TRICKERY! Or, how I got healthy and plan to stay healthy

My first "rule" of living well is:

A corollary to this is that I employ absolutely every form of trickery I can come up with.

I want to emphasize here, again, that this is about my strategies. Your mileage may vary. I may be insane. You have been warned.

(tl;dr version of this post: I use whatever crutches I can find to build good habits, cause building good habits is hard! I don't try to stop doing bad things, I try to start doing good things. If you want to build good habits, I respectfully suggest you let go of the idea that you have to bull through with Willpower(tm), and instead use every trick you come across to help you out. It's totes okay. And seriously, don't go off the deep end with goals. If you have slept till 2pm every day of your life and have never done more exercise than what it takes to lift the tub of ice cream out of bottom of a chest freezer, then don't set a goal of getting up at 5am to run 10k every morning. Think before you commit.)

I firmly believe that "dedication" and "willpower" are a suckers game. I'm not saying that there's no such thing as willpower or dedication, or that those things don't figure into a happy and successful life. I am saying that basing my entire fitness plan around them (as much of the diet & fitness world would have me do) is a terrible idea for me, and honestly, probably for anyone. Near as I can tell, the only thing that beliefs like "All I need is more dedication/willpower!" do is to provide a new reason to mentally beat myself up when I don't succeed ("Damnit, I have no willpower! I'm worthless!"), while simultaneously providing me no meaningful support for actually achieving my goals. It's like willpower and dedication are the abusive partners of the health & fitness world. They yank support right out from under your feet, and then convince you it was all your fault anyway.

So anyway, here's a real conversation I had about a month ago between myself and a random gym patron, demonstrating my relationship with dedication:

Gym patron: You're looking great.
Me: Thanks!
Gym patron: Your dedication is really showing.
Me: Oh, I enjoy being here. If it were about my dedication, I would have quit ages ago.

Willpower and dedication only take me so far. I've seen it characterized in places like NerdFitness as similar to the hit point meters in video games. You start with a certain amount of hit points, and as I play those points get dinged until the meter runs down. (And, eventually, my character dies. Hmmm, maybe I'm taking this metaphor too far...) All day long we have to exert willpower and dedication, in all sorts of little places (e.g., yes, I'll get out of bed now; yes, I'll get the check requests ready; no, I won't curse at that terrible driver in front of my kids; etc.). There's a reason most people feel pretty damned ragged by the end of the day, and not just in a physical sense. My brain is DONE. NO MORE BRAINING. So out of a daily willpower meter that has, let's say, 100 points in it, I'm going to use the last five to completely change my lifestyle and habits? I can't see how that won't work....

Alright, I'll probably torture the hell out of the hit point metaphor over the coming weeks (months? years? how long do you think I can keep this blog going? I should start a betting pool...) But just right now, I want to tell you about TRICKERY.

Yes, TRICKERY.

Okay, I'll stop yelling that word now.

Anyway, trickery! Self-deception! Fooling myself! Here's the key--trickery buys me extra space on my willpower-o-meter by making some activities that would suck down my willpower not cost me as much. It's really a pretty sweet deal.

Doing something like "changing my lifestyle" is ridiculous. It's somewhere between "harder than hell" and "flat out impossible". However, when you think about it, all my lifestyle really is is a conglomeration of habits and behaviors I've built up over the past ... er ... 39.5 years. I'm not about to change my whole lifestyle--gaaaah! But can I change my face washing routine before bed? Well, yeah, I can handle that. (Okay, I'm still working on that. Whatever.)

Even breaking it down into habit changing isn't enough for me, though. Habits are really, really hard to change. There's a reason they're called "habits" rather than "decisions". It takes a long time to build up habits, and a long time to change them. I'll take whatever crutches I can find, thank you very much.

Here are some of the crutches I've used, or am planning to use:

1. Make it fun! No, really, there's often a way to make things enjoyable if you give yourself permission to do so. Find some way of changing what you want to do from an "I have to" to an "I get to!" For example, I finally gave up cardio in favor of weight training. Why? Well, I do believe that weight training is physiologically better suited to my goals, but that's just what gave me my mental permission to change programs. Why I really did it was because I love lifting. What's the best exercise program? The one you like! The one you'll stick with! Want to change something else? Make it fun. Trying to set up a nice bedtime routine? I dunno, make it like a "spa time" or something--use candles, or nice incense, or whatever else floats your boat. Buy a wonderful towel and only use it for that activity. Want to get in the habit of tracking what you eat? Make it a game--turn hitting your macros into target practice or something similar. Cultivate that sense of non-judgmental curiosity that you always hear hippies talking about regarding your own eating habits (hey, that's a good one, I'm stealing that). Get creative, you can come up with something.
2. Bribe yourself. Totally do this. (Just maybe not with food.) One hour of working out = one hour of video games. Wash the dishes every night for a week = go see a movie on Saturday. Again, be creative. The best bribes are the ones that you can sort of set up and keep going. For example, I can't afford to go to a movie every Saturday, so that payoff wouldn't be a sustainable one for me. But I have plenty of video games laying around, so that's cool. Bribe yourself until it becomes second nature. "Fake it till you make it." It's totally legal.
3. Cut it out of your life. A popular mantra in the fitness world is "moderation in everything". Yeah, well, fair enough, but sometimes we need some space in order to learn how to be moderate with something. And sometimes, that will never work for us. If we have an addictive personality, or a particularly firmly seated habit, telling someone "just use moderation" can be like handing a fifth of scotch to a recovering alcoholic and saying "you know, just don't use too much". That's not how it works. One of the hard parts of changing habits for me has been trying to sit down and evaluate which habits fall into the "moderation" camp, and which fall into the "I can't handle this yet, just make it go away" camp. This is difficult, but very successful when I finally incorporate it. One place I've been trying to use this tactic is for my lunches at work. A lot of times I'll just grab foods and sort of "load up" in the morning while running out the door, thinking "Oh, I'll just fix a little bit of this for lunch today". Yeah, BS. This leads almost inevitably to overeating. And what's scary is, I can hear that voice in my head while I'm grabbing food in the morning telling me to measure things out or only take one of the three things, but I'll self-sabotage and load up anyway. So I'm not saying this is an easy strategy to implement. But I am definitely saying that it's easier to be moderate in what I grab in the morning than it is to opt not to eat All Teh Foodz I've brought at lunch. It's easier to not eat what you don't have, ya know?
4. Change the tactic to meet the goal. Example: I need to slow down when I eat. I understand the value of slowing down, enjoying my food, tasting it fully, be "present" and "mindful" and all that stuff--I get why that's a good thing. The problem is, I usually remember to do this maybe 90% of my way through a meal. Damn. I've been trying the "be mindful" strategy for awhile, and it's not working. It's just too big and alien of a mindset for the amazingly firmly-engrained habits I currently use while eating. Fine. New strategy: take much smaller bites. Simple, quick, non-threatening. I noticed the other day that I really load up my fork. What the hell, am I worried someone is gonna take my food out from under me or something? Anyway, I obviously don't need to do that. I don't get less food if I take smaller bites, so I don't have to have the fear of deprivation hanging over my head. And smaller bites will force me to slow down (or at least get some exercise out of moving my fork-hand really fast), which I hope will result in me being more mindful of my food. And maybe, just maybe, I'll start to relearn my internal cues for being full again? That would be cool.
5. Use mechanical intervention. So here's a situation: I stay up too late. Why do I stay up too late? Facebook, Fitocracy, and binge-watching Supernatural and The Walking Dead. Why don't I just stop? Because duh. Anyway, I'm obviously not capable of exerting willpower like this, especially not at the end of the day when my willpower reserves are completely depleted, and willpower has actually started tapping my other reserves (i.e., math-ability, basic reasoning, etc.). This needs to be taken out of my hands. I'd put it in the hands of my spouse, but let's just say that ze's in mostly the same boat I am on this one. Do you know what I could do? I could install something like Self Control on my computer, and put parental controls on Netflix (cause apparently I need to be parented). One way to gain control is to take control right out of your hands!
1. Addendum to this: the main reason I haven't installed Self Control (or at least, the reason I keep telling myself) is that it's a Mac app and I use a PC. I can't find a good PC alternative to this, or at least, one that looks like it will do what I want without completely frakking my computer. Any suggestions?
6. Use stupid life hacks. Remember my thing above about wanting to change my nightly face washing regime? And how I'm full of fail on that? Here's my current plan for how to achieve it:
   
   Yes, what you're looking at is a stupid book case frame full of stupid sticky notes with stupid numbers on them. I hear tell it takes 21 repetitions to build a habit. I'll make 30 of these suckers for good measure, and then rip one off each time I do the thing. I'll put the whole shebang somewhere obnoxious that I can't ignore, like the bathroom mirror or something, and where it will be easy for me to comply with the goal when I see it. Will this work? Maybe, we'll see. 
7. I won't do everything all at once. I try to pick one or two things at a time, and do those. If you're compulsive about such things, you can schedule them out if you like, but that's a bridge too far for me.

The moral of this story: give your willpower a break, it can't do everything! Send help. Call for backup. Use stupid post-it note tricks. Whatever works. Will all of the above work for you? No idea. Not even sure they're all working for me, but I'm trying things and seeing what happens. Most importantly, though, I am gonna stop beating myself up about not having enough willpower or dedication. If I'm trying to change a habit and struggling to do so, I will try to interrupt the internal chorus of "Wow, you totally suck, you can't even do this easy thing!" and instead replace this with the Buddhist detachment of "Hm, I observe that I am struggling with this. Can I identify what my blocks are, and find any crutches to help me overcome them?"

.....

You know, it occurs to me that I might need to use various crutches in order to help me change my habits regarding how to deal with failures in changing my habits. How meta.