Day Thirteen: Fasting continued

Fasting isn't fun; but its not as terrible as I imagined either (at least for a single day). I'm 19 hours in, with only 5 left to go. Its interesting that my stomach isn't complaining, and I don't feel weak. The conclusion is that my desires for food can be ignored with enough willpower. I certainly wouldn't want to fast for very long, nor would it be healthy. But a single day fast feels like progress; progress feels good, because during the first half of this month of discipline, I'm not sure what real progress I've made.

Certainly I am more aware of what I need to do: I need to stop wasting time, I need to focus on my long term goals, I need to actually do what I tell myself I will. But at the same time, I know that I am still wasting a lot of time avoiding what I should really be doing.


For example, last night I read a Vonnegut novel for hours. While it is a good read and something I view as productive, I should have also read some research-related material, which is more concretely productive. I didn't, however, because it wasn't as fun. I think this happened because much of my willpower was already engaged in fasting, utilized to keep myself from giving in to the temptation to eat. Willpower seems like a finite resource, although it can be built up through practice.

I recently read a very informative post by Steve Pavlina (whose superlative writing gives me motivation to keep practicing the art of words), in which he describes judicious use of willpower.

Human beings are the only creatures gifted with significant foresight; we can think strategically about situations to our benefit. Steve suggests that strategically applying our limited willpower can set one up for success.

He gives the example of a diet. What happens typically ina diet is that a person will commit to eating healthily, but after a few weeks will give into tempatation and resume old, bad eating habits. What happened was that their willpower was required every day to avoid the junk food that remained in their house and to actively cook healthy meals. The constant use of willpower became tiring, and the diet eventually lay in ruins.

Instead, Steve advocates intelligent use of willpower; in the first day of the diet, he suggests throwing away all temptation food and cooking a week's worth of food. Then, it is relatively easy to follow the diet for the week; you simply pop food in the microwave and go; it doesn't require as much willpower to not cheat because cheating would require you to actively leave the house and find junk food.

So perhaps I've been going about this self-discipline thing a bit wrong; I've been leaving all the temptations as constant tests to my discipline. Is it surprising that sometimes I fail because I am not a self-discipline master yet.
To remedy this, I've been working on getting rid of temptations, and setting up less evil temptations in their place.

I've gotten rid of my cable box, although the TV still remains (perhaps I will get rid of this too, though). I'm setting up a list of acceptable semi-productive work escapes (such as project euler, TED, reading research-related books, or even decent fictional literature). I yet need to rid my house of junk food, although there is little remaining. Over the next few days, I'm going to focus on this blog on analyzing ways in which we can set ourselves up for success by intelligently using willpower instead of having to rely on an infinite store of willpower to accomplish our goals.