Time and Attention

Let me get this out of the way: I am not a fan of weight loss books. I like to align my life with science as much as possible, and when it comes to books about what we should eat, there’s just so much bull$#!† out there. It can feel impossible to wade through it all. 

Amidst the fray of bad advice, though, there is one author who writes about food that I trust: Dr. Michael Greger. Greger is the founder of Nutritionfacts.org, a nonprofit organization that pores through all of nutritional research published each year, in order to separate what works from what doesn’t. His previous book, How Not to Die (which I consider to be one of the greatest productivity books), covered what we should eat in order to minimize our odds of dying from the 10 leading causes of death. In his latest book, How Not to Diet, Dr. Greger turns his attention to the science of weight loss.

Here’s what separates Dr. Greger’s work from everything else:

In short, if you are interested in a book about weight loss, you should pick up How Not to Diet. It’s the only diet book you’ll ever need.

So how can you get rid of the excess fat that’s marbling your organs, muscles, and body? Here are just 10 of my favorite strategies—of the hundreds in the book—that have been shown to accelerate fat loss, which you can start doing right away.

1. Consume more fiber. Greger writes: “telling people to increase their intakes of fiber-rich foods may actually be one of the single most effective pieces of advice for weight loss.” A high-fiber diet leads your body to absorb fewer calories: increasing your daily consumption to the recommended daily minimum actually leads you to absorb 100 fewer calories a day, even when you eat the same amount. Another reliable study found that the eight types of gut bacteria that fight against weight gain all feed on fiber. A high-fiber diet also leads you to eat less in future meals, suppressing your appetite up to 10 hours after you eat it. Our bodies are designed to get 100+ grams of fiber a day, and only 3% of Americans consume the recommended daily minimum. Fiber is only found in plants (fiber supplements derived from these plants don’t work nearly as well).

2. Consume foods that contain the greatest amount of water. Curiously, we eat a fairly consistent weight of food on a daily basis (around 3 pounds), and how much food weighs depends most on how much water food contains. Water, of course, contains zero calories, and so the more water a piece of food contains, the fewer calories it has. Unfortunately, as Greger writes, “we appear to have an inborn drive to maximize calories per mouthful.” You burn fat by minimizing how many calories you consume per mouthful, because your body will stick to eating around 3 pounds of food a day. A couple of my favorite examples from the book of foods that contain a lot of water: “eating 240 calories of carrots could take you more than two and a half hours of constant chewing”, and “you’d have to eat a wheelbarrow full of cabbage before you’d ever need to begin worrying about overindulging.” Most unprocessed, whole plant foods—vegetables and fruits included—contain an unusually high amount of water, and fill us up more as a result. Cucumbers have so few calories you’d need to eat more than 150 cups of them a day to gain weight; kale has so few calories you’d need to eat 250 cups of the stuff. (Our stomach capacity is around 4 cups.) It’s worth noting that drinking water alongside meals doesn’t have the same effect as consuming food with the water trapped inside of it.

3. You can eat an unlimited amount, as long as you eat the right stuff. One study allowed participants to eat an unlimited amount of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans for just 21 days. In those 21 days, participants lost an average of 17 pounds (7.7 kilograms). The reason for this was simple: participants automatically ate foods higher in fiber and water, and we tend to eat the same weight of food each day. For these reasons, how much you eat doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you eat. You can eat as many whole-food, plant-based products as you want each day and still lose weight.

4. Steer clear of artificial, zero-calorie sweeteners, which actually trick your brain into eating more. Artificial sweeteners make certain foods taste sweet—and as a result, your body expects your blood sugar to spike after eating them. When your blood sugar doesn’t spike, your brain feels cheated, and consumes more calories later on in the day in order to compensate. Your body does this without your knowledge or permission. For this reason, artificially-sweetened products are in practice just as fattening as the same product with sugar added.

5. Give healthy foods time to taste good. The longer we eat healthfully—consuming food that’s grown, and not made—the better real food tastes. As Dr. Greger writes, “the food industry has so deadened our palates with hypersalty, hypersweet, hyperfatty foods. The ripest peach in the world may taste sour after a bowl of Froot Loops.” Give your palette a few weeks to adjust, and your waist line will thank you. Eating real food burns more fat, but doesn’t taste as good as ultraprocessed foods at first, while your palate adjusts.

6. Eating plant-based foods leads your body to burn more fat. Our body is built to burn unprocessed plant foods as fuel. According to one study, if you feed people the same number of calories, but “simply switch out meat and butterfat for olive oil, nuts, and avocados, you lose nearly six more pounds of fat in a single month.” Another study found that your “odds of obesity may increase by 18 percent for every 1 percent increase in calories from red meat, poultry, fish, or shellfish.” If you like meat in your diet, according to Greger you should consume wild game, which has less unhealthy animal fat.

7. There are foods that reliably suppress your appetite. Some examples from the book: vinegar (which also burns more fat—balsamic vinegar tastes great drizzled over a salad or with whole-wheat bread); ground flax seeds (throw some in your morning smoothie); cumin (especially black cumin powder); saffron (though it can be expensive); and water (especially when you consume a couple of cups before each meal).

8. There are foods that reliably lead you to burn more fat. Foods that lead us to burn calories are nutritious, yet contain very few (if any) calories. Some examples of fat-burning foods from the book: hot peppers (including red pepper powder and hot sauce); ginger (dried ginger works better than fresh, surprisingly—ginger tea is a great-tasting fat-burner);
cinnamon (I love throwing some in the coffee maker, right on top of the ground beans); peppermint; and tea (each cup of tea burns around 25 calories, and contains none, assuming you don’t add milk or sugar! Green tea works best, though black coffee still leads you to burn around 17 extra calories per cup.)

9. Consume most of your calories in the morning. According to research, “morning calories don’t appear to count as much as evening calories.” In my interview with Dr. Greger (linked at the bottom of the post), he mentioned this was one of the most surprising findings he stumbled upon in writing the book. Our bodies metabolize medications differently depending on what time of day we take them—and food is the same way. As one study bluntly put it, “If you want to lose weight, eat more in the morning than in the evening.” We burn 50% more calories digesting a morning meal than we do an evening one—as Greger puts it, “our bodies just aren’t expecting us to be eating when it’s dark outside.” We even burn fewer calories when we sleep during the daytime. Because our body’s rhythms matter so much, Dr. Greger also recommends not eating past 7 p.m. if you wish to optimize fat loss: this has been shown to lead you to lose about one extra pound a week, and the best part is that you don’t have to make any other changes to when and how much you eat the rest of the day.

10. Focus on diet, not exercise—exercise is an ineffective way to burn body fat. One large study, which summarized the findings of 18 other studies that took place over a minimum of six months, found that those who dieted and exercised did not lose more weight than those who just invested in diet alone. Research suggests that we need to exercise at least 300 minutes a week in order to lose a noticeable amount of fat. The reason exercise is so ineffective is interesting: the more we exercise, the less we instinctively move the rest of the day, too. We burn most of our calories moving around throughout the day, and actually move less on days we work out. There is a saving grace to this, though: we burn far more calories when we work out before breakfast, when we haven’t eaten for a little while—around 90% more calories. As one study put it, “If exercise were a pill to burn body fat, it would be effective only when taken before breakfast.”

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As How Not to Diet makes clear, the solution to fat loss is a simple one. The best, most reliable food research suggests that we should be eating real food that grows out of the ground. This means cutting out processed food, along with meat, eggs, and dairy, while maximizing how much fruit, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, and herbs and spices we eat each day. The more plants you eat, the more weight you’ll lose.

The post 10 proven strategies to burn more body fat appeared first on Chris Bailey.

Estimated Reading Time:3 minutes, 1s.

Podcast Length30 minutes, 45s (link to play podcast at bottom of post).

Atomic Habits, by James Clear, is one of the best books about habits I’ve read—I’d put it up there with The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, as being one of the best books on habits available.

This week, James was generous enough to join me on the podcast to dig into how to establish new habits and break negative ones—especially around losing weight, given we’re in the middle of that weight-loss challenge for the show.

There are too many nuggets in the book—and the interview!—to list out in one blog post. But here are just a few of my favorites from the book and the interview, which should get you thinking about your own habits:

There are too many nuggets from the book and the interview to cover here, but these are just a few of the ones I found especially powerful! Enjoy the conversation, and have a great week!

The post 6 Nuggets from Atomic Habits, by James Clear appeared first on Chris Bailey.

Estimated Reading Time:2 minutes, 53s.

Podcast Length23 minutes, 38s (link to play podcast at bottom of post).

For the past few months, I’ve been poring over quite a bit of research on the topic of relaxation. If there’s one thing that has become clear from this deep dive, it’s this: true relaxation is something that few of us achieve. I’d include myself in this group—up until recently, I’d been doing relaxation wrong.

When many of us have some time to relax, we distract ourselves—turning our attention to social media, YouTube, Netflix, and other things in the digital world. In the moment, these things feel like a reprieve from the stressors of daily life. But the truth is that tending to them in our downtime may hurt more than help.

There’s a reason for this: digital activities rarely lead us to relax.

So what should we do to relax? The key is to do things that actually make your mind less stimulated.

Each time we pay attention to something new and novel in our digital world, our brain rewards us with a hit of dopamine, a pleasure and reward chemical. We get a hit each time we refresh YouTube. We get another hit each time we check news websites like CNN and the New York Times. We get yet another hit when we refresh Instagram.

This dopamine release feels good in the moment. But it can also lead our mind to become overstimulated when we turn to our digital devices too often.

If you want to relax and recharge during your breaks, it’s essential that you try to settle your mind, by engaging with activities that don’t lead to a quick dopamine release. Digital distractions feel like a break, because they’re different from our work, but they don’t allow our mind to actually settle. Analog activities, on the other hand, do settle our mind. They stimulate us, without overstimulating us.

This is not to say that your favorite websites and apps shouldn’t have a place in your life. But because they lead you to become overstimulated—especially when you’re already tired—they’re not great activities to engage in if your intention is to relax.

The best relaxation activities are found in the analog world; you should almost always avoid the digital world if your intention is to recharge. Depending on how you’re feeling, and how much energy you have, there are great ways to relax both actively and passively. 

Active activities can include things like:

Passive tasks include things like:

Most of these are analog activities—and as such, they don’t just lead to a quick dopamine release, which can lead you to feel even more stimulated and tired and fatigued. Activities like these are less novel than your work and digital life, and so they settle your mind as a result.

A settled mind is a productive mind. The more relaxed your mind, the more recharged you feel, the greater mental clarity you have, and the more ideas and plans you generate. 

The next time you want to relax, be sure to spend time on analog activities that don’t just lead to a quick dopamine release. You won’t just feel better—you’ll actually get a chance to recharge.

The post The Key to Relaxation appeared first on Chris Bailey.

Estimated Reading Time:1 minute, 37s.

Podcast Length32 minutes, 31s (link to play podcast at bottom of post).

I read Neil Pasricha’s latest book, You Are Awesome, in two sittings. I’ll cut right to the chase: this book is one of the best (and most vulnerable and entertaining) books on resiliency out there. If you’re looking to become more resilient, you should pick this one up.

A thought became very clear once I began digging into the book: I absolutely had to interview Neil on the podcast. Luckily, he agreed. (You can listen to our conversation at the bottom of this post.)

There are so many nuggets of insight from our conversation that I think you’ll find enjoyable, but one of my favorite ideas that we chatted about, which you can implement immediately, is about some questions we can ask ourselves each morning to boost how resilient we are. Neil suggests beginning each day with three reflections:

Daily gratitude reminds us of how lucky we are. Choosing a focus lets us set a purposeful direction for the day. And choosing something to let go of allows us to remind ourselves that not all of our baggage is worth carrying.

In our conversation, we also chat about the stories we tell ourselves, and how we can question whether or not they’re true. When you find that the dialogue in your head has gotten heated, and you’re not sure whether you should believe it, it’s worth asking yourself three questions:

When it is just a story, if it won’t matter, and if you indeed can’t do anything about it, it’s not a story worth buying into.

If I’m honest, resiliency is not something I’d thought a lot about, until I picked up this book. I’m sure that, should you decide to dig into this interview (and the book!) you’ll find the exact same.

Enjoy!

The post A daily reflection that will make you more resilient appeared first on Chris Bailey.

Estimated Reading Time:2 minutes, 30s.

Podcast Length25 minutes, 27s (link to play podcast at bottom of post).

Between now and January 14th (the next 13 weeks), I plan on losing 20 pounds, going from 190lbs to 170 lbs. Of course, a 13-month weight loss challenge is anything but a long-term solution to eating better and living a healthier life. But I plan on experimenting with that idea, too.

Lately, I’ve been slacking in the healthy eating department. Between work travel, writing deadlines, and personal events—including getting married and going and on a honeymoon—my food habits have slipped, and I’ve become a tad heavier than I’d like. Nothing crazy, just some extra weight that it’s now time to kick. It’s time to bring more awareness back to eating, and develop some healthy eating habits that stick.

In this week’s episode of Becoming Better, my cohost/wife and I dig into this challenge (she’s planning on losing 10 pounds along with me). 

My question for you is, want to join us? At the end of the episode, we put a call out, asking if anyone listening to the episode—and now, reading this post—is game to participate in this same challenge with us, to lose a specific amount of weight by January 14th. If you want to join, just shoot us off an email with how much weight you plan on losing by January 14th. Set a calendar reminder to follow up on that message when the 14th comes around, to let us know how it went! We’ll expect your response

If you’re looking for some inspiration for what to do differently—beyond bringing some awareness to what you eat, and reconnecting with what constitutes a healthy diet, perhaps by reading my favorite food book How Not to Die—below are the three main strategies we’ll be using to keep ourselves motivated!

Accountability can help immensely in the formation of new habits. Here are a few ways we plan on becoming more accountable for the next 13 weeks: 

In addition to taking before and after pictures, we’ll be tracking our progress through daily weigh-ins on our smart scale, which allows us to see how our weight changes over time. I’ll also chat on a regular basis with my accountability partner (every week or two), so we can chat about how things are going, and whether we’re on track to meet our goals. In addition to recording weight, Ardyn and I (and my accountability partner David) will be recording everything we eat in MyFitnessPal, the popular food-tracking app, to curb overeating.

When you try to develop a new habit without first anticipating obstacles that might get in the way of the habit, you’re far more likely to fail. For this reason, I’m making it a weekly ritual to anticipate any obstacles to eating healthily every Sunday, when I also plan out my week. Obstacles are infinitely easier to deal with before they arise, rather than after.

—

If you have a few pounds to part ways with, I hope you’ll join us on the challenge!

The post Want to join me in losing some weight? appeared first on Chris Bailey.

Estimated Reading Time:

The post Can drinking alcohol make you more productive (or creative)? appeared first on Chris Bailey.

Estimated Reading Time:3 minutes, 47s.

Podcast Length28 minutes, 14s (link to play podcast at bottom of post).

There are a lot of people out there who call themselves experts—and as someone who writes books, gives speeches, and has a podcast about becoming more productive, I’d include myself in this category. 

Here’s the thing about expert advice, though: we live in a world where anyone can call themselves an expert, whether they deserve to be one or not. All anyone needs is an online platform—a blog, social media account, or LinkedIn profile—and boom! They can label themselves an expert, a “thought leader,” or, worst of all, a “guru”. So how do you separate the real experts from everyone else? Enter this week’s guest on my podcast, Cait Flanders (a link to play the episode is at the bottom of the post).

Nine years ago, Cait Flanders started a blog named Blonde on a Budget, to chronicle her journey to pay off $30,000 of debt, and write about her various experiments on personal finance. Her website took off, very quickly becoming one of the most popular personal finance blogs on the internet. 

One experiment that she conducted for the website—doing a yearlong shopping ban, where she saved half of her income, and didn’t buy anything she didn’t absolutely need—went viral, which led to her first book, The Year of Less, that, to date, has become one of the bestselling personal finance memoirs of all time.

Then, one night, Cait decided to pack it all in. She published a blog post that I still remember landing in my email inbox, named, Why I’m Retiring from Personal Blogging, and since that date, apart from sharing the occasional nature photo on Instagram, she has posted pretty much nothing online. She packed up her Twitter account, the Facebook page for her blog, her podcast, and everything else. It’s all gone.

In that post, she wrote about blogging: 

“It’s just not as fun anymore. I used to open up new browser tabs and visit people’s blogs like I was walking into their dorm rooms and sitting on their beds. Then we’d share life updates, what little bits of advice we had, and both walk away feeling like we’d had a great conversation with a friend. Now, it feels like every platform (blogs, social, etc.) is a place for people to shout and be heard. We have been told we need to build, grow, make money and have all the answers. We need to be experts. I don’t want to be an expert. I just want to be a human.”

This last line struck me, hard—especially as someone who makes his living being a productivity “expert”.

But something else also struck me: that Cait is right! There are so many experts out there, telling us what to do—how much money to save, how to work, and how to live our lives. If any odd person can just call themselves an expert, who should we trust and believe?

That’s when I realized I had to get Cait on the podcast to chat about this idea. At the end of our chat, we settled on a few criteria for figuring out whether an expert is worth listening to.

Great experts:

Naturally, there are more variables to consider than these—but the ones above are a terrific place to start.

Enjoy the conversation!

The post Which experts should you trust? appeared first on Chris Bailey.

Estimated Reading Time:2 minutes, 50s.

Podcast Length24 minutes, 35s (link to play podcast at bottom of post).

This week on Becoming Better, we dig into the science behind how you can extract as much energy—and productivity—out of caffeine as possible.

I write about caffeine quite a bit on ALOP, and for good reason: it can give us a great boost of productivity and focus, if we consume it deliberately and strategically.

As always, in case you don’t have the time (or inclination) to listen to this week’s episode, here are a few of our favorite strategies that we mention on the show!

Here’s hoping that these tips prove helpful the next time you decide to caffeinate!

1. Source for this: the book Me, Myself, and Us, by Brian Little. ↩

The post Some ways to get (even more) energy out of caffeine appeared first on Chris Bailey.

Estimated Reading Time:1 minute, 12s.

One year ago, my second book, Hyperfocus: How to Manage Your Attention in a World of Distraction, hit store shelves! I consider the book to be the best thing I’ve created to date. It’s about how to take advantage of the science behind how our attention works.

Today, a new version of the book hits store shelves, as a paperback published by Penguin Books! Same book, but with nice new packaging (including a little penguin on the front), at a slightly cheaper price.

I know your time is valuable, so I’ll cut right to the chase. If you haven’t checked out the book, it would mean a lot to me if you did. If you dig the posts on my site, I’m confident that you’ll enjoy the book, too.

Here are links to pick up the paperback in the US and Canada! 

Have a wonderful week!
Chris

P.S. This week’s episode of the podcast is all about how to read a nonfiction book. The episode is more interesting than it sounds, and you can play it below!

The post Hyperfocus comes out in paperback TODAY! 🎉 appeared first on Chris Bailey.

Estimated Reading Time:2 minutes, 2s.

Podcast Length16 minutes, 33s (link to play podcast at bottom of post).

Research shows that the more unstructured a task is, the more likely you are to procrastinate on it. One of the best ways to combat this? Get other people to hold you accountable for getting your most aversive tasks and projects done.

In this week’s episode of Becoming Better, Ardyn and I chat about our favorite strategies for doing this. It’s a bite-sized episode this week, but in case you don’t have the time or the inclination to listen, here are three simple accountability strategies we chatted about!

1. Get a deadline. You should be able to feel deadlines approaching. There are a lot of productivity tactics and hacks out there—but hardly anything will make you as focused or productive as a fast-approaching deadline. If you don’t have a deadline for an unstructured project, get one. If a project is so big that you can’t feel the deadline for it approaching, ask for deadlines for major milestones with the project. However you can, however you need to, get a deadline. Tell someone about your deadlines, for added accountability.

2. For instant accountability, fire up Focusmate. Or as an alternative, work alongside someone who’s as focused as you desire to be. I’ve written about Focusmate quite a bit lately, for good reason: it’s a way to instantly hold yourself accountable for working on something you’re stuck on. The website works by teaming you up—via live video—with someone who also wants to focus on work for a 50-minute block of time. It’s one of the best productivity websites out there, and it allows you to instantly enter into hyperfocus mode.

3. Find an accountability partner. At the start of each week, my wife emails me the three main things she wants to accomplish in her research that week. And then, at the end of the week, she follows up on that email to tell me how things went. It’s a simple ritual that takes her just a few minutes, and it’s all the motivation she needs to actually get those things done. Find an accountability partner who you can update on your work each week; send them your intentions and goals, and check in with them when the week is done to tell them how it went.

With so many of us doing knowledge work for a living, our work is highly unstructured. These three simple tactics let you hold yourself accountable, and as a result, make you significantly more likely to get your work done. 

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