the strawberry chips challenge!
The Strawberry Chips Challenge
Take this challenge at your own risk. I don’t recommend it.
One day, see how far you can get eating one 8-ounce bag of potato chips. I imagine I could eat the entire bag in one sitting. Another day, see how far you can get eating 7.2 pounds of strawberries. One bag of chips and 7.2 pounds of strawberries contain the same amount of calories, so as long as you “count them,” it doesn’t matter if you eat chips or strawberries, right? Oh, what’s that? Your stomach exploded when you tried to eat seven pounds of strawberries? Disclaimer: Do not try this challenge at home… or anywhere else.
If anyone ever suggests to you that counting calories is all that matters, tell them to take this challenge. When they refuse or give an excuse like, “Well, you just have to eat the chips in moderation,” then you can clarify to them that satiety-per-calorie matters more than just calories (and so does micro-nutrition, but that’s less tangible than seven pounds of strawberries, so we’ll keep it simple). If you count calories, you risk being hungry and wrecking your metabolism. Eat healthy foods that satisfy your hunger and nutritional needs. That’s the right solution.
To summarize the new mindset of this book: Don’t worry about carbs, fats, protein, and calories. Only concern yourself with the quality of food you’re eating. If you eat quality food, all of those other things will fall into place. It’s not easy to eat quality food in a world obsessed with processed food, but it’s easier than counting calories, carbs, or fat. No math necessary. I like math, but not calorie counting math.
The 8 Sacred Laws of Mini Habits for Weight Loss
Do not break these laws. If you do, you will greatly reduce your chance of success.
1. No Dieting
Do not diet and call it mini habits. Mini habits are small and easy changes, not, “Sorry, I can’t eat that. I’m watching my weight and can only eat salad.” Dieting forces you to eat healthy food, but your mini habits will gently teach you to enjoy it more.
2. No Limits on Unhealthy Food, No Deprivation
Your body is used to a certain way of eating, and, if you threaten that, you will lose 95% of the time (this is the failure rate of dieting, according to some studies). If you feel a powerful craving to eat a burger, think about it and apply the optional temptation strategy in this book to see if it changes, but if it’s still there and strong, YOU HAD BETTER EAT THAT BURGER! Enjoy it, too.
If your cravings frustrate you because you want to make progress, you still can make progress. Chew each bite 30 times. Drink water. See if a lettuce wrap would be agreeable instead of the bun. There are battles within the battle, and the optimal decision is not usually at the extreme. Even if you lose the entire battle, it is less important than winning the war. We don’t swing blindly anymore. We choose fights we know we can win. Patience and cunning strategy lead to victory.
The way to eat less junk food is to allow it unconditionally, and to employ strategies to help you make healthier decisions. Leave deprivation to the dieters.
If you ever feel deprived while following the Mini Habits for Weight Loss strategy, either you’re doing it wrong, or you need to tweak it to your needs.
This doesn’t mean you should always eat unhealthy food if you crave it. If you prefer a burger, but find salmon and vegetables to be almost as desirable, then go ahead and get the salmon. That’s not deprivation of an uncontrollable craving; it’s the better choice between two desirable options.
3. Feel No Shame
There’s no reason to feel shameful about what you weigh or what you eat. If you just ate a slice of pizza in two bites, you didn’t commit a crime, you didn’t destroy your chance at losing weight, and you certainly didn’t do anything “wrong.” Food is amoral. That is, there is no morality associated with food (except with certain religions—you know who you are).
That is to say that consuming burgers, sodas, fries, candy, Brussels sprouts, French onion soup, or bacon should have no effect on how you feel about yourself. Think about it—nearly everyone has eaten nearly every type of food. Why should you feel bad about eating a food everyone else has eaten before? It doesn’t make sense. I’m a health nut, but I’ve consumed all of the very worst processed food. In the 1990s there was a briefly popular soft drink called Surge, and I drank it as if I thought it gave me superpowers. Surge had more sugar and caffeine than most soft drinks, so it felt like a superpower at times.
Food is how we survive. It’s enjoyable, except for the cricket I ate in Thailand. That fried food your neighbors just ate still gave them life-sustaining energy.
You can be fully aware of how food impacts your body without feeling shame for eating it. By not being on a diet, you’ll have a much easier time with this, but you might have to remind yourself if your old “dieting” instinct kicks in. You might even need to purposefully and confidently eat unhealthy food to prove to yourself that it’s not criminal. You have a plan to lose weight, but it’s nothing like the ones that didn’t work. It’s rooted in your personal freedom, autonomy, and empowerment. No foods are restricted.
Make the decision right now to drop all shame about your weight and the foods you eat. You will feel 100 pounds lighter just from shedding shame, and you sure won’t miss it!
4. Be the Captain, Not the Deckhand
This one is important. Many people, when reading a strategy-driven book, will attempt to “follow the steps to success.” For this strategy especially, you have to take initiative. Be the leader, and use this as a guidebook for your change. All of the best leaders have advisors. This book is your advisor, but you’re the one calling the shots. This is your life.
If, instead, you demote yourself to a deckhand, you’ll be following literal directions and you may miss the concepts that make this strategy effective. Those who have the greatest success with this strategy will be the ones who “get it.” They’ll see the concepts at play, such as how small, imperceptible changes won’t trigger the body or the subconscious into countermeasures, how shame destroys us while small wins encourage us, how autonomy empowers us to new heights while rules beat us down until we rebel, or how consistency matters more than anything else because it shapes our habitual preferences.
One of the best ways to describe the difference between the captain and the deckhand is this: The captain will make changes as necessary, while the deckhand will only do what he’s told. The captain will be more aggressive in general, making bonus reps a more likely occurrence (and bonus reps are one of the most exciting aspects of this strategy).
You’re free to live as you wish, but you’ll be armed with potent strategies to change yourself for the better. This is a lifelong strategy, because you aren’t giving up your freedom. You’re adding power to your life, not following directions and depriving yourself to get a result. Please take the wheel, Captain. (May I suggest Hawaii?)
5. Never Stop Self-Negotiating and Strategizing (Don’t Allow Complete Rebellion)
The moment you say, “screw it” and binge is the moment you’ve lost, not because you’re about to eat an entire cheesecake, but because you’ve let the “strict” side of you—the one that wants to lose weight—domineer over your carnal, cheesecake-loving self for too long. In order for this venture to be a success, you have to be happy with your decisions consciously and subconsciously. You need to make decisions that at once support a healthier you and provide you with the carnal comfort you need.
Counterintuitively, the way to stop rebellion is not through brute force tactics (like willpower), but to make rebellion seem like a ridiculous idea. People don’t rebel against things they like. Make sure you like what you’re doing. This strategy is built to be very agreeable, but feel free to customize it to better meet your needs. Just be careful not to “customize it” into a typical dieting system of rules and restrictions. That’s why understanding these concepts is critical to success.
6. Rely on Your Healthy Heroes
Take note of healthy foods that you like. These are your heroes, and you can rely on them to carry you. If you don’t like vegetables much, but you have an unusual affinity for broccoli, eat lots of broccoli. If you like to snack on radishes, do it often. If you love the taste of asparagus, always have it on hand.
Those who diet tend to force-eat food they don’t enjoy. Some food is an acquired taste, so it’s not a bad idea to make yourself eat food you don’t enjoy on occasion, but don’t make it your primary strategy. You can avoid the “suffer for weight loss” mindset by choosing food you like. If you don’t think you like any healthy food, then continue to experiment. You haven’t tried all of it, and you’re most likely comparing it to processed food. When you eat lots of processed food, healthy food won’t seem as appealing because it’s different. Don’t think of eating healthy food as substitution; think of it as practice. The more consistently you eat healthy food, the more you’ll want it.
7. Try
Mini habits are powerful little behaviors. They can change your life. They are not, however, magic. I mean, they’re almost magical in how well they work, but you can’t think, “Okay, I did one push-up and nothing happened.” Underlying that quote is someone who is indifferent to success, hoping to get it without trying. In order to make the mini habits strategy work, you still have to try, just as you would with any other strategy. The total effort required for success with mini habits is lower than most, but effort is still required.
8. Never Mistake Your Goal for Your Strategy, and Use Them Both Properly
Your goal is where you’d like to go. Your strategy is how you plan to get there.
Processed food is terrible. It is the bane of weight loss. Therefore, the goal is to stop eating it. The best strategy, however, is not to “stop eating it,” since a “junk food ban” will make you feel deprived when you don’t eat it and shameful when you do.
Your goal is not your strategy, but your goal is still important. Just as bad as using the goal as your strategy is ignoring the goal and mindlessly using the strategy. If you eat a carrot and passively wait for something to happen because “the strategy is supposed to work,” then you’re not thinking about your original goal, which is to live healthier.
When you know your goals and you use smart strategies to achieve them, you will thrive. Your goals give you direction and desire, and your strategy puts you in the best position to reach the goal. Here are a couple of examples.
Mistake (using your goal as your strategy): “I want to stop drinking soda, therefore I’ll stop drinking soda.”
Correct: “I want to stop drinking soda. My strategy is to allow myself to drink it, but stock up with several healthy alternatives, and every time I’m tempted to drink soda, I’ll go through the mini obstacle course I’ve set up, including drinking a glass of refreshing lime-infused water.”
Mistake (ignoring the goal and mindlessly trying the strategy): “I’ll eat one carrot at 3 PM every day because Stephen said.” (This could work, but it’s not the ideal perspective.)
Correct: “I want to lose weight by eati
ng more vegetables. My strategy for that is to eat one carrot at 3 PM every day to decrease my resistance to eating vegetables over time. Also, I can use that momentum on some days to eat more carrots or other vegetables in that moment, or maybe it will encourage me to keep making good decisions for the rest of the day. The first small step should break through the resistance I usually feel and put me on the right track, while doing it every day could develop the carrot-eating habit.”
Mini Habits for Weight Loss Strategy Recap
Since we’ve covered so much information, you might be wondering how to put it all together. Let’s take a zoomed-out look at the entire actionable portion of the book.
The Mini Habits for Weight Loss strategy has four components. Three of these are optional, and one is a daily requirement. We’ve covered these in detail, and this is the overview of how they all work together.
Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering. Page 26