It seems like this assumes some kind of conservation of failure where you’re going to have some amount of breakage and it’s better to get it over with on the front end, but that doesn’t seem normal to me. There’s not an obvious reason why binge eating would make your diet more effective or easier to stick to. Hunger doesn’t work in such a way that you can have a huge caloric excess one day and then not be hungry for several days while build a habit of eating less. The excess calories are excreted or stored and when you start to run a caloric deficit again, you will feel hungry and have more weight to lose.
I suspect the reason is that we’re using brain mechanism that evolved to enforce/evade social rules, and there one big failure is better than lot’s of small ones.
It seems like this assumes some kind of conservation of failure
Yeah, more or less. From my personal experience, it seems to require about the same amount of willpower to get either a string of small failures or a single big failure. I have no clue why this is, beyond the basic theory of “success chains” being good for motivating us—a single break doesn’t seem to slow down motivation, but a lot of little ones tend to kill it.
Hmmm, given that some people look at this advice as “obvious” and others are utterly baffled by it, there’s a chance that this advice only works for a certain segment of the population. It might help to model this as general advice, regardless of goal: I learned about it in terms of building career skills and fixing sleep schedules, and just naively started using it to build my diets on the assumption that it was a generic pattern (for me, at least, it’s where all my semi-stable diets come from)
It seems like this assumes some kind of conservation of failure where you’re going to have some amount of breakage and it’s better to get it over with on the front end, but that doesn’t seem normal to me. There’s not an obvious reason why binge eating would make your diet more effective or easier to stick to. Hunger doesn’t work in such a way that you can have a huge caloric excess one day and then not be hungry for several days while build a habit of eating less. The excess calories are excreted or stored and when you start to run a caloric deficit again, you will feel hungry and have more weight to lose.
I suspect the reason is that we’re using brain mechanism that evolved to enforce/evade social rules, and there one big failure is better than lot’s of small ones.
Yeah, more or less. From my personal experience, it seems to require about the same amount of willpower to get either a string of small failures or a single big failure. I have no clue why this is, beyond the basic theory of “success chains” being good for motivating us—a single break doesn’t seem to slow down motivation, but a lot of little ones tend to kill it.
Hmmm, given that some people look at this advice as “obvious” and others are utterly baffled by it, there’s a chance that this advice only works for a certain segment of the population. It might help to model this as general advice, regardless of goal: I learned about it in terms of building career skills and fixing sleep schedules, and just naively started using it to build my diets on the assumption that it was a generic pattern (for me, at least, it’s where all my semi-stable diets come from)