âŚbut only after a long and boring discussion of the first shoe
Welcome back. Today we want to drop the second shoe, but first we gotta talk about the one thatâs already dropped.
The D.E.R.P. is made up of a few hundred discrete parts, if you include all the optional bits, and protips. But there are only a handful of tenets, and a stonerâs dozen of precepts that are drived from them. But even these are just things that help you accomplish the actual nuts and bolts of DADBOD.REHAB â well really, just the nuts, because there are only two of them:
The âcrown jewelsâ of DADBOD.REHAB
There are two aspects of your daily life that need an overhaul to rehabilitate your dadbod, and get you back into âfit as fuck (for your age)â shape. Weâre going to talk about it tomorrow.
Note that we didnât choose that term at random. Declaring something is âfit as fuckâ implies level of fitness that people in general would recognize as âfit, while the âas fuckâ part implies a high degree of enthusiasm, and in this case satisfaction, on the part of the person making the declaration. The satisfaction part of it is presumed to be there because, in this instance, we are imagining that the person saying it is you.
We know you need to overhaul these two aspects of your life because you have a dadbod, and all people with a dadbod need to overhaul these two aspects of their lives, in order to fix it. We know you have a dadbod because you are here, right now, voluntarily, doing a program called DADBOD.REHAB. And we therefore also presume that you will feel a significant level of satisfaction once you have taken care of your dadbod, and are âfit as fuckâ.
But we donât know exactly what âfit as fuckâ means to you. The bar isnât low â no matter what you think it means, it still has to also mean âfitâ to people in general. The âfitâ is, therefore, an (almost) objective evaluation, while the âas fuckâ is pretty subjective.
Some guys wouldnât think they were âfit as fuckâ unless they have multiple identifiable abs and visible veins on their that-dude-obviously-lifts arms, with a body fat percentage around 10%. Those guys feel good, but when they say it, they also mean they look good. (And they presumably care a lot about that.)
Other guys will hold a beer in both hands while stating âyeah, Iâm fit as fuck,â even though they are at around 20% body fat, and they mean they could unload a moving truck by themselves without taking a break.
DADBOD.REHAB is a program designed to get you to wherever within that range is âfit as fuckâ to you.
The left nut of DADBOD.REHAB
Yeah, forget the shoes; the testicles metaphor is way better for the dualistic nature of DADBOD.REHAB â but might screw up our SEO if we used it right in the title.
Anyway, we already introduced the first half of the duo: ingestion.
This means your consumption of all food and drink. Your dadbod is evidence that your consumption exceeds the optimal threshold for your physiology and activity level.
However, weâve already told you (and you may have already known) that itâs not really feasible to exercise your way out of this predicament. You canât fix your dadbod through physical activity alone.
There are many reasons for this disappointing reality, but the main ones are just that
a.) it takes sooo much exercise to offset a tiny little bit of food or drink, and
b.) when you do run off 4 pints of lager and an order of nachos (which takes about 5 hours of running on an elliptical trainer), you end up soooo hungry that you either eat a shit-ton more, or else feel very hangry for the rest of the day. (Some people can, in fact, make that last option work. But itâs a very small group.)
So thereâs no way around it. To be a happy guy, and not a hangry guy, you have to completely re-architect your relationship with food. It starts with awareness, which is why we had you write down all your food yesterday.
By the way, howâd that go? Did you manage to write down everything before you ate it?
To continue, answer the question above.
If you havenât done so already today, check that list now (and mark the task complete in the B.R.A.I.N.);
Was what you ingested more, or less, that you expected?
How do you think it compares to your average daily consumption?
Given what you already know, and your intuition about nutrition, what was the âhealthiestâ thing you had yesterday? Stuff that you think a very healthy person might eat frequently?
How about the âunhealthiestâ? Did you eat something that no actual human being should ever consume, such as a frozen waffle-and-sausage-on-a-stick?
Reading the list of things you ate and drank, do any of them make you think, Fuck yeah, that was some rightous eating!, or Honestly, no, I didnât need to drink that, and shouldnât have, or anything like that?
Was any of the stuff you ate yesterday actually illegal? How about just immoral? Or moronic?
And so on. The answers to those questions donât matter arenât the point. Just thinking â briefly â about what you ingested is the point.
This is called âreviewâ. It seems weird the first time you do it, and it certainly seems weird when we do it together, like weâre doing now. But it is usually done alone, silently, and once habituated to doing it you can literally do it in 3 seconds. Like literally literally.
Reviewing a day's recorded ingestion. We can find the stupid part of this guy's consumption in literally three seconds. It might take 5-10 seconds for a novice.(Image credit: fuzzy-logic trained-model automaton #FATT-EAT4)
The review step is the second part of the ârecord everything you ingestâ process. Like the actual writing it down part, it adds a very tiny, but meaningful, additional cognitive step that increases your awareness of your own actions. To put it in hippie terms, it makes you more mindful about what you have eaten, and your eating tendencies over time.
This, in turn â you guessed it â changes your tendencies. So reviewing what youâve recorded, and recording it in the first place, are two sides of the same coin.
Hmm, we havenât heard that second testicle drop yet
OK, on second thought, letâs go back to the shoes metaphor.
Youâve already guessed that the other shoe is exercise. What kinds, how much, how often.
But weâre not going to talk about that today. Weâre going to talk about it tomorrow.
In the meantime, we want you to start thinking about it, so in addition to the every-day-for-the-forseeable-future recording of your ingestion, we want you to start recording your exercise. (Or lack of it; if you donât do any, just write down ânoneâ.)
Get out the B.R.A.I.N. and add these tasks for today:
(NOTE: When we give you a new task like âDo blah blah BEFORE you do yadda yaddaâ, thatâs assuming you do DADBOD.REHAB in the morning. But if you are doing this after you already did yadda yadda then (kinda obviously, we hope) you just do the blah blah right now, and then do it before yadda yadda going forward.)
For the purposes of this exercise, any and all exercise should be included, even if that is just walking to the supermarket, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator, or whatever.
