I’m up to 15 pounds of extra weight today. There’s a lot to juggle, and I have decided not to wear the weighted vest to school or the lab for the time being. I do a lot of my studying from home, so that still gives me plenty of time in the vest.
I have to take off the vest when I drive, as the weights on the back are very uncomfortable to lean on. However, I can wear it sitting at my desk, since I have a habit of sitting up ramrod-straight in my chair due to decades of piano practice sitting upright on the piano bench. Good posture becomes especially important wearing this vest.
Astronauts tend to lose musculature and bone mass in space, and as I understand it this is because of the lowered strain on their bodies. I am curious whether the extra weight from this vest will have the opposite effect.
This vest has made me more conscious about eating. I eat a lot of pizza, and I usually eat 4-5 slices for a meal. Over the last couple of days, I have found it easy to stick to 2-3 slices. Part of this is that my conscious decision about how to alter my eating habits was to “do what I normally do, but marginally healthier”—one fewer slices of pizza, choosing a healthier snack most of the time, that sort of thing. Part of it too, though, is that I am wearing a constant and extremely obvious physical reminder of why I’m making that choice. It would be very cognitively dissonant indeed to be wearing a weighted vest out of concern for my weight, while continuing to overeat.
This makes me think that modifying one’s dress and environment might be unusually tractable and potent commitment devices for motivating behavior change. Based on my experience so far, it seems like the key is to do something you’d normally not prefer, so that the only reason you could possibly be doing it is as a commitment device. In other words, avoid motive ambiguity. The uniform or environmental change is a costly signal.
In our kitchen last year, I put up some ugly, rather “loud” signs around the counter saying things like “ABSOLUTELY NO GROCERIES LEFT ON THE COUNTER” and “ABSOLUTELY NO DIRTY DISHES HERE.” Boy did that work. We just took the signs down for a deep clean, and didn’t put them back up again afterward. Immediately, the kitchen has started to become messy again.
Simulated weight gain experiment, day 3
I’m up to 15 pounds of extra weight today. There’s a lot to juggle, and I have decided not to wear the weighted vest to school or the lab for the time being. I do a lot of my studying from home, so that still gives me plenty of time in the vest.
I have to take off the vest when I drive, as the weights on the back are very uncomfortable to lean on. However, I can wear it sitting at my desk, since I have a habit of sitting up ramrod-straight in my chair due to decades of piano practice sitting upright on the piano bench. Good posture becomes especially important wearing this vest.
Astronauts tend to lose musculature and bone mass in space, and as I understand it this is because of the lowered strain on their bodies. I am curious whether the extra weight from this vest will have the opposite effect.
This vest has made me more conscious about eating. I eat a lot of pizza, and I usually eat 4-5 slices for a meal. Over the last couple of days, I have found it easy to stick to 2-3 slices. Part of this is that my conscious decision about how to alter my eating habits was to “do what I normally do, but marginally healthier”—one fewer slices of pizza, choosing a healthier snack most of the time, that sort of thing. Part of it too, though, is that I am wearing a constant and extremely obvious physical reminder of why I’m making that choice. It would be very cognitively dissonant indeed to be wearing a weighted vest out of concern for my weight, while continuing to overeat.
This makes me think that modifying one’s dress and environment might be unusually tractable and potent commitment devices for motivating behavior change. Based on my experience so far, it seems like the key is to do something you’d normally not prefer, so that the only reason you could possibly be doing it is as a commitment device. In other words, avoid motive ambiguity. The uniform or environmental change is a costly signal.
In our kitchen last year, I put up some ugly, rather “loud” signs around the counter saying things like “ABSOLUTELY NO GROCERIES LEFT ON THE COUNTER” and “ABSOLUTELY NO DIRTY DISHES HERE.” Boy did that work. We just took the signs down for a deep clean, and didn’t put them back up again afterward. Immediately, the kitchen has started to become messy again.