For the past four months, I’ve eaten the slow-carb diet from Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Body. The diet can be stated simply as follows: six days a week, eat lots of protein and vegetables, no dairy, and no carbohydrates that can be white, including bread, rice, corn, and sugar. On the seventh day, eat whatever the hell you want. Go nuts. This last part didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but Tim claimed that attention-getting results would manifest themselves soon after adopting his diet. I chose to try it rather than wonder.
Overall, the change in diet was fantastic. Increasing the amount of protein in my diet gave me both a lot more energy and more warning before a low blood sugar episode actually began. I also started losing fat and gaining muscle with no change in exercise. There was just one problem: the cheat day. My first few were miserable. The new diet was obviously an improvement; why go out of my way to buck it once a week in a base concession to hedonism that I knew would just make me sick? Once I got a few months in, though, the problem with an extreme diet became apparent. It wasn’t my body that was the limiting factor. It was my brain.
I had come to understand on both an intellectual and a cellular level that what I was doing was better for me, but some contrarian instinct deep inside me didn’t want to go with the plan. It still wanted bananas, apples, and pears. It wanted rice, bread, chocolate. Sometimes it was clever, reminding me how much I liked Thai curries and that eating them without rice was likely to make me sick. Other times it came at me with a sledgehammer, inducing cravings for a delicious sugar rush from a piece of fresh fruit. I could not make this go away, no matter how deep into the diet I was. Without the cheat day, it would have sunk me.
I’m not sure what the intended point of the cheat day is. Sometimes, it sates my desire for otherwise-forbidden foods. Other times, it reminds me that if I overdose on standard American fare, I will feel significantly worse. Tim claims that there is some scientific basis for it, but I suspect that it’s just a brain hack that he’s found keeps people compliant. Whatever the true purpose is, it has turned out to be integral to my long-term success at adopting this diet.
I’ve committed myself to daily posts on this blog. That’s a similar commitment to eating a niche diet; it’s something that requires long-term discipline, and something that few people do. I’m venturing off on my own, currently without a peer group of fellow bloggers to support me.
The point of this exercise is to run myself out of built-up ideas until I discover what sort of content flows sustainably out of me. Writing daily long enough to achieve that will require long-term discipline. Today, on only my fourth day, I was already feeling the pressure to not miss a day, to keep my perfect record. Knowing myself, this kind of pressure will make the commitment unsustainable. Luckily, thanks to Tim, this is a solved problem.
As of today, I’m instituting a writing cheat day. Once each Monday-to-Sunday interval, I’m not putting up a post. I can spend that day whenever I want, but only once between any two adjacent Mondays.
Expect radio silence tomorrow. I think I’ve earned it.
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