DAY 008: Bro, do you even record your intention to lift?【DADBOD.REHAB】 Welcome to week 2! Last week was mainly a fuck-around week (“write down your intentions to rehab your dadbod, then eat a donut”, and then “cook vegetables one time, then eat two servings… in the whole week. Good job! You deserve a Häagen-Dazs!”).
To be honest, this week is gonna be another fuck-around week. But next week will be the find-out week. But don’t be scared. You got this! Well, we’re gonna be real: you probably couldn’t handle it if we dropped it on you today. But by DAY 015? It’ll be a 🎂🚶, dude!
So… back on DAY 001, we introduced the bedrock concept of DADBOD.REHAB:
Intent precedes action. Before you do something, you should intend to do it.
Then we introduced the the B.R.A.I.N., and did a couple exercises last week to try it in actual practice.
Today, we introduce the first Core Habit[^1] of DADBOD.REHAB, which is based on this principle.
Most of us mostly cruise through life eating when we become hungry, and drinking when we become thirsty (or, perhaps, when we become fed up with work at the end of the day and crack that first beer). Sure, there might be some obstacles during the day, depending on our work or school, but for the most part this is how modern people in the default mode live.
Everything might even seem fine when we are young, with that carefree spirit and (even more importantly) the fast metabolism of youth. Then, one day, you wake up and you are like maybe 39, or 45, and you can’t see you dick anymore when you piss. And then you kinda tense up your abs (you can’t see them lately, either, but they are still in there, and still respond to your brain’s motor control) and you’re like, Whew! Dick’s still there.
Finally, one day, you tense your belly, but this time you still can’t see your dick. You kinda have to lean forward, and peer down to make sure it’s still down there and OK. But at this point, you realize, Ugh, this sucks, I’m hella fat and out of shape compared to the old days, I gotta do something… and lo and behold, now here you are on some random dadbod rehabilitation website! 😅
In fact, if we have an effectively unlimited supply of highly palatable food, that can even just be delivered to us whenever we want by some Armenian guy named Manvil in a blue Honda Fit, then just eating whenever we are hungry doesn’t make sense
Obviously, right? But it’s not obvious when you are 18 and can go to taco bell every weekend, drink several beers every night, and still have an athletic build and play sports without looking goofy. But by the time you not only can’t dunk anymore, but can’t even see your dick anymore when you piss… somehow, it it still not obvious — at least until you think about it — because you have those decades of experience doing that, and it just seems so normal.
And it is. But it shouldn’t be. The single most effective habit of DADBOD.REHAB is:
This means you have to (somehow) record all your food and drink (except no-calorie choices like water, black coffee or tea, and several types of vegetable which are exempt even though they technically have calories).
Yes, this is a annoying. But this is the “low-touch” version, and it’s pretty easy. We’ve optimized it as far as can be done without diminishing efficacy. You’ll use this method this week. From next week, you’ll have to learn the high-touch method (much more annoying), but then later once you have hit some of your goals, you can switch back to this low-touch method until you start moving back toward fattie status.
All you need to do for the low-touch method is write down what you will eat or drink, before you do it.
You don’t need to write down the amounts, or the calories, or the macros. Just write down the food and drink you intend to ingest. You can do this in the B.R.A.I.N., on a piece of paper (just keep one in your pocket), or in an app. It’s up to you. But you have to do it before you eat or drink. If you don’t, you failed at the task.
You don’t need to do this yet, but you will. The high-touch method of ingestion intention logging is to not only write down what you are going to eat, but also the amounts of each food, and the resultant calories and macronutrients for each food. Then these values need to be combined into a total for the day. Every day should have a full record.
Does that sound like a pain in the ass? Well, …it IS(!!!)
Luckily, you live in a Golden Age of Unfathomable Convenience, and so you have the option to buy an app for your intelligent telephone device which can do almost all of that for you. But it is still annoying, even with the best phones and apps.
So, when you are fixing a problem, like being pudgy and out-of-shape, you are gonna have to do the high-touch method. Even though we won’t do this method this week, it might be worh spending some time this week to see which apps might suit you, though, since we will be starting soon.
The reasons this is important are:
The obvious reason is that so you can tell whether or not you are meeting your kcal/macro goals for your diet. We don’t yet have these, but will soon.
The less obvious reason has to do with Schrödinger’s Asshole. Or was it Heisenberg? Anyway, one of these smart nerd guys realized that merely writing down an action — eat a donut, say — changed the likelihood that a person would actually do it. This was made famous by the guy who invented Evernote, and he used to be a little bit famous for that, but then he got a lot more famous for writing down everything he ate in Excel. This led to him not being a fattie anymore.
Is it because writing “eat a donut” in Excel somehow burns 340 kcal? With how bad Excel sucks at entering data, that maybe is not totally impossible. But no, it’s because writing down your intentions makes you more mindful of them. This is a fancy word that means it makes you think about them. And even just a tiny amount of thought is often enough to realize, “wait… I don’t even actually want a donut, I just want to not be doing this other bullshit task in Microsoft Teams, it actually has nothing to do with hunger.”
A lot of our eating is almost entirely mindless.
The Dadbod Ingestion / Consumption Knowledgebase (D.I.C.K.) (that paper we mentioned earlier, or section in the B.R.A.I.N. is a powerful tool that enables you to record all your ingestion events before you do them. Kind of like those crime-predictors in Minority Report. And just like them, it can prevent criminal acts before they even happen: terroristic crimes like eating because you are bored, or its cousin eating because you don’t want to do that thing that is going to be boring. And the classic eating because a UFC fight or NFL game is on TV.
The “Core Habit” part of this means you are supposed to do this every day from now on, starting… now.
NOTE: There is no need to eat less! In fact, later it will be helpful to have a week’s worth of your pre-rehab dadbod’s diet. So just eat as you normally do, but write each meal, snack, and drink down first.
(There will be more, but that’s it for now.)
Good luck! It is actually expected that you will totally forget a few times, at first; that’s what this practice week is for, before we start for real. Just notice every time this happens, and write “FORGOT: 1 Apple and cheese slices”. (Doing this will help you stop forgetting.)