I’ve recently been chasing the question, “What if this were easy?” which I first encountered while listening to Tim Ferriss – author of The 4-Hour Work Week known for his tips and tricks for optimized productivity. James Clear also addresses this idea of constructing an environment where doing the right thing – however you define that in your circumstances – is not only advantageous but simple in his book, Atomic Habits, through his 3rd Law of Behavior Change: Make it easy. If you introspect for a few moments, you may realize that this concept already exists somewhere in your life. For example, my father is a bit of an exercise junkie, in that he was a competitive long-distance runner from high school to his 30’s and still allocates time to physical activity daily. As a result, for me, going for runs and visiting the basketball court in the early-morning hours was a norm throughout my youth that fostered my own connection with exercise. And, it is that connection that makes consistently lifting weights, running roads, and physical training as a whole easy for me to complete regularly because I was raised in a world where doing so was fun and habitual.
The month of January is historically dominated by aspirations and ambitions for improvement, whether that be on the playing field, in the classroom, at the office, or in life. One of the most common, if not THE most common, of these pursuits is losing weight, which almost always means losing fat mass. And, in the world of non-caloric sweeteners and complex nutritional chemistry, I find that this goal epitomizes the aforementioned idea of making execution easy.
Regardless of your dietary affiliation, by the First Law of Thermodynamics, losing weight requires some type of caloric deficit. Simply put, you must burn more calories than you are eating in order to lose weight – there are nuances to the math, especially concerning how your body adapts to changes in weight over time, but that’s a topic for another day. So, with respect to ease of execution, the question is, “How can I make achieving a caloric deficit easy?” And, I find that this will translate for many of you into, “How can I achieve a caloric deficit without starving myself and while eating some of my favorite foods?”
One approach is to identify the high impact foods that you thoroughly enjoy eating and double down on your strategy with those. For the purposes of cutting weight, think of high impact foods as those you will find it especially difficult to sacrifice and that typically cost a lot of calories to consume. Determining the former is self-explanatory, whereas the latter is probably less obvious than you think. For example, check out what ~650 calories looks like depending on what food you’re eating:
8.2 oz steak
10.4 oz chicken
15.8 cups of spinach
18.5 rice cakes
3.1 cups of white rice
3 cups of brown rice
6.3 medium sweet potatoes
4 medium white potatoes
11.6 Oreos
4.3 oz of potato chips
2.5 pieces of cake
2.4 cups of ice cream
4.2 cans of beer
5.3 glasses of wine
6.7 shots of tequila
Now, eating an 8 oz steak in one sitting probably doesn’t sound out of the ordinary. And, doing so will cover various nutritional needs and will likely leave you feeling full and satisfied for several hours. On the contrary, I don’t know about you, but I could probably eat 12 Oreos every hour, all day long; consequently, though calories-in vs. calories-out matters, all calories do not have the same effect on your body, at least in terms of taste and satiation. This becomes particularly impactful when you realize that one deceivingly calorically expensive meal can overturn a whole day’s worth of reducing calories. In other words, eating what looks like a normally sized bowl of ice cream or bag of chips as a small snack might actually cost the same amount of calories as a whole meal. Interestingly, this idea of high-stakes eating is evident on the macro scale as well, in that overeating during the last few months of the year can cause significant annual weight gain, even if you maintain a caloric balance the rest of the year. (I, II) Also, this concept is exemplified by stories of people losing significant amounts of weight by swapping out regular soda for diet soda.
And that is the basis of the tactic I’m describing: swapping out high impact foods/drinks – those that you love eating and that carry a lot of calories with them – for low or zero calorie foods/drinks that still satisfy your cravings. For instance, let’s say your goal is to lose 1 pound (3500 calories) per week, but you don’t want to give up Coca Cola, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and Lay’s potato chips. You could simply substitute each of these items for lower calorie options that taste nearly equally as good, eat a similar quantity, and easily hit your calorie deficit without changing anything else in your diet. Check out Table 1 and Table 2 to see what this could look like.
Baseline Diet
Easy Diet
As you can see, solely leveraging a few high impact foods can get you all the way to your target caloric deficit and further, all while enjoying tasty foods and easily adhering to your diet over time – and that’s without considering exercise.
Now, I don’t think we want to eliminate struggle in all of our endeavors, as I believe that struggle and challenge breeds progression; however, I also believe in picking your battles and working smarter so that your hard work takes you further. Sometimes, this means making hard work easy. We’ve seen how we can make cutting calories easy. Where else can you apply Make It Easy ?