Big Problems With Small Solutions
There’s a thing in psychology called Proportionality Bias - a belief that a major event must have a major cause.
If a monarch gets assassinated we tend to believe that it can’t be because one guy snapped. It must be some far-reaching, decade-spanning, conspiracy.
Or if a volcano erupts and destroys your village it can’t be because of rocks rubbing up against each other under the ground, it must be because you angered The Gods.
Cognitive biases like this are bugs in human software - they were never ironed out in any of the updates, and we fall prey to them if we leave ourselves on default settings.
In fitness, we see this running the other way - if you have a major problem, our instinct is that it must require a major solution.
Hating the shape of your body is a painful experience that can grow to dominate your life, so it feels like the solution needs to be something gigantic. Your instinct will be that it requires making a meal plan for the month, giving up all your favourite food, exercising until you vomit every morning at 5am etc etc...
...but that just ain't so.
You hit the limits of human biology very quickly. Fat cells can only release energy at a set maximum rate. Once you’re in a moderate calorie deficit, you won’t lose fat much faster if you go into a massive deficit.
In fact, if you do so much that you can no longer meet your calorie needs from stored fat, your brain just totally rebels and sends you looking for chocolate anyway.
The real solution to the big problem is actually very small - choosing more foods that promote fullness, going to bed 30 mins earlier, being a little more active and being consistent for 3 months.
The problem is that this doesn’t FEEL right.
It seems practically insulting to suggest that something painful that has come to define much of a person’s life could be solved with small, simple changes.
Of course, “simple” is not the same as “easy” - it’s hard to change established behaviour patterns. You need a slow and steady approach, the right framework and typically some help with staying on track...
...but it isn’t going to be complex, revolutionary or grand.
One of the nice things about being human is we can upgrade our own software - so the next time you find yourself thinking about massive overhauls to your life that you’ll do “some day”, notice what you’re doing. Flip it over instead and ask yourself what’s one SMALL thing you could do TODAY.
Doing 1 tiny thing every day for 6 months is WAY more impactful than waiting 6 months before doing 1 enormous thing.
At the absolute bare minimum, you’ll have spent 6 months not getting any worse, and be in a better position to start!
So what's something you could do right now?
