Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

Here’s a neat thing.  Last time I laid out a new diet plan at the end.   http://www.joshuaforeman.blogspot.com/2015/05/self-control.html I’ve been tinkering with it paying special attention to how my self-control tank gets depleted and when it seems to be recharged.  The last couple weeks I’ve settled into this pattern.  Weekends I eat a ton of gargabe, weekdays I eat super low calorie.  I haven’t let myself pig out until I’m about a pound under my last lowest number.  This is the result so far. Looks like a lot of up and downs, but the important thing is the trajectory is right.  It’s going down consistantly, like a ball bouncing down stairs. A really neat thing about this system is that unlike my previous plans -which featured gritting my teeth and holding out as long as I could, and then feeling guilty when I failed- this has a nearby goal.  It’s like an emotional lighthouse that’s never too far away.  And having that big p...

I just finished a short lecture series from The Great Courses called Scientific Secrets for Self Control.   http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/scientific-secrets-for-self-control.html These six lectures could have been 2 or 3 if Professor DeWall didn’t have 2-3 second pauses between each sentence and 3 or 4 redundant ways of saying the same thing over and over and over.  But that’s beside the point.  He started out talking about the primary theories about self control and how it works. He settles on the model I talked about here: http://www.joshuaforeman.blogspot.com/2015/04/ego-depletion.html (Though he has a different name for it I can’t remember.) The basic idea is that SC is like a muscle.  It can be depleted of strength by getting over worked, but it can also be strengthened with practice.  Also like a muscle, you can fatigue it with something like weight-lifting, and then find you have trouble sweeping later.  In other words, things t...