KISS Weight Loss – Habit 3

Okay!  So, previously, we looked at two super easy, yet surprisingly effective weight loss hacks: drinking 16oz of water a half-hour before meals, and downsizing your plates.  Either of which, extrapolating from published research, could help you drop 10 pounds over the course of the year.

Fair enough.  Still, while both are effective, they’re also pretty finite in scope.  So, today, I’m sharing a hack with much broader implications, something you can use at pretty much every meal for the rest of your life.

When people get serious about nutrition, they’ll often set out counting calories – both to clock an overall number, and to perfectly balance the macronutrients (the protein, fats, and carbs) in their meals.  And, indeed, that’s an effective approach.  For the very short term.  However, in practice, it turns out to be wildly unsustainable; pretty much everybody quits doing it entirely, reverting to their old ways whether after two days, two weeks, or (if they’re particularly gung-ho) two months.

Fortunately, however, you can get 90%+ of the results, much more sustainably, by using a simpler approach instead: measuring things with your hand.  With a handful (pun intended) of rules, you can figure out the size and composition of optimally healthful meals.  Which has a few big advantages.  First, you take your hands with you most places you go.  And, second, they come already scaled relative to your overall size, which makes them perfectly customized to your specific nutritional needs.

Here’s how it works:

– Your palm (the size and thickness) is a serving of protein.

– Your first (balled up) is a serving of non-starchy vegetables.

– Your cupped hand (or, rather, what you can hold in it) is a serving of starchy carbs.

– Your thumb (length, width) is a serving of healthy fats.

Women need one of each of those to make a meal – one palm of protein, one fist of veggies, one cupful of starches, and a thumb of fat.  Men need two of each.

So, Abigail might eat a palm-sized piece of salmon, a fist-sized serving of broccoli, a cupped hand’s worth of rice, with a thumb of olive oil drizzled on the broccoli and salmon.

Or Bob might have a piece of steak the size of two palms, two fists of sauteed spinach, and two cupped hands of mashed potatoes, mixed with a thumb’s worth of butter.

And maybe they have brunch together, with one or two servings respectively of scrambled eggs (palm), a green salad (fist), a sweet potato hash (cupped hand) and some avocado (thumb).

The possibilities are endless.  And the process is as easy – and handy – as it gets.

About Time

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been trying to take a hard look at myself of late. And though that’s mostly been diving into some of the bigger issues that I’ve identified in myself, I also keep stumbling across small, strange weaknesses that I’ve never really considered before. For example, it turns out I’m absolutely crap at remembering exactly when in the past things happened in my life.

Here’s a good, recent illustration: when designing workouts, it’s usually wise to do a ‘deload’ every four to six weeks – essentially, after beating yourself down with increasingly heavy weights and increasing intensity, week after week, for a subsequent week you step the intensity way back, often literally halving the weights used, to give your body a chance to recover. Recently, I’ve been playing around with daily and weekly workout structures in my own workouts, but I haven’t been paying close attention to the multi-week cycles that would include a deload. But, this week, feeling pretty run down, I commented to a friend at the gym that I thought I could probably use one. I just felt like I needed a break. Which was weird, I told him, as I’d just taken time off, during a week when the gym happened to be closed. My friend looked at me funny, and then reminded me that the gym was actually closed at the end of August, almost three months back.

Similarly, if you asked me in what year I did certain things – when I moved to a given apartment, started a company, worked on some project, headed off on a big trip—I’d have pretty much zero idea. Which is weird, because I actually tend to have very vivid and detailed memories of all of the individual episodes; I just can’t really order them, or place them specifically in time.

Fortunately, unlike any number of other things I’m working through, this one doesn’t seem to cause problems in my life, at least so far as I can tell. But, it’s an interesting quirk of my brain to consider going forward. And I suspect ‘consider’ is about the best I can do. Because, though I’m finding ways to work through and resolve a bunch of my other stuff, this is one I’m not even vaguely sure how to debug.