The culture of exercise/fitness suffers from a motivation (and discipline) problem.
It suffers from an informational problem. Learn a bit about how you REALLY lose weight (and gain it, you’ll learn both at the same time) and then read that ebook, or that article, or ask your friends for advice.. and you’ll just notice how much crap there is about there.
I think since books like this got published that are based on both studies and decades of trainer experience, that is largely solved. I think it is not an issue anymore.
However, the issue is that the end result of even that great book is simply “do this”. Every fitness advice boils down to “do this”. We don’t need this.
What we need is “do easy thing X to get in the mindset where it is not too hard to do hard thing Y”.
I largely hacked it here with sports: for example there is a huge difference between the advice “do push-ups”, which gets then interpreted as “do push-ups at home, alone, for the reason of looking better and being healthier, while you hate the whole thing and would rather do something else”, and in sports it is much more like “cool I am at a martial arts training with friends and we will have some really enjoyable sparring later but now we do push-ups on the trainers counting in order to punch stronger”. This is like a billion times better motivation psychologically. This is what I offer here.
I have not yet looked into hacking diet psychology the same way. That may be harder, everybody is lazy the same way, but wrong diet habits are vastly different. For example I always got confused by blogs that talk about snacks, candy etc. I always disliked the sweet taste. However I drank rather inordinate amounts of beer and other alcohol. And I have a cousing who does neither, just consumes traditional homecooked food—but ginormous quantities.
It seem I will have to figure out different psychologies for these different cases.
That site is full of advertising and therefore I say the book sucks. If you don’t trust my intuition then he didn’t provide a single link to a study and I don’t see the reason to believe a word he said. He’s also making various appeals tp nonreason that you should be able to see yourself.
Well, here’s my “book”. http://www.liamrosen.com/fitness.html. I suppose you’ve read that book so let’s see what you can say against my link that isn’t covered in my “book”.
My bottom line? Hack the mind first. Don’t simply stop at “X is beneficial for the body” but also “is X an easy choice to make” and “how to arrange things so that X becomes an almost unavoidable and joyful choice to make”. Stop just telling people they should do things they dislike doing. It is almost never a lack of information: people who simply don’t dislike it all are never fat even if they know nothing. (These people engage in active hobbies, they simply forget to eat, they hate feelling too full, and they are uninterested in oral pleasure and just absent-mindedly grab a sandwich between one fun activity and another.) That is my bottom line: it is the lack of motivation, not information, and largely because it is formulated so that it is not enjoyable. (Actually right now, when I finished this comment, I will take a lunch break (from procastinating at “work”, yeah) and buy a slice of pizza while fully knowing the issues with it, but right now my stomach feels so that it would not feel content with a salmon on wholemeal rye bread combo which I buy on my stronger days for lunch.)
It suffers from an informational problem. Learn a bit about how you REALLY lose weight (and gain it, you’ll learn both at the same time) and then read that ebook, or that article, or ask your friends for advice.. and you’ll just notice how much crap there is about there.
I think since books like this got published that are based on both studies and decades of trainer experience, that is largely solved. I think it is not an issue anymore.
However, the issue is that the end result of even that great book is simply “do this”. Every fitness advice boils down to “do this”. We don’t need this.
What we need is “do easy thing X to get in the mindset where it is not too hard to do hard thing Y”.
I largely hacked it here with sports: for example there is a huge difference between the advice “do push-ups”, which gets then interpreted as “do push-ups at home, alone, for the reason of looking better and being healthier, while you hate the whole thing and would rather do something else”, and in sports it is much more like “cool I am at a martial arts training with friends and we will have some really enjoyable sparring later but now we do push-ups on the trainers counting in order to punch stronger”. This is like a billion times better motivation psychologically. This is what I offer here.
I have not yet looked into hacking diet psychology the same way. That may be harder, everybody is lazy the same way, but wrong diet habits are vastly different. For example I always got confused by blogs that talk about snacks, candy etc. I always disliked the sweet taste. However I drank rather inordinate amounts of beer and other alcohol. And I have a cousing who does neither, just consumes traditional homecooked food—but ginormous quantities.
It seem I will have to figure out different psychologies for these different cases.
That site is full of advertising and therefore I say the book sucks. If you don’t trust my intuition then he didn’t provide a single link to a study and I don’t see the reason to believe a word he said. He’s also making various appeals tp nonreason that you should be able to see yourself.
Well, here’s my “book”. http://www.liamrosen.com/fitness.html. I suppose you’ve read that book so let’s see what you can say against my link that isn’t covered in my “book”.
Do you have a bottom line, btw?
My bottom line? Hack the mind first. Don’t simply stop at “X is beneficial for the body” but also “is X an easy choice to make” and “how to arrange things so that X becomes an almost unavoidable and joyful choice to make”. Stop just telling people they should do things they dislike doing. It is almost never a lack of information: people who simply don’t dislike it all are never fat even if they know nothing. (These people engage in active hobbies, they simply forget to eat, they hate feelling too full, and they are uninterested in oral pleasure and just absent-mindedly grab a sandwich between one fun activity and another.) That is my bottom line: it is the lack of motivation, not information, and largely because it is formulated so that it is not enjoyable. (Actually right now, when I finished this comment, I will take a lunch break (from procastinating at “work”, yeah) and buy a slice of pizza while fully knowing the issues with it, but right now my stomach feels so that it would not feel content with a salmon on wholemeal rye bread combo which I buy on my stronger days for lunch.)
Good.