Find out where you are. Take a small step towards your goal. Adjust your understanding based on what you learned. Repeat.
Dave Thomas Agile is Dead, Long Live Agility 2015
Short background
When I was 8, I attended a pool party in my backyard. I had just stepped outside when a small girl looked up at me, ran to her mother, and whispered loudly, “mommy, why doesn’t he have to wear a bra?”
In March 2018, I realized I had gained 60 pounds in 4 years. Given the trajectory, I was about to have serious health concerns. I had tried diets and calorie counting apps, even through childhood, and nothing stuck for more than 7 months. I needed something different. I was too disagreeable to hand myself over to a program for an extended period. Really, I needed the wisdom that software engineering provides.
I have successfully lost 60 pounds over a period of 3 years. Then I joined AWS and had a baby. Now I’ve lost 20 of the 40 I’d gained back.
Principles
When I realized I needed something different, I started to rethink how we do weight loss in America. Most of the marketing centers around adrenaline-induced motivation: do more, keep pushing, just do it. What if these didn’t work for me because they don’t work?
Instead, I started with a basic premise: approach weight loss as a scientist, not an athlete. Then, run safe experiments on your own body; don’t rely on what works for someone else.
Here are the basic principles I’ve come to align with. By following these, I see sustainable outcomes which have guided me through the past 5 years.
0. Do the least amount of work to achieve your goal.
The muscles one uses for passing a test are unsustainable long term. Until 2018, I made the mistake of “trying too hard.” I threw myself into weight loss and burned out quickly.
If you want to succeed, do simple things that use little willpower. I’ve found that weighing myself once a day and asking, “how did I get here?” then altering one behavior for a day is the least amount of work I can do to achieve a consistent result.
This turns weight loss into a flywheel. Smaller consistent changes lead to big results.
1. Expect to lose weight at the rate you gain it.
Don’t sprint. Don’t overwork yourself. This is an epic.
I’ve heard a (probably false) statistic that Americans gain one pound a year. If you lose one pound a year, you’re twice as far ahead as most people in America.
If you set reasonable expectations of yourself (3 pounds a month was right for me when I started), you tend to make more sustainable choices. It’s more about asking the question, “what does it look like to live comfortably as someone who’s 10 pounds lighter than I am?” than “how do I lose weight?”
2. Measure somehow, consistently. Make your tools your friends.
If measuring weight directly sounds like punishment, don’t do it. But find a consistent measurement that fluctuates within a fine-grained time window and correlates to the outcome desired.
When you find a measurement, treat it as a friend who tells you the truth, not a competitor. This will encourage engagement with measurement regardless of how the past cycle went.
Don’t use calorie counting. This measures the input vs the output. What you’re trying to measure is how your body responds over time, not your behavior around food.
3. Run experiments at fine-grained increments.
Shorter than a day if you can. For me, a day is just right. The more data collected, the more you find out how actions impact your outcomes.
This is just utilizing short cycle times.
4. Choose when to gain weight.
When I attend a holiday meal, I gain weight. Don’t fight battles unless you’re going to win. When you are presented with options, choose consciously whether or not to gain weight. It’s not a “cheat day.” It’s a day where you’ve chosen your outcomes.
5. Celebrate small things
If you move in a positive direction, say, “yay!” out loud. It helps 🙂
Hopefully you do this in business too. Celebration is advantageous for so many things.
6. Change your environment more than you change your behavior
Over-utilizing willpower leads to burn out.
Instead of “trying not to grab the ice cream from the freezer,” engage with something else that will fill the craving and stop buying ice cream. Maybe it’s finding a group of friends to play a table top role-playing game with.
If you tend to eat at places with heavy foods during work, find a restaurant with good food that serves smaller portion sizes. If you tend to go with coworkers, maybe order a hot chocolate instead of a hamburger and then eat at your desk (that’s an example from my life).
7. Set reasonable targets in public
It’s much easier to lose weight if you’re public about where you’re at and what you’re aiming for. Find a friend group which is happy to have updates on a cadence (maybe join a health challenge) and be open about where you’re at.
This is the equivalent of “working in public.” However, I don’t know where I learned that software principle from and can’t find examples. The basic idea is to surface progress early and often, which creates alignment between engineers and stakeholders.
8. Find a reason
For me, there were several. As I’ve mentioned, there were health implications. There were also several other reasons. Feel free to draw from these and find your own. Your feet take their own steps when you are aligned well.
Here are mine:
Health concerns
Mental health (depression mostly)
An idealized self image
Wanting to interact with future children fully
My experiments as examples
What happens if I use 2% instead of whole milk? I lost 1 pound that day.
What happens if I order a salad at this restaurant instead of a burger? I gained 1 pound instead of 3.
What happens if I go for a run today? Nothing changed.
What happens if I have some whiskey? Nothing changed.
What happens if I shift my food intake earlier? I lost weight. This is one of the most impactful changes I made.
What happens if I cut out caffeine? I gained 2 pounds over two weeks, then I started to lose weight again.
By running these experiments, we start to see what sorts of actions lead to what consequences. Running experiments more than once is also valuable to help isolate and correlate behaviors and outcomes. Once an action is found correlative with a desired outcome, we can utilize those experiments in my everyday life to achieve our goals.
Summary and how to get started.
Handing your body to someone else to take care of doesn’t work. We all need to find what works for us. This post really just outlines what we’ve learned in software: run short experiments and gather data.
Get started:
Choose a measurement tool and cadence for measurement today. Using a scale is effective.
Run an experiment.
Measure and record the results.
Go to step 2.
FAQ
I’ve talked about this to a couple of people and there are some common questions I get:
“What if I was female assigned at birth?”
If your measurement tool is there to give you information, not to punish you, there’s no reason to measure less frequently. Including data about your cycle is valuable information. We’re looking for long term progress and fine-grained data collection.
“What if I need to make a change now?”
If your weight has crossed over into having immediate health implications, don’t try to move slowly. Move at an unsustainable pace to get to where you need to be, then come back here.
Please follow advice from medical doctors over anything stated here.
