It’s about that time of year again—people are making resolutions and scrambling to stop from falling off that proverbial wagon in the first couple of weeks.
My lovely girlfriend, Kayla Marie, and I have been working the Weight Watchers routine that I talked about last month in the post Spending Points. We’d lose a little, gain some of it back, and then lose a little (though not enough to get back to par again). Knowing the “value” of the food going into your body is helpful but if you don’t spread those points out evenly it doesn’t work out. We were both pretty disheartened after an especially disappointing weigh-in last week.
We made a pledge to eat perfectly for seven days. No flaws, no compromises, no mistakes. Six evenly-sized nutritious meals taken at 6am, 9am, noon, 3pm, 6pm, and 9pm (rising around 5am and going to bed at 10 or 11pm). I fired up a Google Docs page which later became a spreadsheet and we both logged our meals. At first we actually planned ahead a couple days to help with shopping. We stuck with the workouts we were already doing – lifting weights Mon/Wed/Fri and fitting in Zumba and other cardio where we could – and we were off to the races.
The result: Kayla is down 6.2lbs and I’m down 7.2lbs.
Neither one of us really ate poorly before. We’d kind of go back and forth between “being good” and “oh hell, we’ve earned it” all week long. So why was this time any different than before? Evidently it was the “bright line” that Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney talk about in their book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength:
These are clear, simple, unambiguous rules. You can’t help but notice when you cross a bright line. If you promise yourself to drink or smoke “moderately,” that’s not a bright line. It’s a fuzzy boundary with no obvious point at which you go from moderation to excess. Because the transition is so gradual and your mind is so adept at overlooking your own peccadilloes, you may fail to notice when you’ve gone too far. So you can’t be sure you’re always going to follow the rule to drink moderately. In contrast, zero tolerance is a bright line: total abstinence with no exceptions anytime. It’s not practical for all self-control problems—a dieter cannot stop eating all food—but it works well in many situations. Once you’re committed to following a bright-line rule, your present self can feel confident that your future self will observe it, too. And if you believe that the rule is sacred—a commandment from God, the unquestionable law of a higher power—then it becomes an especially bright line. You have more reason to expect your future self to respect it, and therefore your belief becomes a form of self-control: a self-fulfilling mandate. I think I won’t, therefore I don’t.
Perfect means perfect. It doesn’t mean “mostly perfect” and it doesn’t mean I’m never going to have a piece of chocolate again. It means that I’m going to have one at the end of the seven-day period. Oh and believe me, after we weighed in we hit the yogurt bar with a vengeance, but we’re back on the straight-and-narrow again and we’re excited to make more progress this week.
What “bright line” will you draw in the sand this week? It worked for us. It can work for you.
