How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT

I'm eagerly waiting the new Cosmopolitan cover with the line "TDT: THE HOTTEST NEW WAY TO WASHBOARD ABS".

I have the opposite history: I was able to stop stressing out about my weight when I realized that, no, I really don't prefer the idea of a thin life devoid of cheesecake and fried things to the life I currently have where I eat whatever I want and am yea big. (This calculation may change if I become more than yea big with age.) Making this tradeoff explicit in my head actually helped me uncover a couple of weird self-denial habits that did not make any sense according to any metric (specifically, I was not having all the legumes and fruit I wanted, out of some confused subconscious notion that they were displacing vegetables... but meanwhile I had already abandoned the difficult project of limiting my chocolate intake.)

But would I rather enjoy today the full effect of never having had the knots, in exchange for not having any? Once I asked the question that way the answer came back a resounding yes. I didn’t know how much it would matter, but the calculation wasn’t remotely close. I walked right past the pizza place and never stopped in there for a snack again.

I think the interesting bit here is not the comparison you made (it's described quite explicitly in more than one self-help work I know of), but that you transposed it to the past.

That is, you appear to have effectively said, "If I'd not taken action X all this time, I'd have result Y; would it have been worth it?"

I would expect this to increase the usefulness of the technique for people who view the past in an especially concrete way, and/or have difficulty thinking of the future in concrete terms.

In any case, the improved effectiveness you experienced is almost certainly due to this one bit (improved concrete construal counteracting the discounting effect of an abstract future) rather than to anything to do with TDT.

I think I shall try it myself on some things, and see what happens.

It sounds like you just needed something to convince yourself with. TDT isn't special in this regard. With some inventiveness you could also have used quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, extrapolated volition, or any number of other LW topics :-)

An interesting post. I immediately thought of asking "What habits would I adopt if the long-term effects were in full force immediately?"

I think I have some thinking to do.

Edit: typo.

If I never stopped for the knots I would weigh less and feel better, but I wouldn’t have any knots. Even worse, I wouldn’t have any garlic.

You can buy a bulb of garlic in a grocery store for about 50 cents, and add it to meat and vegetable dishes. It doesn't have to come attached to garlic bread, and it's not the garlic that is loaded with calories.

Utilizing TDT gave me several key abilities that I previously lacked. The most important was realizing that what I chose now would be the same choice I would make at other times under the same circumstances.

This is similar to the mind hack I am working on to bypass my own hyperbolic discounting.

I assume that I will always make the same choice in similar circumstances. I find that this is a very good approximation of my actual behavior.

I determine the potential consequences of the alternatives in relation to my goals. Sometimes it helps me if I specify the consequences in a way that captures an opportunity cost. For example instead of cost in dollars, I'll consider the cost in terms of new tires for my truck.

I decide what to do -- treating the consequences as though they will occur immediately. In practice I only focus on the top one or two consequences for each alternative -- based on my current value weighting.

For example, every morning at work I am tempted by the pile of donuts in my office's cafeteria.

If I ate a donut every day, in a year I could gain an extra 13 pounds (50 work weeks 5 days per week 180 calories per donut / 3500 calories per pound).

These donuts would cost me about $190 (50 work weeks 5 days per week 0.75 dollars per donut).

I could consider more consequences, but these are enough. I don't want to pay $190 and gain 13 lbs of weight today -- just for the enjoyment of the donuts. In fact I would probably pay $190 just to lose 13 lbs right now; forget the donuts.

When I started to implement this approach I discovered that I could engage in automatic behavior that was counter to my choice. For example I would choose to not buy the donut only to get up and walk to the cafeteria. I would reaffirm the choice and yet still select a donut and pay for it. This behavior had almost an alien hand sense to it.

To break those automatic behaviors I found that I could simply stop and refuse to do anything that wasn't in keeping with my intellectual choice; I would even close my eyes. Every time I had an "urge" and would start to do or to think something, I would stop and check it against my current goal; if it didn't match I would I would refuse to continue. With repetition this replaced the negative automatic behavior with positive behavior.

I am...very impressed. Currently searching for areas in MY life where I can apply this.

A simpler argument would be noticing that what you're actually doing is not just taking too many calories today, but following a strategy of taking too many calories every day. You don't need TDT to see that, it's a matter of recognizing a precommitment, and making decisions about alternative precommitments (strategies).

The resounding impact of this post was to make me crave garlic knots. Not sure I can get any here though... all the pizza places in Berkeley are either chains or places with limited menus selling nothing but California style pizza (and the best ones are closed on Mondays!).

On the matter of exercise, there are two kinds, represented by walking and weightlifting. I.e., there is the low-intensity long-duration kind (such as walking, bicycling, dancing, aerobics), and there is the high-intensity short-duration kind (such as weightlifting, nautilus, squats and pushups). The book Body by Science describes the latter sort of program, and attempts to find the minimal effective program.

From the point of view of the person considering whether to add exercise to his program, one of the major advantages of the Body by Science program is the trivial time investment (12 minutes a week on the minimal but still highly effective version). Of course, if there is no benefit from it then even the trivial time investment is not worth it. But if you are not sure whether there is a benefit from it, the minuscule time investment should, I think, recommend giving it a much longer trial period than, say, walking.

Suppose you are trying to lose weight and you test walking to see if it helps. After walking an hour a day for a month, you discern no benefit, and so you stop. Okay, that's 30 hours you were willing to invest into a test of an exercise program. Are you willing to invest 30 hours into a test of a strength-training exercise program? If you are, then at 12 minutes a week, that comes to 150 weeks, or about three years. So, if you were willing to invest the same amount of time into a test of a minimal strength training program, you would be willing to give it a try for three years.

Wow. Super relevant to my situation, at a BMI which is close to 40, and has climbed from 25 over the years. I make changes that feel sustainable and then they disappear.

I have questioned whether I would be happier as a skinny person not eating frozen pizzas for dinner than as a fat person eating frozen pizzas and ice cream. I really like eating frozen pizzas and ice cream. I have at best a theoretical liking of being more attractive and having more of an opportunity to have sex with non-fat girls, and to ski a whole day, and to not face the embarrassment of looking like shit all the time. I can recall having a BMI of 35 and being quite happy, and even of having a BMI of 30, but I do not know if my metabolism would support my still being happy at those BMI values or whether my aging metabolism has put them out of reach.

The portions controls resonates. Clearly, the first quarter of the frozen pizza has about equal utility to me as does the following three-quarters and the full feeling that follows it. At something like 3 times the cost, but is it 3 times the cost? It has seemed to me that until I slake the hunger I will keep looking for things to eat, that I might as well eat the pizza OR learn to live with the hunger, which has obvious disutility.

I have thought in the past that I would one-box because I think Omega is a charlatan but I'd rather have the million dollars than to even begin to do the work required to demonstrate to the (stupid) world who believes in omega that he is a tricking them with tricks no better than what you can see on stage at the Magic Castle every night. THat the people who were credulously buying in to Omega as "real" were exactly the same group who believed in God because of a promise of heaven or even just of superiority over all the other humans for being chosen. I.e. that outrageous unrealistic claims about something supernatural could be accepted if it raised your status to accept them.

But what if I need TDT to lose weight? What if I need to believe in a higher power than myself to lose weight (to shift the formulation to Alcoholics Anonymous/religious one)?

What if I am fat because I am an atheist and an anomeganist? Could it be true?

I know there are fat religious people and skinny atheists out there. Is there a systematic BMI difference between one-boxers who believe in Omega and one-boxers who fight the hypothetical?

After listening to Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat, I'm curious to know three things about your weight-loss diet:

1. Did you eat more or fewer grams of carbohydrates per day?

2. Did you eat more or fewer grams of fat per day?

3. Did you eat more or fewer grams of protein per day?

This is really impressive, and a great example of how rationalists really do will. From what I gather, even the great Eliezer himself have not been able to take this idea so seriously! Truly an example for us all.

In Breakdown of Will George Ainslie describes a mechanism through which this sort of behavior can be obtained within the framework of hyperbolic discounting. He says

The will is a recursive process that bets the expected value of your future self-control against each of your successive temptations.

In this view, thinking now in terms of TDT (or whatever) gives you enough evidence for future self-control such that abstaining from garlic knots is the correct decision even for a hyperbolic discounter.

"The most important was realizing that what I chose now would be the same choice I would make at other times under the same circumstances."

Wow, this is a really powerful statement that has immediately begun helping me with my procrastination issues. 

This reminds me of the character based self improvement programs of guys like Benjamin Franklin. The first step is deciding who you want to be. Then take them one at a time, and practice them. You become who you want to be by acting like it until it becomes a habit.

Covey is similar, though he stresses being clear on the choice of who you want to be more than developing into who you want to be through habit. Without that clear vision of who you want to be readily available, it's hard to overcome the easy feel goods of the moment.

My bias is toward Franklin's stress on cultivating habit. Self control is a finite resource. Having to dredge up that vision of the long term goal and suppress the short term reward by an act of will is a losing battle. Better to make the behavior automatic.

I say this as I slurp down egg nog.

The rule of thumb that helped me lose 120 pounds is this: long term (due to being not fat) happiness is greater than than short term, ephemeral (due to eating lots of pizza) happiness.

Great post. You can think of lots of on-going choices like this; whether to be nice to colleagues, for example, or making an effort to drive efficiently in a similar way. Accruals based accounting also gives you similar results, if you can manage the trick of actually assigning some amount of extra weight, unhappiness etc. to each unnecessary food item consumed.

FWIW I used this method successfully to get in the habit of flossing my teeth every night. It seems like every night after dinner I am tired and I have the same urge to skip flossing and just read a book, watch tv, hang out with my family, etc.

I started telling myself that whatever I decided to do was probably what I would end up doing every night. To my surprise, this worked like a charm.

I think flossing is especially amenable to TDT because you are in basically the exact same scenario every day, day after day after day.

With dieting it's probably trickier since there are a lot of different scenarios you are facing and it's hard to fit them into a reference class on the spur of the moment. For example, suppose your old college buddy you haven't seen in 10 years shows up and wants to get together for some beer and wings on the spur of the moment. Does that fall into the reference class of "drinking beer and eating bar food with a long lost friend who showed up after 5 or more years"? or perhaps "going out with a friend and eating wings"? or "eating unhealthy food on a special occasion"?

It's difficult to say. And for a typical working adult, there are dozens of potential diet-breaking special occasions in a year.

Based on my experience, I would say that TDT shows a lot of promise for combating akrasia. But in the context of dieting, someone needs to solve the reference class problem.

Can imagine losing weight only with tdt

Wow, fancy, for a bot.

The title sure reminds one of Egon Spectowsky's all-time self-help classic, How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare Time (and So Can You!)

I'd love to hear more success stories like this from you and other people but only if you/they also talk about the background reasons that made the final successful step possible. You did this in your last paragraph, which is extremely helpful!

But sometimes you don't eat the junk food because you've been eating junk food for the past week. Sometimes you stop procrastinating for a while because you've been procrastinating for the past month.

Thus your decision is affected by recent history, which is different every day. Still, if TDT considerations help one take up the strategy of not committing some vice if one hasn't committed it in in one's recent history, that's very useful.

(I've thought of these things before, and TDT hasn't cured me of akrasia)

To me, keeping the weight off after reaching your "maintenance weight" is the real challenge. To keep it off for 5 years or more would be truly impressive. How long have you kept it off?

In your article , you say that

"The first was to cut down from three meals a day to two and eliminate all snacks except water, cutting my consumption by more than a third."

It may have worked, but it was probably not the most healthy way. Losing weight isn't all about how much you eat, but also what you eat. I'd suggest adding a couple of "healthy snacks" every day. These might be a piece of fruit or a nice glass of milk. That's healthy, tastes fine and may further motivate you to remain abstinent of other, less healthy snacks.

After all, the form of strict diet you used to lose weight seems to be very effective, though you might damage your body by accidentally not supplying it with enough important stuff like vitamins. It's just a side detail though, as you're still alive and more healthy than before.

Congrats on not having given up, shows that you have a very strong will.

Losing weight we should be aware of possible side effects: http://adipexblog.com/adipex-side-effects.html