Month: May 2022

You are not addicted to sugar. 🍭🍬🍫

Food, by nature, is neutral. Demonizing any food group is pure diet culture BS.

No one can get addicted to food (barring any real disorders of satiety, you’re not addicted). You can’t get addicted to air or water. They’re REQUIRED for life. 

So is food.

➡️ RESTRICTION ⬅️ is what makes us obsess over everything we eat.

We desire what we can’t have. AND our bodies are primed via evolution to fight against starvation.

Diets (Paleo, Keto, WW, Intermittent Fasting, “Clean” eating) are by their very nature restrictive. This in turn creates a situation in your body where it thinks you’re starving. Even the THOUGHTS of restricting food triggers your body’s survival mechanisms.

So you fixate on food and feel “addicted.” 

Check out the Minnesota Starvation experiment where they subjected 30ish men to reduced-calorie diets of 1800 calories/day or less (think about the current popular recommendation for 1200-calorie a day diets. A *toddler* needs 1200 calories a day 😳).

One ended up scouring the trash for food, and snuck out to get milkshakes, while many chewed up to 40 pieces of gum a day and obsessed over food, making small rituals like adding water to make it seem like more.

What happens when you allow all foods? 

🔥Food loses its power over you. 👊 

And when food loses its power over you? You’re free to focus on stuff that’s more important. 

I also believe that diets are used to keep us docile & focused on food instead of changing our world, but that’s for another time.

*Note: Food can make your body feel differently depending on what it is. It’s highly individual. I feel better when I have more vegetables and drink lots of water, and I feel worse when I have more than a couple slices of bread. But that’s my body and I’m in tune with how food makes *me* feel. I still don’t restrict anything.

p.s. eat the damn cookie.

You know you’re deep into a TV binge when Netflix regularly asks you if you’re still watching. 

I found myself here at the end of March.

At our Dreams Program meeting at The Abs Company we were given a discipline challenge, pick one thing to do or not do for 30 days.

I decided to stop my TV habit cold turkey. Unplugged the TV in my office and hid the remote (which I still can’t find by the way). The other members of my household weren’t subject to the same so I found ways around that.

Instead of watching TV, I… 

📝 finished a class I was taking online
🍽 kept the kitchen sink clean (most nights)
🎸 picked up my guitar again
🎧listened to podcasts
🎮 played games with my kid
📕read nearly 2000 pages
📝 started a new online class
😴and got a LOT more rest. 

Where I thought that I had no time to do what I wanted, I discovered I actually *did* have time – I was just using it to numb my brain with TV shows. 

On May 1st, free from the shackles of the 30-day challenge, I decided I’d catch up with the 3-4 shows I regularly watched. Four shows deep, I realized it didn’t feel very good, but I kept watching. I spent most of my day staring at the tube and ended up feeling like a zombie by dinner. 

I’ll still watch my shows on occasion, but I think I’ll be keeping most of my time for me instead of giving it to Netflix.

People screw stuff up all the time. 

We’re human, so of course we make mistakes. 

We’re human so we’re slow and forgetful with boring stuff. 

During a meeting today our CEO joked that I dislike people (he was a bit more colorful with his language but I’ll leave that up to your imagination). 

I love people.

But I often look to automation to make work and life easier, taking humans out of tasks that require precision and timing and repetition. 

It’s less misanthropic and more “let people do what they do best and let computers & systems do the rest”. 

People are best at creativity, relationships, overcoming objections, empathy, and those kinds of things.

Put people where they shine, and build systems around them for supporting the things they’ll screw up time and time again.