Losing some weight after holiday feasting

Visiting family over the holidays involves lots and lots of feasting at the house of my in-laws, because my mother-in-law is a very talented chef. Which is wonderful and delectable! Except for when I step on the scale when we get back home. Usually I've gained between 4 and 6 pounds.

I've developed a plan for this, though, which seems to work pretty well. My diet plan is to eat as much as I want, of anything on this list:

• oatmeal
• whole milk
• blueberries 
• any vegetables (radishes, cabbage, tomatoes, green peppers, etc)
• hard boiled eggs
• rye crisp crackers
• lentil soup
• Any zero-calorie drinks (coffee, tea, diet soda)

I also add one ounce of butter daily.

I've done this twice now for 3 days, and it's remarkably effective at "resetting" my eating habits after a period of overindulgence.

There's quite a few negatives.

• It's not a long-term diet plan. Three of four days is probably my limit. This means that it's not great if you have a lot of weight to lose.
• You don't develop an understanding of calorie counts, like you would if you were actually weighing, measuring, and logging your food.
• It's hard to go out to eat with people - you'll just be sitting there, drinking your coffee.

But for me, the positives outweigh the negatives by a large margin.

• It's SO easy! Just eat as much as you want, no need to prep, weigh, measure, and log
• It's very effective.
• The foods are all very healthy 

If I need to make it easier to follow the plan for more than a few days, I could add add a few more items to the list, such as plain cottage cheese, plain yogurt, maybe plain roasted peanuts, canned beans.

Notice all the emphasis on "plain". Everything on this list is bland, with no added sugar. Avoiding sugar is part of the whole "resetting" mechanism, and makes food much less addictive. However, all the foods on my list are full-fat, not low-fat or non-fat. You need full-fat foods - otherwise the diet would just have too little fat to be tolerable.

How humanizing a boring logic puzzle makes it much easier to solve - the Wason Selection Task -

I can't remember which book I found this in, but I found it fascinating.  Here's the setup for a logic problem:

You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a colored patch on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. Which card(s) must you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?

It's a dry, boring problem. Here's a more visual representation of the problem: The Wason Selection Task. This is still very dry, but more understandable.

The really interesting part of this is not how bad we are, in general, when presented with this type of logic problem. Rather, it's how good we are when the exact same problem (in terms of the logical structure) is presented in a more natural, human setup:

For example, if the rule used is "If you are drinking alcohol then you must be over 18", and the cards have an age on one side and beverage on the other, e.g., "16", "drinking beer", "25", "drinking coke", most people have no difficulty in selecting the correct cards ("16" and "beer").

There are some theories for why people are so much better at solving this problem when presented in a social context. One author suggests that we have a strong "cheater detection module", that is not as dependent on our logical reasoning power. I also think that any problem, presented more realistic context that you can visualize, would be easier to solve.

I've used the insight from this in my work. For instance, when I'm explaining things and writing sample database code, I put a lot of extra effort into giving realistic table and field names. This makes concepts much more understandable. In this blog post on How to use a column name as an argument in a TOP clause, it took me much longer to come up with the sample code, because I wanted to make it more understandable. But I think that time is definitely worth it, to make it more coherent.

Here's a few links on the topic:
http://www.philosophyexperiments.com/wason/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

One other interesting point - I'd been wanting to write about this for quite some time now, but I couldn't remember what book I found the story in, and couldn't figure out how to look it up ("card problem"?  "logic puzzle"?), and what to search for on Google to find the details. But once I sat down and decided to do it, I searched for this phrase:

 "how many cards do you need to turn over to determine"

And the very first link that came up was correct!

Does the frog REALLY let itself get boiled alive?

Short answer - of course not!

Long answer - I've been reading self-help and business books recently, and it's surprising how many of them have this story:

A frog immersed in boiling water will jump out immediately, but a frog immersed in cold water that is gradually heated will never jump out, and will boil to death.

I wondered if it was true - it certainly didn't seem true.

So I did about a minute of research (thank you, Professor Google!). And I found that it's completely untrue. There's multiple debunkings - here's one from 2006: The boiled-frog myth: stop the lying now!

But there's also still recent references to the boiling frog myth, usually using it as a parable to encourage us to beware of complacency. For instance: Forbes: Leadership And The Boiling Frog Experiment

Why do myths like this stick around? Probably for the same reason that the bible is full of parables - they allow us to easily illustrate the point that we'd like to make, in a way that's understandable and culturally accessible. You could also quite easily find a story that would illustrate the opposite argument, but of course that's not the point. The larger take-away here is the immense power that stories have over us.  A great book on this topic, along with tips on how to tell a good, convincing story, is Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die