I’ve had pretty much the same diet for many months – a burrito for breakfast and a big spaghetti meal for dinner. It was working fine and with some supplements even met all my micronutrient needs. A few weeks ago I decided to change it, built a new plan with healthier alternatives and spent a whole day buying all the ingredients and cooking.
That was supposed to cover around a week’s worth of food, a first test run of my new diet. That test run is now two weeks long. After I ran out of the food I made, I just bought the most convenient things at the store.
All my time is now dedicated to working on the anatomy book and continuing to develop the app I wanted. What looked like it could fit into my calendar didn’t actually live up to reality.
What went wrong
It’s very easy to overestimate how much you can actually focus on at the same time.
There’s a study I read this week from Baba Shiv, a researcher at Stanford. He gave one group of students an easy number to memorize and another group a harder one, both well within anyone’s ability, then offered everyone a snack afterward, cake or fruit. The group holding the harder number in their head was almost twice as likely to take the cake. Nothing about the number made them hungrier. Their mind was just slightly more occupied, and that alone was enough to influence their decision.
That’s basically what happened to my diet – it lost to the two demanding projects I am working on.
One habit at a time
Every time you do something you don’t want to do, you tap into your willpower reserve. My mistake was assuming that this reserve is much bigger than it actually is.
I verified that those cooking sessions fit into my schedule alongside the work and thought that was it. But willpower is a different resource than time. It requires a different approach.
When something runs on autopilot, like a habit, it doesn’t require willpower to do. My old diet ran on autopilot. I was never in doubt of what I should eat. I was investing all my willpower into my projects, so when I tried to add a new demanding thing on top of that, it didn’t stick at all.
And I am still putting off the next cooking session.
