Because diet is about not caving to strong temptations inherent in human nature, and it’s hard to practice not doing something.
I could imagine an exercise consisting of walking amidst hundreds of delicious cakes, where you know that if you start eating them, no one will stop you...
A more cruel exercise would be having dozens of unknown meals (for example, spheres of blended matter, colored by random food colors) that you are supposed to taste, eat the healthy ones, and spit out the unhealthy ones. (To make it simple, the healthy ones are vegetables, dairy, and meat; the unhealthy ones all contain lots of sugar and/or salt.)
The idea in both cases is that if you repeatedly succeed in the arena, you will become more resistant against temptations in real life, perhaps to the point that you will stop perceiving cakes as food options, and even if you accidentally taste one, you will automatically spit it out.
But even this is ultimately a mindless activity. Rationality is about judgment, seeing things in perspective, etc. Though some parts of it could be made “automatical”, such as probability estimates (like calibration game, except that you are interrupted by phone at random moments of your day, and asked to quickly estimate a probability of something), murphy-jitsu (but again somehow being interrupted and asked to do this in real-life situations). Maybe a browser plugin that would detect you writing a general statement, and open a popup window asking you to provide three specific examples?
EDIT: An interesting and immediately useful exercise would be to establish a daily routine where in the morning you list your most important short-term and long-term tasks, and provide a probability estimate that you will do that thing today (the entire short-term thing, or the specified “next step” of the long-term thing). This should help you focus on the important stuff, and also become realistic about your abilities to do it.
I could imagine an exercise consisting of walking amidst hundreds of delicious cakes, where you know that if you start eating them, no one will stop you...
A more cruel exercise would be having dozens of unknown meals (for example, spheres of blended matter, colored by random food colors) that you are supposed to taste, eat the healthy ones, and spit out the unhealthy ones. (To make it simple, the healthy ones are vegetables, dairy, and meat; the unhealthy ones all contain lots of sugar and/or salt.)
The idea in both cases is that if you repeatedly succeed in the arena, you will become more resistant against temptations in real life, perhaps to the point that you will stop perceiving cakes as food options, and even if you accidentally taste one, you will automatically spit it out.
But even this is ultimately a mindless activity. Rationality is about judgment, seeing things in perspective, etc. Though some parts of it could be made “automatical”, such as probability estimates (like calibration game, except that you are interrupted by phone at random moments of your day, and asked to quickly estimate a probability of something), murphy-jitsu (but again somehow being interrupted and asked to do this in real-life situations). Maybe a browser plugin that would detect you writing a general statement, and open a popup window asking you to provide three specific examples?
EDIT: An interesting and immediately useful exercise would be to establish a daily routine where in the morning you list your most important short-term and long-term tasks, and provide a probability estimate that you will do that thing today (the entire short-term thing, or the specified “next step” of the long-term thing). This should help you focus on the important stuff, and also become realistic about your abilities to do it.