DAY 004: DAY 004【DADBOD.REHAB】

DAY 004

TL;DR

• Prepare the vegetables for eating (but don’t eat them)

• Note your relevant completed actions, and record your intentions for tomorrow in your B.R.A.I.N. (pics notes or it didn’t happen!)

Vegetables

This exercise isn’t really about the vegetables. The main point is to ease you into the practice of planning some of your food consumption in advance, as part of the DADBOD.REHAB program.

This program doesn’t involve meal-planning, BTW. You can definitely plan your meals if you want to — but you’ll have to do that on your own time. It is too time-consuming to fit into this program, and it isn’t actually necessary.

But this program does use a few of the best easy food hacks. Five, to be specific, but this is the first one: preparing non-insane food in advance, and deciding (in advance) to eat it.

The benefits of doing this are simple:

• You eat non-insane food (meaning healthy and nutritious, with reasonable caloric load) food, and this will probably end up replacing some not-very-sane food choices that you’d otherwise make (and if not, we’ll address that later in the program).
• More importantly — much more importantly, as it turns out — doing this reduces the total number of food decisions you have to make. In almost all people, this reduces the quantity of insane food consumed, because there are fewer opportunities to make a bad food choice. More than that, though, it reduces the cognitive load.

That second one is a little bit controversial in scientific circles — scientists argue about the “ego depletion” theory and whether willpower has a biochemical basis that makes it a finite resource, while other awesome scientists write huge (and hugely entertaining) books about fuck a bunch of willpower, we don’t even have choices at all, bro.

But for the purposes of DADBOD.REHAB it is unequivocally true: making fewer choices about mundanes shit like “What should I eat right now?” results in not just better food choices, but also more perceived energy to make other important choices (“Should I go to bed now, or doomscroll my phone until 3AM like a moron?”) correctly, and (for most people, anyway) more energy and happiness generally.

So: DADBOD.REHAB is gonna decide some of the stuff you eat. We crank the convenience knob up to 11, too. So you’ll save time while shedding that dadbod. It might not taste good; YMMV. We don’t give a fuck about that, though, see? That’s actually part of the secret. If you don’t like vegetables, we suggest you either learn to like them, or just pretend it’s medicine that is going to make you look and feel better, and live longer. (Hint: because it fucking is!)

So, take out your notebook — er, your B.R.A.I.N. — and in today’s section write:

Prepare vegetables for consumption
Divide prepared vegetables into servings and store

Then in tomorrow’s section, write:

Eat 2 servings of already prepared vegetables

Then, at some point later today, complete the first two tasks. It’s about as self-explanatory as it seems, but let’s go over it just in case.

Prepare vegetables for consumption

We’ll keep talking about broccoli and carrots, but if you chose to substitute some other veggie, that’s fine; just do something roughly equivalent.

We suggest cutting the broccoli and carrots into bite-ish-sized pieces and steaming them in a pot with a steamer. (How?)

You can also choose to roast them, bake them, or eat them raw.

Remember, you are just preparing them today, not eating them. We’ll cover how to eat them tomorrow (LOL).

Divide prepared vegetables into servings and store

The only important thing is to store them already divided into single servings. But the servings should be reasonably big; they should weigh about as much as one unopened can of non-diet Coca-cola with a Krispy Kreme donut balanced on top of it. Or thereabouts.

Put each serving in a ziploc bag, or in a bowl sealed with plastic wrap (protip: if your plastic wrap doesn’t suck (we recommend Costco’s) then you can totally stack sealed bowls of veggies on top of each other), and then put it all in the fridge.

You’re done! You got to the point in the DADBOD.REHAB program where we start telling you what to eat (sometimes), but you’re still not actually to the point where we start telling you what not to eat. So… you know, nobody’s watching! (Yet.)

See you tomorrow.