* * *
The Rule: You earn 10 points a day by eliminating an unhealthy habit and 10 points a day by practicing a new healthy habit. You must declare you habit choices to your teammates and stick with them for the entire game.
The Penalty: Each time you change your habit choices, you lose 50 points, so choose carefully!
The Exception: You get a day off from this rule too—but be smart about it. If you are quitting smoking or something similar, don’t take a day off or you’ll destroy your progress.
* * *
Truth be told, this is the part that intrigued me most when Az first proposed the game. Sure, I was sort of sick of my expanding waistline, but I was happily married with a wonderful baby and a reasonable clothing budget that allowed me to buy ever-bigger clothes that didn’t cling. I also have a very vivid imagination that allowed me to believe that clothes were just being made smaller and that I was not actually at a size that required me to shop in the plus-size section of Nordstrom’s. I was shopping in the plus-size section of Nordstrom’s—I just refused to believe that I had to. I was all, “This is just more comfortable. I like loose, flowy things. It’s hot in California. I’m not actually this big.” So, yeah, I was intrigued with the diet and exercise part of the game, but this habit part? It’s the thing that made me really want to play.
Az’s actual original e-mail to me:
Dear Krista,
I challenge you to a fitness game. It will be played for points. You and Jana and Mickey against me and Anselm and Kevin. Boys vs Girls. We will compete for tickets to a show in Vegas—winner’s choice. We will win points for food and water and exercise. Plus we all have to take on one bad habit we’d like to eliminate and one good habit we’d like integrate into our lives. We’ll get points for all of it, we’ll play for nine weeks, and the team with the most points wins.
Cheers,
Az
You heard me. Nine weeks. NINE. He sent me a casual e-mail proposing that I DIET COMPETITIVELY for NINE WEEKS. So here’s how I read it:
Dear Chunker,
I challenge your tubby ass that keeps asking me for diet advice but won’t actually do what I say to a game. Because you have been known to make people cry with your competitive ranting on Games Nights, maybe this will get your blubbery butt on the stationary bike. Because you LOATHE to lose, you will be FORCED to do what I say—e.g.: eat kibble and drink toilet water—or risk losing for you and your team. HA! This will be AWESOME (for me. You will hate it). Oh, and you’ll get to take on some of your habits, which you might actually enjoy and which might take your mind off the kibble-eating.
Cheers,
Az
For the record and just in case you haven’t read the food chapter yet, there was no kibble-eating. I lost more than fifteen pounds in that nine weeks and it wasn’t painful and it was actually fun. The next time we played, I was excited to go back on the food plan and lose more weight. But the first time I played, it was the transformation points that hooked me.
I like the idea that people can change. That “old dogs, new tricks” adage bugs the crap out of me. It has been my experience and my observation that when it comes to changing, age is a benefit. As we grow older, we know ourselves better, and we can and should use that self-knowledge to continue to evolve. My dad went to law school at the age of forty-seven. This was a man who didn’t have a college education but did have a brilliant mind. It just took him nearly fifty years to grow up enough that he wanted to use it. He persuaded the college to acknowledge his life experience and give him an undergrad degree for it. And then he took on law school. The number of habits and routines he had to change to make it work was tremendous. He struggled, no doubt. But at fifty, he graduated law school near the top of his class, with high honors. Old dogs, new tricks, my ass.
Don’t worry. We’re not asking you to go to law school. We’re just asking you to take a look at your habits—all of your habits, not just the obvious ones—and pick one you’d like to be rid of and pick one you’d like to add.
Only you know what you really need and want to change in your life. Note that I said need and want—because the want part is the key. Many people—family, friends, doctors—bitched at me for many years to quit smoking, but I didn’t do it successfully till my dad died of esophageal cancer at fifty-six. At his death bed, I promised him I would quit. He didn’t ask me to—he couldn’t talk by that point—but I wanted to offer him something. I wanted him to know before he left that some small good thing might come from the horrible mess he had made of his own body. And then, I wanted to honor the promise, so after a few weeks of chain-smoking to assuage the grief, I did.
Smoking is an obvious one. If you are reading this book, and you are still smoking…I’m not judging. I’m just saying that this game is about optimizing your health and smoking does quite the opposite. So I hope you quit. I even hope you use the game to quit. I have two friends, Ray and Corey, who did just that!
I cannot believe I’ve gone four weeks without a cigarette. I really can’t believe it. I have been a closet smoker for eleven years—eleven years, every day, sneaking cigarettes like a junkie on the make. And now I haven’t had a single one in twenty-eight days. AND I haven’t gained weight, which was my big fear. I was all, “I can live with black lung, just not a beer gut.” And now I don’t have either. I love it! The game rocks. I thank you, my lungs thank you, and my dogs, who are no longer doomed to an early death from secondhand smoke poisoning, thank you.
—Corey, 36
Smoking aside, here are a few other habits you might consider.
Drugs: Maybe you are using some illegal drugs that you know aren’t good for you. Or maybe you are using some prescription drugs that you know you don’t need. Either way, give them up for four weeks and watch how your life changes. You might be surprised. (If you take this on, please consult a doctor first!)
Complacency: If you give up complacency, you must specify what you mean. E.g.: Once an hour, I will get up from my desk and walk all around the perimeter of the office. Or, I will do three Sun Salutations a day. Or, I will walk or bike to work instead of driving. Be specific!
Lying: This is a big one. If you catch yourself lying, even a small lie, you must correct the lie with the person you lied to or lose your points for the day!
Negative self-talk: Most of us speak unkindly to ourselves several times throughout the day. Each time you catch it, you must take the time to rethink—e.g.: I’m not a fat bastard. I’m a good guy and I’m working hard to change what isn’t working. If you don’t stop and rethink, you lose your points for the day.
Cursing: Maybe you have a kid now? And she’s started picking up on your potty mouth? And you don’t want her to grow up going, “Pass the fucking block this way, Jakie!”? Consider this: Each time a curse word comes out of your mouth, you will lose your points or put $5 in a jar, then at the end of the game, you’ll donate the contents to Habitat for Humanity or the charity of your choice (and the charity can’t be you). By the end of the game, you’ll have broken the cursing habit or gone broke for a good cause!
Coffee: If you are drinking, like, eight cups a day, don’t quit cold turkey. Set a plan that goes something like three cups a day for week 1, two cups for week 2, one cup for week 3, then for week 4…Oy. If you can give it up entirely and stay sane and functional, you have my utmost respect. Be warned: You may suffer headaches as you begin to withdraw—try to get a little extra sleep and drink some extra water to help with the withdrawal symptoms.
Texting while driving: This is a fatal practice. FATAL. You wouldn’t drink and drive. And if you are in the habit of texting and driving, please take this on and quit cold turkey!
Watching TV (except Grey’s Anatomy—don’t give up Grey’s Anatomy): Turn it off. Or commit to only one hour a night. You’ll be amazed at how much time you suddenly have!
Mindlessly surfing the Internet: Same as TV. This is where all your time is going! Give yourself a half hour to play online and that’s it.<
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Video games: Same as TV and the Internet. These are a HUGE time-suck.
Internet porn: Turn it off. You’ll be amazed at how much more respect you suddenly have for women. And farm animals.
Gossip: Make the commitment that you won’t say anything behind anyone’s back that you wouldn’t say to his or her face. If you slip, you have to stop the minute you catch yourself and say three kind things about the person and make an earnest wish or say a prayer for his or her success and happiness or lose your points. This can be time-consuming—and eventually, you’ll break the unconscious habit. As an added bonus, you’ll worry less that people are trash-talking you!
Watching the news: Turning off the news for a month has TREMENDOUS benefits for your health and well-being! Televised news is as negative as they can make it. It’s designed to scare you and studies show it prompts serious anxiety. Quit it like a bad drug. Read the news instead. Better yet, read it only one day a week. Because the human psyche was not designed to take in all the bad news of the world every day of the week. Stay informed—just with less frequency. You’ll be amazed at how much better you feel.
Ordering in: If you are in the habit of ordering in even one meal a day, you would be startled by the effect that giving it up has on the planet. The southern U.S. remains the world’s largest paper-producing region and every year millions of acres of the South’s forest are cleared to feed the pulp and paper industry. So give up one meal and you’re helping to save the Southern forests right here in the United States. Or consider this juggernaut of a statistic: If we all used one fewer napkin a day, more than a billion pounds of napkins could be saved from landfills each year. Take this on. You’ll be doing us all a favor!
Buying bottled water: If you are buying bottled water every day, giving it up for four weeks will save energy, oil, and landfill space. “Approximately 1.5 million barrels of oil—enough to run 100,000 cars for a whole year—are used to make plastic water bottles, while transporting these bottles burns even more oil…In addition to the millions of gallons of water used in the plastic-making process, two gallons of water are wasted in the purification process for every gallon that goes into the bottles” (www.treehugger.com).
Get a refillable bottle and a filter for your tap water. It’s not expensive when you consider what you’re spending on bottled water. After a week or two, you’ll actually be saving a lot of money! If you go to www.thegameondiet.com, you can buy a refillable aluminum water bottle and we will give all the proceeds to the Environmental Defense Fund.
The habit I took on that first game out? TV. (Ironic, right?) But here’s the thing: I complain a lot about not having time to do all the things I want in this life. I want to become a better guitar player. I want to learn a foreign language. I want to be better about keeping in touch with old friends. I want to do yoga, learn to like to meditate, keep a journal. I want more quality time with my husband, more time to read really good books, more time with my friends, more sleep. And I always feel like I just don’t have enough time for any of it. Except…I watch HOURS of TV every night. At least two hours. Sometimes three. Occasionally four.
So I asked myself, if I limited my TV-viewing to one hour a night, what would happen to my life? Well, I tried it. And what happened is…I was incredibly irritated for several days and simply went to sleep early because I was too annoyed about missing So You Think You Can Dance to stay awake.
But that was just the first few days. After that, what happened is that I had time to do—and I DID—every single thing on the above list. (Okay, I didn’t learn a language. But I swear, I had so much time, I could have.) I practiced my guitar every day. I wrote to old friends, had dinner with others, did yoga, seriously contemplated meditating (MAN, do I struggle with meditating), read great books, and got plenty of sleep (and frankly, I slept better). I never realized what a massive time-suck TV was in my life until I turned it off.
Maybe TV isn’t your thing. Maybe for you, like my husband, it’s sports. I swear the man can spend an entire day checking sports Web sites, reading sports magazines, watching sports TV—and then complain that he has no time.
Almost everyone I know has a version of this. Like gossip. I have friends—and by friends I mean me—who can spend HOURS talking about the lives of other people. To what end? To what gain? All that gossiping does for me is make me paranoid that it’s being done to me. It doesn’t make me a better person, and in some cases, it can actually be harmful. So, it’s another one I’ve worked on while playing the game. Honestly, it’s the hardest one I’ve worked on and I lost a lot of points that game, but I did get more mindful of the words coming out of my mouth, so I considered it a successful experiment. Which brings me to an observation I’ve made in all my months of playing this game: The more extreme habits—the ones that are more likely to kill us—are sometimes easier to change.
In my adult life, I have quit drinking and quit smoking successfully. But when I tried to quit gossiping, I was less successful. I think in part because there is a TON of support from family and friends when you decide you’re ready to quit smoking. But when you decide to quit gossiping? People look at you suspiciously and call you boring to your face. When you turn off your TV? You feel utterly left out of water-cooler conversations, plus, people call you boring to your face. So the benefits of giving up the habit you choose have to outweigh the losses—because there will be losses.
At the beginning of the game, I started writing down every time I judged my body and I was horrified—there were days I would say “You’re fat” to myself twenty-five times. I thought, Imagine if I said that to my child! By forcing myself to rethink each time, I broke the habit and I can’t express how good it feels.
—Duffy, 39
Do you have to be extreme in your choice of which habit to give up? No. Can you start small? Like, one fewer hour of TV a night? Yes. But I will tell you from experience that the benefit to your life will be directly proportional to how big you go. Turn off the TV completely for a month and your life will improve radically compared with turning it off an hour early. And yet, turning it off an hour early is no small feat, and if that’s what you’ve got in you, then that’s what you should do. Just pick a thing. Pick a thing you want to change, declare it to your teammates, and change it. Don’t panic. It’s just four weeks. (Unless you like the change so much, you keep it for a lifetime. How cool would that be?)
Whenever I ate or drank something in the evening I would always put my glass or dish in the sink and expect my wife to rinse it off and put it in the dishwasher. For my good habit, I decided to start rinsing off those evening dishes and put them in the dishwasher myself. Now, even though the game’s over, I still do that. And my wife appreciates it. I’m not sure if I’m getting more sex because of it, but I’m a better husband for it.
—Mark, 50
Which brings us to part 2: choosing a new habit…
You know all the things I listed above as things I don’t have time for? All good habits that I would like to integrate into my life. Feel free to pick from that list or to pick one of your own. The idea here is that you are trying to integrate a healthy habit. It’s something you are going to do every day for the next twenty-eight days. Make it a challenge—but it doesn’t have to be time-consuming (if time is a limitation in your life). For example, a few games back, I chose flossing. I know. At thirty-six, I needed to force myself to floss my teeth every night and I’m admitting to it in print. But that’s because I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. And I’m pretty happy with the fact that since that game ended, I’ve kept up the habit completely. And my dentist and hygienist? Freaked out last week when I went for my check up. They were like a tooth paste commercial, they were so excited. Apparently, it makes a big difference. So yay me.
Pick something that will improve your life or will improve your health or will make you feel better about yourself and the world on a daily basis. Whether it’s flossing your teeth, or practicing piano for 20 minutes a day, o
r reading for half an hour every night, or giving thanks every night, or stretching before bed, or…or…or…You know what you need in your life. Pick a thing and stick to it for twenty-eight days and see what happens.
Some Common Healthy Habit Choices
Take up cooking (at least one meal a day).
Organize your house or clear clutter.
Study a foreign language.
Learn or practice a musical instrument.
Rediscover reading for pleasure.
Take up journaling.
Take up yoga.
Take up meditation.
Floss daily.
Call three people you like each day.
Be of service to others. (Do charitable work.)
The habits may seem small but the commitment to change is big. Think carefully about your options, because we are asking you to pick them once (one new habit you are integrating, one old habit you are quitting) and stick to them for the whole game.
You can do it. You rock. Yay you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q:
What if I chose poorly? Can I change my choice?
A:
“Chose poorly” generally means that you chose hard and are struggling and feel you are losing too many points for your team. So before you change, consider why you chose the habit you did. Chances are it’s because it’s a thing you really do need to work on in your life. Can you work a little harder on it? Can you stick with it for one more week? Can you recommit?? Consider trying harder before you change—because you lose 50 points every time you change a declared habit. We impose this rule for a reason. According to researchers, it takes twenty-eight days to successfully change a habit for life. If you change yours after a week or two, you aren’t getting the full benefit of the challenge.
Q:
Okay, yeah, but have you ever changed a habit mid-game?
The Game On! Diet Page 15