Over the past few years, I’ve set a couple of agreements with myself that have turned out to be really powerful.
- I can eat whatever I want as long as I log it in MacroFactor
- I have to work out for 30 minutes, but that workout can be whatever I want
These have turned out to be really powerful.
I have to trust that I really can do whatever I want.
But doing this also does change what I want. I don’t reach the end of the day feeling like I denied myself (and subconsciously planning to make up for it the next day); I reach the end of the day having accomplished my goal and feeling… satisfied, the opposite of deprived.
I mentioned elsewhere that I have actually liked tracking my calories with MacroFactor:
Perhaps a weird way to put it, but it’s accurate to say that I’ve been enjoying tracking my food intake for the past 6 months. I’ve been tracking exercise for longer, and I started tracking food too when I realized I was mentally reaching for my phone after meals to record the data - I wanted to have a record of how I was doing.
I use MacroFactor, which is thoughtfully designed to do the job and get out of your way. I expected tracking to feel bad, but that mostly hasn’t happened. I set an agreement with myself that I can eat and drink whatever I want as long as I track it accurately, which has been freeing, but also has highlighted food that I wouldn’t have enjoyed enough to be worth its calories.
That agreement that I can do whatever I want has turned out to be kind of a hack, because it added a goal to my mental calculation. Originally, I wanted to track calories to eat less, because I wanted to lose weight, and to be vaguely healthier. With the new agreement that I can do whatever I want, that goal is still there (and just as vague), but I added a new goal, to track for its own sake. I met that goal just the same if I ate 2000 or 4000 calories in a day, and meeting that goal of just tracking felt good.
I didn’t even realize this as I was doing it. I started to track because of course I wanted to lose weight, and I read in various Macrofactor articles that tracking accuracy was less important that consistency, so if you’re eating out, track as best you can and don’t worry about it. Somehow that “track as best you can and don’t worry about it” sort of trasmuted into “track as best you can and do whatever you want”, which is what I did.
It also gave me data for making decisions beyond just a momentary feeling. With the benefit of a history of my intake, I could start to connect feeling good or bad in the short term to food decisions in a way that I never had before. Sometimes I realized that I didn’t actually want to eat that extra thing, because it didn’t feel worth it to me at the time; when that happens, I don’t feel the bitterness of not getting what I wanted, because if I had wanted it, I would have chosen it. It feels more like my choice in the moment, and less like my future self taking something away from my present self.
As I mentioned in the micro.blog post, this was an unexpected effect of getting exercise data. For the prior 18 months, I had made a different agreement with myself: I was going to work out for 30 minutes every day, but it could just be a walk if I wanted. I was just keeping track of my consistency in my head, and doing it gave me a sense of accomplishment. But it felt even better when I got an Apple Watch, where I could see my consistency visualized in graphs and a calendar. I wasn’t even really planning on using the watch for fitness, but the fact that I got data out of each workout really hooked me. I started to feel disappointed at the prospect of just a walk workout, and so I started going to the gym, running, or biking more.
Just like with food, it was my present self making that decision, not feeling locked in to some commitment that my past self had made, but making it affirmatively in the moment because I wanted to. This took time; I spent quite a while walking most days and going to the gym only sometimes. This was slow. It gave me many opportunities to make the decision: gym or walk? Because neither choice was the wrong choice, I felt good about it each time. And after I’d done that for a few hundred days, I finally started to notice what feels different about days I go to the gym, and choosing that, for myself, in the moment.