Notes for a larger case study
The exact scenario I was in was like this: I wanted to lose weight to win a bet, but didn’t actually want to lose weight.
My friend Milan and I were trying to figure this out. He asked me what the Magic the Gathering Color Pie would say.
If I was on the blue-leaning half of the magic the gathering color pie, this wouldn’t be a problem. I would just make a bunch of metrics, track them, come up with optimizations, have fun…
But I am not on the blue-leaning half. I am in the red-green area, and so doing the blue stuff is not just counter-intuitive, it is competitive with and against my natural way of doing things and my values.
And so what to do? One of the inventions I believe in strongly when we use the MtG system for problem solving is to stay faithful to the idea that opposite colors really are in conflict with each other, and that no you cannot “just do both opposite colors” without some special alchemy.
We started modeling out my situation. I liked myself, didn’t want to change. I did want to win the bet, wanted to impress a specific girl by looking a specific way for her, and had a few strategic health and social reasons for losing weight.
Alright. The strategy there is black.
The not wanting to change and liking myself is green.
Those two are natural opposites in the color pie. In between them is red. And so any integration between these two conflicting colors would have to happen through red.
We got this far, which is already pretty advanced and a cool application of the color pie to a real problem we were working on.
Now, how do we design the thing?
Red likes experience. Is there a good experience I can create?
Black likes strategy around tradeoffs. Is there a way to make metrics for this that I can track, rather than (blue) metrics for fun and for the sake of it sometimes?
I came up with a metric I cared about. Not losing weight, but changing the ratios of muscle and fat. I was at 40% fat and 26% muscle. I thought wouldn’t it be kind of delightful to flip them. And then that experience is one I can wrap my mind around enjoying.
This allowed me to bypass a certain kind of enjoyment / complacency of Green. There was something that I could imagine enjoying — and enjoyment in transformation, rather than enjoyment in what is already there, is one way to get Green to move (other ways are threats :(. Remember the Ents in LoTR).
Once I had the right “red-black metrics” the rest became very easy to me. Probably that should be explained rather than handwaved.
I really like weight-lifting, really liked an excuse to lift a lot and to devote energy to it. I am still a n00b and so get the n00b gains.
I also started doing keto, which proved surprisingly sustainable and easy.
But basically, there were a lot of things I liked, that I was chill with doing, that I was able to align with the red-black metrics I had set up.
Having a spreadsheet where I tracked things was a black-red activity, not a blue activity or a white activity. And I enjoyed my spreadsheet a lot.
I enjoyed what I was eating, enjoyed my workouts. Nothing was feeling pushy.
This is where the green was looped back in — things I naturally enjoyed from before I kept doing or incorporated again if at some point I had stopped doing them (hadn’t lifted for a while).
I guess an important note is how much I wasn’t optimizing after this setup was created. I don’t do any cardio at all, though I might start to on my rest days. But my cardio would be playing Beat Saber, not running outside or on a treadmill.
I’m not trying to optimize my lifting either. I basically go to the gym and do whatever I want. I also go to the gym I want to go to. I ended up on a good split, but that’s because I realized going 5 times a week on an upper/lower/rest split means that I actually get two guaranteed rest days per body part, and that means I get to be extra spicy lazy. I have a spreadsheet where I record what I did, try to beat my “last high score” on any exercise for progressive overload, and make important notes about injury prevention (I am not allowed to bench press anymore, for a while).
Also, not calorie counting at all. Every so often I vaguely check my calories. On one day it was surprisingly high, when I got a lot of cream in my coffee at lunch. But most of the days I check my calories because it seems weirdly low. I picked keto as a thing because I didn’t want to track calories. I do track carbs in a day, loosely, because that number can’t be over 20. But since counting to 20 is so trivial I wouldn’t really call this “tracking” anything.
And so the main “optimizations” are “am I doing it.” And the things I am “doing” are being in keto, going to the gym, and doing progressive overload in the gym.
I am not trying to stay clean keto, either. I’ve had keto Wendy’s three times. I eat keto ice cream. I eat sugar-free root bear and coke zero. I am not trying to “optimize it.”
I do take vitamins sometimes and protein and finally got some collagen. But these are Green-based what feels good to my body based decisions.
And so you can see that this isn’t a Blue optimization strategy at all. I am not trying to figure out “the perfect way to lose weight.” I am trying to figure out the way I would lose weight with the least effort and resistance as possible, aka how to reach my goals while being maximally lazy.
If you like not optimizing things, you might like to check out
https://suboptimalism.neocities.org/