Heuristic Weight Loss
I often consult on software process improvement. As part of that, I promote an idea called “heuristic process improvement”. Heuristic process improvement is different than the typical process improvement approach in that it centers on developing the skills of the people on the project, while developing heuristics (NOT rote procedures) to help them do that.
If you are taking a heuristic approach to process improvement, then you will not be treating people like little stupid robots, and you will not be suffering the dusty binder syndrome. If you have dusty binders full of procedures nobody references, just throw them away. Problem solved.
Trying to Lose Weight
Matthew Heusser recently blogged on his weight loss process, so I figured I’d share mine, too.
Back on August 6th, my father challenged me to lose 10 pounds. It was to be a competition. Dad suggested one strategy: go to bed hungry. He swears by it, apparently. That means no food after about 5pm.
I followed his advice, which turned out to be pretty easy. The trick is to be hungry, but not ravenous at bedtime. I also decided to walk a mile every day, which required me to use hotel fitness centers. I’ve always been reluctant to do that, but in the urgency of competition I overcame that initial reluctance.
The third thing I did was very important: I start tracking my LOW weights. In other words, if I weighed myself and I saw a new low score, then I recorded it. Otherwise, I ignored it.
At first that was all I did. I wanted to see if it would work. After three weeks, I started to see it work. After eight weeks, I was sure that it was working. Not only that, but if you look at the graph, the steady 1.5 pounds per week loss clearly began on the very day that I started! It had been working all along.
I have no particular self-discipline. So, what made me stick with the program? I think it’s a matter of developing my skill and perceptions. I never before directly perceived the connection between specific things I did (or didn’t do) and my weight. This process has made me pay attention to that connection. Weight loss is now a game, with rules I understand. It’s a game I think I can win, instead of an endless and meaningless slog.
This same kind of transformation has to occur in a software project for things to get better. People need to feel that learning itself is a game they can win, or else they turn away from it.
If you Know What You are Doing, You Don’t Need Discipline
Discipline, like faith, is something that doesn’t work for me. I just don’t live that way. Maybe I was was born without a certain gene that most other people have. To me discipline is motivation without reason, just as faith is belief without reason. You do something a certain way because… well, because you’re disciplined, not because it makes sense to do it that way. Discipline is great for computers and robots, or for people who are emulating computers and robots, but I prefer being in charge of my own life. Instead, I operate according to an unfolding emotional and rational narrative that some people call “free will” (I don’t believe my will is actually free, but it feels free, so I’ll go with that phrase for now). Self-discipline is outside of free will, so I have to reject it.
I don’t need discipline to walk to a door, open it, and walk through the door. I just need motor skills and the desire to leave a room. If it’s difficult to leave a room, I won’t leave it until my desire to leave builds high enough.
Similarly, I don’t need discipline to lose weight. I just need to understand the causes and effects and make use of them. My problem had been that weight loss and gain were mysterious to me, at first. Much of that mystery is now resolved.
I haven’t had a pizza since mid-August. I love pizza. This also is not self-discipline. I simply have become very aware of what cheese does to me. I avoid cheese the same way I avoid hitting a deer in the road, when one jumps out in front of me. Not through discipline, but through desire not to hit the deer.
Process Improvement
About 10 days after I started walking every day, I began to feel distinctly better when I walked. I almost began craving a walk each day. I began to walk longer distances. After three weeks, I noticed that after a long walk my hips didn’t ache so much, and my legs recovered much more quickly. One day in Lund, Sweden, two of my students found out I was exercising and offered to walk with me. One of them pushed me to walk six miles that day, something I had not done since high school. Another told me to read Body For Life, because it had been so helpful for him.
When I read Body For Life, I felt repelled by the author’s “you have to do it this way” style. He is one of those discipline freaks. Instead of following his instructions, as such, I combed through the book to find a handful of ideas I would try on my own terms. As I tried them and found that they seemed to work for me, I went back to find more.
This is an important part of heuristic process improvement: you don’t follow someone else’s ideas. What you do is make some else’s ideas your own, and then follow your own ideas. To do this you need to experiment until the ideas make deep sense to you. This is less efficient than blind obedience, but also more satisfying and authentic. In the long run, for complex cognitive tasks, I find that it’s a lot more effective to be self-directed in that way.
Even though I don’t do exactly what the Body For Life guy says, I have gotten lots out of reading his book, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I eventually pursued a program that is indistinguishable from the one he recommends.
I am 5′11′. I was 261 pounds on August 6th. Since then I lost 27 pounds. I feel much better. I look better. I think I look good enough for a man not hunting for a mate, but since I’m already on a roll I want to see if I can get down to 200.
December 15th, 2007 at 2:48 am
James,
I really enjoyed this post. It made me think upon a great many things. I wanted to share some of those observations with you.
I wish to point out that you appear to have a great capacity for faith and discipline. Everything I read in this post pointed to a very strong faith. Your ‘faith’ is in your emerging understanding of a system. Your ‘discipline’ is in how systematically you re-evaluate your faith in the face of miracles and heretics.
[James' Reply: Definitions vary, I suppose. I don't see how doing something consistently necessarily implies self-discipline. The least disciplined person in the world will systematically and predictable eat food when he's hungry.]Â
I’m not completely sold on “if you know what you’re doing, you don’t need discipline.� There may be a time when the weight-loss trend bottoms out and challenges your understanding of the rules in this game. What then? Either you re-evaluate the rules or give up altogether; giving up won’t make the weight go away, however. I personally hope you are able to continue your discipline. Speaking of…
[James' Reply: I think you are defining discipline in a different way. In my terms, discipline is motivation that persists in the absence of a reason and purpose. In other words, sticking to a plan for the sake of the plan, rather than for the sake of serving the goal of the plan.]
Discipline is a decidedly human endeavor and doesn’t belong in the domain of machines. A computer cannot take any course of action of its own volition as it is incapable of doing so. A computer doesn’t experience frustration when inexplicable “forces� thwart its efforts. Solving all the billions of calculations that bring this message to your eyes is not “hard� for the machine.
[James' Reply: Discipline seems to me like a subversion of volition. It has to mean pursuing something even when you don't want it right now. I'm more of an instant gratification kind of guy. I do my best to live without discipline, but rather in spontaneous harmony with my nature.]
Finally, some people’s faith may appear to exist in a kind of reason-vacuum. But that assertion may be based more on outside observations. The internal dynamics of faith compel the believer to reason and rectify the internal with the external with the super-external. If that is not readily observable to those on the periphery, it is a limit of personal expression not necessarily a limit of rationale.
[James' Reply: I'm not sure what you mean. Is faith something that you come to through evidence and reason, or not? If so, what is the difference between having faith and science? If not, then it is antithetical to my reason.]Â
You warned me in Atlanta of the danger of bringing faith into the testing effort. I find more and more testers who bring in an internal belief-system that dictates to them that there must be bugs in the external system. That is a faith of sorts. The foolishness is if we stay there and do not exercise our discipline to re-evaluate in the face of miracles and heretics.
[James' Reply: It is necessary to behave as if that the thing you search for can exist, if you are going to do a good job of searching for it. That is not the same thing as believing in a specific bug for which you have no evidence.]Â
Thanks again for making me think!
Zach Fisher…
December 15th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Great post - congrat’s on the successful weight loss experiment!
I LOVE the concept of heuristic process improvement. I’m going to definitely adopt that phrase. The focus on people’s skills, talents and preferences is really key, and the idea of providing guidance and principles instead of directions and rules is fantastic.
As someone once said, rules are for fools with no principles…
December 15th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
Hello James,
Your post is encouraging to me on quite a few levels. There are a number of aspects of my life that I am striving to “fix”. In each area, a lot of the issue is a perception of loss of control. My weight (translate: health) is “out of control”, so is my career, and I am dealing with some other aspects of life where I assumed that my lack of discipline was a large part of the problem.
Years ago, when dealing with my weight issues, I discovered The Hacker’s Diet. I was amazed by this engineering approach to weight management. And it worked - for a time. (Thinking back, it worked as long as I did it). Your common-sense, practical approach inspired by your father’s advice reminded me a lot of this method. Here’s the site:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html
The Hacker’s Diet is a fascinating read, and the author, John Walker, is a brilliant and creative engineer. I think that you’d find it interesting, but from what I have read in your post, you have described a parallel truth about really understanding a problem, vs. struggling with a disciplined approach. I do think that you may find some bits and pieces of The Hacker’s Diet, and the software tools that John created, interesting…
Your post inspired me to revisit this, in the context of addressing my weight/health issues. To go back and truly think about what it is I am trying to achieve and what is really needed. (And by the way, I also love pizza).
A bit of soul-searching, and my career struggles are similar. I have been assuming that I need to be much more disciplined - particularly about time management. But thinking about the joke about time management, time cannot be managed. It always passes at the rate of one second per second. I am not trying to manage time - I am trying to manage testing. And so it certainly does make sense that learning about testing, and embracing a deeper understanding of what testing really is, will do much more to help my career than striving for discipline that makes no sense anyway.
A concept “making sense” is so closely related to seeking “truth”. And this is not a matter of faith or discipline. It is a matter of intellectual inquiry and understanding. It is frequently a matter of shared learning.
I recently started taking a Java course that is being offered by my employer. One of our instructors has worked with Java for many years, and she mentioned her work with UAVs as an example of an object-oriented approach to design. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are flying robots, but they do not follow a pre-prorammed list of instructions so much as the directions provided by a set of programmed objects that communicate with sensors, actuators, and with each other. If a UAV is on a collision course with another one, it “knows” how to react. If it runs low on fuel, it “knows” to fly to certain locations. It “thinks” more based on a primitive kind of “understanding” than on a rote set of instructions.
Great post James! Let’s see if I can achieve sufficient understanding to improve my weight/health - I know from experience that I cannot achieve this through discipline, but I believe I can confirm a pattern that each time I actually have managed to act based on understanding, the results were positive.
It feels good to exercise free will. It typically feels bad to exercise discipline. I think that we are programmed to go after fun and learning, and to turn our backs on tedium. Seek perfection and shun boredom. Seek others who strengthen you in this…
-john
December 15th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Thanks for the comments, James, but I think you made a typo when you were writing about Heusser-istic process improvement …
[James' Reply: Don't you mean "hoser-istic"?
]
December 17th, 2007 at 3:25 am
Hi Jim
I have lately read and listened a lot written by Tony Robbins, the guru of coaches. One of his main ideas is that we are all controlled by pain or pleasure. We strive to avoid pain or to achieve pleasure. Intellectually we know that most of us should lose weight and exercise more. The reason that we don´t is that we connect to much pain to change the current situation and not enough pain about the future. Our bodies get instant gratification from relaxing and eating pizza. So a lot of this is a chemical reaction in our brain and body. The trick to achieve something is to connect a lot of pleasure to achieving it and a lot of pain with NOT achieving it.
In my own case I sat down and wrote all the negative stuff about not taking care of my body. Examples are: hurting back, ill-fitting clothes (to cheap to buy new), lack of energy, intellectual fatigue. Future problems might be that I die ten years earlier than I should, not beeing able to enjoy my grandchildren, in principle THE WORST I can think of.
Then I wrote down the possible pleasures: the joy of beeing able to play with my children AND work hard, and running 21 kilometers in a go, and read lots of books and to get a long healthy life without medical treatment, better sexlife etc.
By writing all this down and reading it over several times I saw no choice but to change my physical health starting right now. This was two months ago and I now exercise several times every week, drink less alcohol, eat better food and already feel that I have more energy.
Two other clues to lasting change is persistence and celebrating all achievements. Losing ten pounds in a week is not a lasting change. Constant and never ending improvment (CANI) is the clue to a successful life in any area - your development of Exploratory Testing and Rapid Testing is abrilliant example of that principle. Measuring your weightloss in a diagram is important information for your conviction that you are doin the right thing.
Keep filling in your diagram and celebrate your success. The chances are that you will not stop at 200 - why should you?
[James' Reply: By meditating on your situation, it sounds like you are working on the awareness side of the equation to gird your motivation. You still need to know how to lose weight. If you knew how to lose weight easily, then maybe it would take less motivation.
Anyway, working on motivation makes sense. I suppose for me, my father's challenge provided the little nudge I needed to get going.
I don't really know what weight I will stop at. I'm basically living this lifestyle and my weight will do what it will do, except that as I've felt successful I've also felt like adding more elements, which is why I've experimented with writing while walking on my treadmill, and why I have a weight set next to my bed.
I also wrote down some strength goals, just for fun. I've already met two of them, so now I'm thinking of some more challenging ones]
December 17th, 2007 at 9:34 am
That was the trick for me — treat it like a game. I went further on the metrics by tracking calories as well as weight. I’ve got from 225 to 168 since May 31st. Every time I’d think about eating, but then realized that I’d “lose” because I wouldn’t lose the amount of weight I needed to. The pleasure of “winning” by seeing that number go down was much greater than the pleasure of actually eating the calories. The side effect is that now I can fairly accurately guess the calorie content of anything I see.
As for the understanding, I think I always had that. I knew that eating 2300-2500 calories a day wasn’t good. Putting it into the context of a game, however, really made it work for me. I think most of us like competition, but for some losing is a worse feeling that the positive feeling of actually competing. This particular challenge is one that is pretty easily winnable.
December 18th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
James,
It is great to hear you are taking some measures to address your weight. I had a slight weight problem too, just want to share a couple of points
if you may indulge me. 1) make a one year plan, do it gradually not some three months blitz. 2) focus less on losing weight, more on healthy life style.
3) combine your exercise with eating healthy, eat a balanced meal. I happen to read “Body for Life” too and it really worked for me. I don’t buy any
of the dieting plans now days (southbeach, lowcarb, what have you), just stick with eating sensible food.
Good luck! You will be so much happier, and your mental clarity will improve as well, which is kind of frightening.
yan
January 18th, 2008 at 1:13 am
Despite what you may have heard, losing weight isn’t a incomprehensible process. In fact, weight loss doesn’t even have to include odd diets, uncommon exercises or even the use of medication or fitness equipment. So what is the secret to losing weight effectively? Simply make minor changes each and every single day and you’ll slowly but surely lose extra unwanted weight, pound by pound.
Secrets to Weight Loss
To lose a sinlge pound, you must burn approximately 3500 calories above what you already burn while conducting daily activities. That sounds impossible doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. Here’s how simple it is.
1. Calculate your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate). Your BMR is what your body needs to maintain normal functions like breathing and digestion.
2. Calculate your activity level. Use a calorie calculator to figure out how many calories you burn while doing various things like sitting, standing, exercising, etc. throughout the day.
3. Closely monitor of how many calories you eat. Use a food journal to add up what you eat and drink each and every single day. If you’re eating less calories than you’re burning, you will lose weight.
Focusing your attention on daily changes is the best way to reach your weight loss goals. Don’t expect to lose weight overnight. Instead expect to lose weight gradually over time. To lose weight gradually over time, is to lose weight the healthy way. When attempting to lose weight it’s important that you always remember, your Health is more important than your Appearance!
[James' Reply: Figuratively speaking, I'm not a bean counter. Nor do I wish to be a literal bean counter. Of course losing weight would be as simple as not eating and exercising a lot more, except that we have feelings and our feelings matter. I am losing weight, slowly (32 pounds and counting), but I have no idea what my basal metabolic rate is or how many calories I'm taking in.
Over new years, my weight stabilized. I think that's because I backed off my exercise. So, I've gone back to walking every day and weight training every other day.]Â
March 1st, 2008 at 10:19 am
This is a quick and effective NLP technique for keeping confident and focused.
Take a minute to imagine yourself riding in a roller coaster. See yourself sitting in
the front car, riding up and down.
Now, make another picture of a roller coaster, but this time, do NOT see
yourself in the picture. See it as if you were actually looking out of your own
eyes, sitting in the roller coaster. Ride for a few moments.
Now, which one of those felt more real in your body? I’ll bet anything it was
the second kind. An image or goal only appears real to your mind if it comes in
the second form, as if you were seeing it through your own eyes.
Step One:
Recall a time in your past when you felt confident and powerful. A time where
you fully felt the way you’d like to feel. This can be anywhere and
about anything - a great golf shot you made, or an “A” book report you did in
school. Running a race, scoring a goal….
Step Two:
Close your eyes, and see yourself in the first kind of picture, going through
that experience again.
Step Three:
Now, step into the picture, and see the events as if you were actually looking
out from your own eyes. See what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel how good
it felt in your body. When those feelings of confidence and power reach their
peak in your body, reach over with your right hand, and give your left wrist a
squeeze. Run through this twice more, giving the same squeeze in the same place.
This will train your mind to recall those feelings of power and confidence
whenever you squeeze your wrist the way you are doing now.
Step Four:
Think of a situation or circumstance where you would like to be more powerful
with women or more poised or whatever it is you’d like.
Step Five:
Picture it the second way, as if it were going on and you were seeing it through
your own eyes.
Step Six:
As you do so, reach over with your right hand and squeeze your left wrist,
triggering your confidence anchor. This will train your mind to automatically
call up the feelings of confidence and power when you are in a situation like
the one you are seeing through your own eyes. You won’t even have to think about
doing it, which is the advantage. (And that’s why anchoring works where
“positive thinking” won’t, because often by the time you get yourself thinking
positively, it’s already too late.)
http://www.leadingminds.biz
June 8th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Usually, when I see anyone remotely technical start to talk about losing weight and “becoming healthy” (read: losing weight), I roll my eyes and skip the post. Your post is pretty much the same until you get to talking sensibly about discipline. I particularly liked your response to William Hill above. There are so many things which would be simple if we didn’t have feelings that mattered, and weight loss is one of those.
I only have one real recommendation as far as weight loss goes, and it’s an echo of Yan Zhu above: trying to focus on maintaining a healthy lifestyle instead of losing weight might better serve you in the long run. Keeping weight off that seems to want to be on is hard, thankless work, and is often not successful unless you keep hard at it and frame it in a way that encourages you to keep hard at it despite how unfun it is. Keeping your body exercised and eating healthy things that you like is much more fun, and more sustainable whether or not you have pizza again, AND it leaves more time to do other things with your time and energy.