Mechanism -- The Ugly Truth That Nobody Wants To Know (Chapter 4)
©2005 Darel Rex Finley

PDF download page (entire manuscript, complete with figures, tables, italicization, bolding, and footnotes)


Art, Beauty, Fitness

“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone.”

—Anonymous

MORE THAN ANY OTHER ARTIST, Pablo Picasso has come to symbolize the advent of modern art. Originally Picasso, like most painters, created lifelike portraits of people, such as “Old Guitarist” or “Portrait of Sebastià Junyent.” But when photography was invented, Picasso reacted by changing his style to “cubism” — bizarre, abstract, angular areas of solid color arranged to form a cartoonish representation of a scene, such as “Three Musicians,” and strangely deformed cartoon people most typified by “Guernica,” his depiction of the Spanish Civil War. For creating these crude, cartoonish works, Picasso was rewarded with elevation to the status of most revered artist of his time, seemingly incapable of producing anything that wasn’t widely considered great. The art world has followed Picas- so’s lead ever since, and most modern art consists of the bizarre, the abstract, the crude, the cartoonish, and the ugly. Nor does this look to be a passing fad; among the upper echelons of the art crowd, at least, it appears here to stay.

What happened? The most obvious analysis is that the camera gave everyone the ability to effortlessly create perfect portraits and landscapes of anyone or anything, and rendered that style of painting superfluous — thus, the fine artist had to turn to the creation of abstractions that the camera cannot capture. This explanation, however, is inaccurate, or at least incomplete. Notice that there are many artists who create pictures of things that the camera cannot capture, such as dragons, monsters, and fictional dramatic landscapes, but whose works would never even come under consideration as fine art by the art crowd. Why not? Is it simply because those artists make money off of their paintings? No — artists who create ugly, abstract art also sell their works for money.

To answer this question, we must return to the camera and ask what it really did, and not just to the art, but to the art crowd. True, the camera enables the ordinary individual to trivially create realistic portraits of persons and places. But the camera did something else, something less obvious: It brought fine art to the masses. Prior to the camera, great works of art like the Mona Lisa could be viewed only by a limited few; a privileged art crowd. For centuries, the members of this crowd (mostly non-artists) convinced themselves that they were an intellectual elite; possessing the rare mental capacity required to appreciate the beauty of fine art; an ability that placed them above the commoner. The typical member of humanity, they thought, wouldn’t know the difference between fine art and worthless junk.

When the camera was invented, along with photographic printing, it became possible to take photographs of fine art — like the Mona Lisa — and distribute them in book form to the masses. The commoner, it turned out, could discern and appreciate fine art, and there was nothing special about the members of the art crowd after all, except for their money or their social position as patrons of the arts. Needless to say, that didn’t sit well with the art crowd and — inspired by the Emperor’s new art: the new works of Picasso — they saw their way out. By embracing the ugly, the crude, the simplistic, and the bizarre, and claiming to perceive deep meaning in it, the art crowd has rescued their elite position. It doesn’t matter that the camera can distribute pictures of this new art to the masses, because the masses don’t want this new art; they see nothing of value in it. The elite members of the art crowd can simply claim to see special value in bizarre shapes, and presto — their elite status as appreciators and interpreters of fine art is preserved.

Since photography and printing (and now the internet) are not going away, neither is ugly modern art. But those who like beautiful, traditional art need not despair — the artists who like to produce it never went away, and today their numbers and their peak talents are greater than ever. Today, their skills are employed not by a high-society art crowd, but instead by the commercial world. From Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, to H.R. Geiger and Hans-Werner Sahm, to George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino, beauty in art is alive and well — but don’t look for it in a somber museum populated by snobs and suited guards. Look in the art-book section of B. Dalton’s or Waldenbooks at your local shopping mall. Look in the movie theaters. Snubbed by the art crowd, the creators of beautiful art have turned to the general population, and in today’s modern market economy, the latter has turned out to be the far more generous patron.

Two amusing footnotes in the ongoing charade of modern art: Today most modern artists make sculpture rather than paintings, due to the more limited ability of the camera and printing press to reproduce three-dimensional works. And, the latest trend in modern art is a rarely elaborated quality called “genuineness.” It is a thinly veiled desire to avoid the artist who bites the hand that feeds him — a phenomenon ironically pioneered by none other than Picasso. The Art Crowd resents such sentiments and, after being stung several times by artists who admitted that their work was meaningless crap or was created by a young child, the Crowd now focuses its most intense praise on the artist whose carefully researched personal origin and history indicate that he is unable to discern the low quality of his own work, and hence is “genuine.”

— • —

The Oscars

Probably the most prominent example of the art-crowd mentality today is the Oscars; the Academy Awards given out in lavish ceremony each year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to steadily declining TV ratings.24 Watch the movies that win these awards, and the successful films that don’t (or aren’t even nominated), and a pretty obvious pattern starts to emerge. AMPAS, it seems, has three basic priorities:

1. Motion pictures should depict American culture in a negative light, never a positive one.

2. A motion picture should be a deep, aching story about the frustration of human relationships and the tragedy of profound human suffering. Movies should not be fun (e.g. action-adventures, horror movies, comedies).

3. Movies should be set in the historical past, or at least the present, but definitely not in the future or in a fantasy world.

See Table 4-1 for a comparison of recent AMPAS “best pictures” with the biggest box-office draws from the same year. (Note that for some years the AMPAS choice is, in my opinion, the better film — though not necessarily the best — the point of the table is simply to illustrate the above three criteria in action.)

Like the Art Crowd in general, the AMPAS wants to enjoy an elite art-interpretation position over the masses, and this explains each of their three priorities in judging movies. Most AMPAS members are American, and American culture is generated by the masses. Therefore, the elite position, by definition, must be to disdain your culture; to “know better” than the bulk of the population about how people should live and breathe. Therefore, recommending that Americans go see movies that portray American culture negatively is teaching them, not entertaining them.

Most people go to the movies for fun. Recommending a fun movie is a way of helping your fellow citizens to entertain themselves. Recommending a tragic movie about frustration and misery is to position yourself as a molder, a mentor, a teacher. This is an elite position.

And finally, movies set in the past are educational by their context alone, and can also be lessons in the actual mistakes of the past. Again, this is a teaching role. Movies set in the future are largely speculative, and teach little or nothing — likewise with movies set in a fantasy environment.

The AMPAS is a nearly perfect manifestation of the desire to position oneself as an elite tutor to the rest of the population. Like any con-game, there is no real goal to such posturing. The masses are never going to learn what this elite has to teach them (thus dissolving the elite). The purpose of positioning oneself as elite teacher to the rest of the population is simply to enjoy that position in perpetuity.

— • —

Life is like a poker game. If you don’t win, you lose.

“Garfield” — Jim Davis

Though members of the elite art crowd would never agree with this or any definition of art that denies them their elite status as privileged interpreters of art, I think the most objective definition of art is simply that which significant numbers of people will go out of their way to experience even though it isn’t necessary. So a painting hanging on your wall is art, but the electrical wiring inside your wall is not. Sure, a professional electrician might look at the wiring diagram of your house, and say, “Wow, they did a good job on your house — that’s a work of art.” And an art critic might look at the landscape hanging on your wall and say, “That’s rubbish; there’s no artistic value at all.” But the fact remains that the wiring is concealed inside the wall, while the painting is prominently displayed in front of the wall.

My definition of art does, of course, contain a key ambiguity: What constitutes a “significant” number of people? I can live with that ambiguity. The definition still has substance, because it asserts, at the very least, that if a work that attracts an audience of a hundred people is art, then another item that attracts a thousand must also be art — or conversely, that if an item that attracts an audience of a thousand people is not art, then another item that attracts only a hundred is also not art. It is not too difficult to find cases where the art crowd would violate this rule.

Superficially, my art definition seems to agree with the maxim “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” since it places the measure of art in the hands of the largest body of beholders; the general public. But the “beholder” canon is actually meant to imply that beauty is undefinable, varying so much from one person’s tastes to those of another as to render any attempt to quantify beauty impossible and meaningless. That conclusion would be warranted only if tastes varied widely over the population, and in a manner that was distributed evenly. What we actually have in the real world is a massive consensus of what is beautiful and what is not. Take a test audience of a thousand randomly selected subjects, and show them a set of twenty photos of randomly selected people. Ask each test subject to order the twenty photos according to attractiveness, from least attractive to most. You will probably find that although the order would vary from one subject to the next — perhaps even being unique to each test subject — certain aspects of the order would not vary much at all. There would be many cases of two of the photos being consistently in the same order relative to each other. What these results would show is that while there is some wiggle room for variation in taste, perception of beauty is massively constrained by an overwhelming consensus of who is better-looking than whom.

This huge consensus has a way of dictating the life experience of individuals, particularly when it comes to dating. A simplified but nevertheless revealing model of dating is depicted in Figure 4-1. We start with twenty heterosexual individuals (ten of each gender) who have just reached dating age. These individuals are ordered from 1 to 10 according to their attractiveness, 10 being the most desirable. All ten males are attracted to the one female whose attractiveness ranks 10, and likewise all ten females are attracted to the one male who is also a 10. Only the two 10s find themselves mutually attracted, so they marry. This naturally disappoints the remaining eighteen individuals, but they soon get over it and start pursuing the two 9s. Again, only the two 9s are mutually attracted, so they marry next. This process continues on down the scale (possibly over a course of years) until the two 1s marry each other, or until the degree of attraction is too low to sustain further marriage, in which case the bottom several individuals do not marry.

If this model is correct (even approximately), what does it imply or predict? A few things:

1. In most marriages, the two individuals will be about as desirable as each other, on the society-wide scale.

2. The really good-looking people will marry early in life, and the less-attractive people will marry later after a long and hard search for the “right person” — actually a long and hard process of discovering that they can’t get someone much more desirable than themselves.

3. Persons of relatively low desirability will have more marital problems than those who are highly attractive, since their marriage is largely a sham: a game of “I can do that too.”

Looks matter, and they matter a lot. The old adage, “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” is meant to imply that the real value of a person is not their exterior appearance, but instead their personality, their generosity: what’s on the inside. The truth is that both matter, and looks probably matter more, in that a very good-looking person with an averagely reasonable personality will have far better luck in the dating game than an average-looking person with a wonderfully compassionate, caring, understanding personality. This is true because the package, the cover, the exterior beauty is what people experience most. And not just other people — you yourself experience your mate’s exterior looks far more frequently than his personality traits.

Let us return to the case of Apple Computer: The importance of exterior looks is not lost on Steve Jobs, CEO of the company. Apple’s products, particularly after Jobs’s return to the company in 1996, have exuded a design philosophy of hiding rude functional necessities behind a deceptively simple and elegant exterior. Take his iPod music player, for example. (See Figure 4-2.) From the outside it looks like a sleek, roundish rectangle of white acrylic and metal, with a square screen and a disc-shaped controller flush with the surface. A very small set of ports break the continuity of the top and bottom of the unit only. It seems almost too simple to serve its purpose, yet it does so with remarkable user-friendliness. Many competing players look almost as complex and utilitarian on the outside as they do on the inside when dissected.

Steve made some very interesting observations very early on about how [the iPod] was about navigating content. It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device — which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff. —Jonathan Ive, iPod designer25

Throughout his reborn, post-millennium career at Apple, Jobs has placed at least as sharp an emphasis on perfection in the exterior appearance and user-interface experience of his products as he did during his earlier years, but has been newly willing to compromise on the contents of the user-invisible interior. Throughout the 1980s, Apple had a very hard time competing with less esthetically refined products from Microsoft and the the major Windows PC makers (Gateway, Compaq, Dell, etc.). In hindsight, this failure appears to be the result of a desire that the guts of the computer be as perfectionist as the exterior and the end-user appearances: The first Mac was loaded with custom components that were both expensive and largely incompatible with what most other people were already using. In recent years, however, Apple seems to have learned that while perfectionism is as critical as ever to the end-user presentation, the guts of the device should focus on efficient functionality alone. Today’s Apple products are built mostly from inexpensive, commoditized components, and the iPod’s lack of successful competitors is testimony to the value of this principle. iPod is the first Apple product ever to dominate its field with market-leading share.

Prior to the release of the iPod Shuffle and iPod nano, each model of iPod worked with both Apple’s own FireWire connector and the competing USB2 connector. The mere inclusion of USB2 support was a seriously utilitarian concession, by Apple’s earlier standards. When the diminutive Shuffle and nano came out, their size constraints permitted support of only one of the two connector types, and Jobs chose USB2 simply to ensure the widest range of compatibility with the current consumer base of computers — even though that move might be the last straw on the camel’s back for any possibility that FireWire would win out against USB2 in the long run. (Apple’s latest, video-capable iPod also sports only a USB/USB2 port, not a FireWire port.) When IBM dropped the ball on keeping up with Intel’s manufacturing process refinements, Jobs jumped ship in 2005, switching his whole platform from IBM’s PowerPC chip to Intel’s x86 line — a move he admitted Apple had been well-prepared to make for five years before it became necessary. The x86 ISA (instruction set architecture) is ancient, designed for processor technologies and programming methods that have long been pathetically out-of-date. All x86 chips are immense in-hardware emulators that fetch x86 instructions out of memory and translate them on-the-fly into a semi- modern, pipelineable form before they can even be processed and executed. It is indeed testimony to Intel’s manufacturing prowess that they have been able to beat IBM even while strapped to such a horrifying kludge. It is also testimony to the newfound pragmatism at Apple that Jobs would be willing to switch to such a kludge. As long as the computer’s physical appearances and the OS’s elegance and beauty are not compromised, he apparently realizes, the internal organs should be designed around pure, market-driven efficiency and competitiveness.

— • —

Since most people are not at the top of the beauty spectrum, the idea that exterior looks are critically important, and the implied musical-chairs-like model of dating described above, must seem rather bleak. But while genetically determined looks may be essentially unmodifiable (or only in limited ways via surgery), can your natural looks can be powerfully enhanced, in either a positive or negative direction, by your fitness level? Can a natural 8 sink to the level of most 4s through fitness neglect, and conversely can a natural 4 rise to the level of the typical 8 by fitness diligence? The answer is “yes,” although curiously most people harbor a deep suspicion that it is “no.”

I ain’t gonna be just a face in the crowd
You’re gonna hear my voice
When I shout it out loud

“It’s My Life” — Bon Jovi

As I write parts of this book, I am sitting in a Starbucks coffee shop, consuming my indulgence of choice: a Java Chip Frappuccino and a decadent, seven-layer pastry. On any given day, I’m reasonably fit-looking, so if anybody is watching me, they may be wondering, “How does he eat that junk and not blow up like a balloon?” If anyone asks, they will get a rather mundane, even disappointing answer: I eat this stuff only one day a week.

The Story of Al

When I was in my early twenties, I got a job at a government contractor. Many of the workers in my building were former government employees; older men who were horribly out of shape. Their bodies resembled pears or large dumplings, with skinny, atrophied legs from sitting all day and never exercising. Many of them smoked, and others had a ruddiness that made me suspect them of drinking excessively in the evening. I was dismayed to have to work with such people, and this gave me a stronger desire than ever to try to get in shape, though my attempts at that time were still largely unsuccessful.

Al Smith (not his real name) was a middle-aged man who worked in our building. He was of about average height, on the skinny side of normal, and had a somewhat gruff temperament. I never conversed with him at length, but spoke briefly with him to answer business-related questions. I paid no special attention to him; he was just one of many persons in our building with whom I was familiar but didn’t really know personally.

Once, when I had just provided Al with some requested information, and he had then walked away, one of my coworkers said, “Hey, see that guy Al you were just talking to?”

“Yeah — what about him?” I replied.

“He used to weigh three hundred pounds.”

“No way! That guy?” I was incredulous.

“Yes, he did! His doctor told him he was going to die if he didn’t lose weight. Haven’t you seen him walking along the main boulevard that goes by our building here?” my coworker asked.

“Now that you mention it, I have seen him walking the sidewalk there, usually around lunchtime.”

“Yeah, he’s doing that for exercise. His doctor told him he had to start exercising and lose weight or he was going to die. He lost a whole bunch of weight.”

My coworker didn’t seem to be joking, and I had no reason to think he was making the story up. So logically, I believed that what he was telling me must be true. But somehow, looking at skinny Al, it just seemed hard to believe. Not having ever seen him fat, I just couldn’t really picture him that way. Part of my mind refused to believe that what I was being told was really true.

Months went by and Al disappeared from our building. I didn’t even notice his departure; in retrospect I’m convinced he must have been moved to another building down the road where I never had the opportunity to run into him. Three or four years passed, by which time I was in a new group with new coworker friends. We had a good time there — or as good a time as could be had working in Dilbert world. (Scott Adams’s “Dilbert” comic strip didn’t actually exist then, but we were living in it nonetheless.)

One week, there was a big shift of employees, and a new group of workers moved into the set of cubicles near my group’s area. We didn’t work with these people, but they were close by and so we saw them a lot. One of them was Al. He had gained the weight back and must have been in the neighborhood of 300 pounds. I didn’t recognize him at first; I just thought, that’s a very obese older guy who dresses sloppily, looks serious all the time, and has a lot of busy-looking papers all over his desk. Then after a few days I happened to be walking by his station and noticed his nameplate: “Al Smith.” Oh my God, it’s him, I thought. Knowing who it was, I could now recognize his face and demeanor through the fat. My coworker’s story from years ago was all too true, I realized.

This was a much bigger wake-up call to reality than just seeing out-of-shape guys in the building. Here was living, breathing proof that a person could be a totally normal weight at one time, and then just a few years later (if not less), the same person could be severely overweight. All my life prior to that, everyone I knew seemed to be about the same weight the entire time I knew them. They were each perpetually fat, perpetually thin, or perpetually in-between. Seeing so dramatic a change was something of a shock to my mental picture of weight and fitness, and how it all really works.

My new coworkers had never seen Al when he was thin, so he was no big deal to them — just another very overweight person — but I couldn’t help harboring a morbid curiosity about the guy. Without being overt, I kept an eye on him and thought about him periodically. Gradually, as days turned to weeks and then months, I began to feel deeply sorry for Al. And these feelings puzzled me because I’d never felt that way about fat people before. I didn’t necessarily condemn them in my mind, but neither did I feel sorry for them. So why was I feeling that way about Al? Because I had seen him thin? No, that would make me feel less sorry, not more; it proves he is capable of fitness.

The question nagged me until I began consciously exploring it, and then it suddenly hit me what it was about Al that was making me feel bad for him. Al never ate anything. Not a thing! I never saw him eating or drinking. Not even a diet soda, or a cup of coffee, or even water. I never saw him drink from a water fountain. Other workers were snacking on and off the whole day. I myself fought a losing battle with the vending machines, and frequently could be seen munching on donut sticks or chocolate bars at my desk. Some kind of drink was never far from my grasp. But Al never put anything to his lips; neither did he have any kind of food or drink on his perpetually busy desk.

Once I realized this, I also realized that if I ever had seen Al putting food in his mouth, I wouldn’t have felt so sorry for him. My mental image of him would have included the image of an immensely obese person putting food in his mouth. But not having ever seen it, I couldn’t easily form a mental picture of it. Logically, I knew Al had to be eating something somewhere — otherwise he would starve to death, and on the way to death-by-starvation he would hit a normal weight. But my mind couldn’t really believe that he was eating much. I just hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

Now that I knew what was making me feel sorry for him, my sympathy was tempered, but only slightly. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that Al had to limit himself to very little food, in order to combat his weight problem, and so was living the worst of both worlds — food deprivation plus extreme obesity.

But soon that would all change. One day, Jim, a friend and coworker, said “Hey, I hear there’s a really good, cheap, pizza buffet down the road. Let’s check it out!” So we did; about six of us. And when we walked into the pizza parlor, guess who was there? Al. He was by himself, and he had brought work with him. His plate was piled four slices deep with thick pizza, and he was eating it like there was no tomorrow. My gang had to wait in line to pay and get our plates. Al was eating the whole time. He stayed there and ate nearly as long as we did, departing just a few minutes before we got up and left.

Now my mental image of Al was drastically different, but it would become even more different about a week and a half later. My group decided to visit the pizza buffet again, and the exact same thing happened. Al was there by himself; he had brought work with him; he was eating pizza nonstop; and he got up and left a couple minutes before we did. We went back there a few more times over the next several months, but never saw Al there again.

Now, it’s hypothetically possible that it was a complete coincidence. Maybe Al went there and started eating his pizza just before we walked in the door. And maybe he was ready to leave just a few minutes before we were. And maybe he happened to go to that buffet the same two days we did, in a span of two weeks or more. But there’s a much more likely explanation. Al had been stuffing his gut every day at that buffet for quite some time before we saw him there. And when we came in the door, he had already been there for a while. He recognized us, and when it was apparent that we were winding down and would soon be leaving, he got up and left, so as to save some face — to leave some doubt in our minds that he was really there much longer than we were. He continued going to that buffet, figuring we wouldn’t come back; but then we did, so he decided to find a new place.

The images of Al and of the other painfully out-of-shape workers at that company have stuck in my mind ever since, and I gained a few lessons from this experience:

Fitness neglect leads to a profoundly unattractive body in middle and older age.

People can change dramatically from thin to fat and vise-versa, in just a few years.

You can’t tell what people are doing fitness-wise by what you see them doing — you only see a fraction of their time, and they know when you’re watching.

Getting On the Richard Simmons Show

In 2002, the Discovery Health channel aired an interesting program about obesity, titled Big As Life; Obesity In America. One of the main features of the show was the story of a very overweight woman, Doris Skiba, who in the early 1980s decided that she would try get on the then-popular Richard Simmons exercise show by losing weight. She went on a very low-calorie diet — about 600 calories a day, far less than the number of calories needed to support a normal weight for her height — and rapidly lost 150 pounds over the course of about seven months. She sent letters to the Richard Simmons Show, documenting her progress. Then, when she reached her normal weight, to her great delight she received an invitation to be on the show.

She was flown out to California and was a big feature of one day’s show. Her weight loss was truly striking — she looked like an utterly normal, fit woman, whom you would never guess had been very obese just a little over half a year ago. It truly looked like a testament to the value of rapid weight loss via very low-calorie dieting. Then her stay with the Simmons entourage was over. She went home, and the weight started coming back. To document her discouragement and despair, she shot a sequence of artsy, black-and-white, film noir photographs of herself gaining weight. A typical photo showed her sitting glumly in front of a huge pile of doughnuts, apparently powerless to stop them from putting her back to her original weight. Today (or as currently as reported in Big As Life) she is as heavy as ever, and has decided that this is just who she is, and probably always will be — she now serves as an advisor to the International Size Acceptance Association.

What did Big As Life have to say about Skiba’s story? It seemed that they wanted to portray her in as positive a light as possible: Very little was said about her eating habits before and after her I-wanna-be-on-Simmons diet. Practically the only analysis offered by Discovery Health’s program was that she was a victim of the so-called starvation alarm clock. According to its promoters, the starvation alarm clock is a survival mechanism built into your brain. It detects starvation, and forces you to eat and gain weight, as a precaution against starving to death. The starvation alarm clock theory is widespread and uncritically accepted by many (even by Bill Phillips, my own personal fitness inspiration).

I can’t say with certainty that something like a starvation alarm clock doesn’t exist in the human brain, but I have to wonder: Why didn’t the alarm clock start ringing when Skiba was one quarter of the way into her weight-loss goal? Or halfway there? Or two-thirds? Why did the starvation alarm clock just happen to wait until she had lost enough weight to get on the Richard Simmons show? That’s a funny coincidence — to say the least.

Since Big As Life offered so little in the way of analysis, I feel compelled to evaluate the situation myself, with a special eye towards direct, obvious explanation. Figure 4-3 represents a hypothetical situation similar to that discussed in Big As Life. The solid curve represents a person’s weight changing over time, and the dotted line represents that same person’s eating level. Since your weight is approximately proportionate to the number of calories you eat, these two quantities — weight and caloric consumption — can be graphed together, and with the knowledge that your weight moves asymptotically towards your eating level. The asymptotic approach is because the closer your weight comes to corresponding to your eating level, the smaller the excess (or deficit) of calories becomes, and so the weight change steadily slows.26

In the first phase of the Figure 4-3 graph (before “diet start”), the subject’s eating level is at “very obese,” and so is her weight. In the second phase (between “diet start” and “Richard Simmons”), her diet is slightly below “death,” and her weight plummets asymptotically towards death. However, when her weight hits “normal,” she appears on Simmons, and then returns to her “very obese” diet. Again, her weight asymptotically moves to match that level.

The tale of Figure 4-3 is by no means exceptional. Probably many thousands of people go through a virtually identical experience in any given year. I myself once did a less dramatic, one-month version of the same scenario. My motivation to get down to a healthy weight was so I would look good in a Halloween costume. Halloween lasted one night — then my excess weight came back in full.

What did this woman do wrong? Well, for starters, she chose a very ephemeral motivation for losing weight, and got very ephemeral results. How long can you be on The Richard Simmons Show, or for that matter, how long can you be a celebrity of any kind simply for having achieved dramatic weight loss? In most cases, not very long. (About as long as a typical Halloween party.) Since junk food tastes great, and exercise is uncomfortable and requires effort, you can’t expect to stay in shape without sufficient motivation, and if you want to stay in shape for years to come, you will need a motivator that’s going to last that long. Everybody has their own motivators — no fitness book will tell you yours — but your motivator needs to be one that will keep coming back at you again and again for years to come.

The other big mistake depicted in Figure 4-3 is that the subject never spent any sustained period of time eating the right quantity of food. Where on the graph does the dotted line, which represents her eating level, hold steady at “normal?” Nowhere. In other words, the subject is not learning to eat a normal, healthy amount of food and then stop until her next meal. She’s always eating a highly abnormal quantity: Either way too much or way too little. Probably the most important part of a nutrition program isn’t just getting to your target weight — it’s learning to eat normal quantities of food on a day-in, day-out basis. Figure 4-4 shows what would have happened if the same subject had switched to a normal diet: Her weight would have dropped to normal, but it would have taken longer to get there, and because of the asymptotic nature of the decline, there would be no sudden arrival at the desired weight — one day, she would just look in the mirror and realize that she was already there, and had been there for some time.

Learning to control your eating in a nation overflowing with tempting desserts and snacks is not easy or fun, and it requires finding a healthy diet that you can live with for the long term; not a temporary fix. Going on a very low-calorie diet, devoid of rich sweets, is actually a way to avoid learning to eat normally. Why learn to stop at one, modestly sized piece of birthday cake when you can just avoid the cake altogether and dream of how many entire cakes you will devour when you reach your target weight?

Once I attended a weight-control group discussion session, in support of a family member. Each member of the group told stories of his or her past week, and two of those stories stuck in my mind. The first story came from a woman whose husband had brought home a box of twelve snack cakes. He ate one of them, and put the rest of them in the pantry. The next day, he couldn’t find them because she had eaten them all. He got mad at her, she got mad back, and the whole scene was ugly. The advisor in charge of the session told this woman that her husband needs to keep snacks like that in the cab of his truck and not let her know that they are there.

Another woman spoke of her annoying ex-roommate who was perpetually skinny, but seemed to eat whatever she wanted to. The most annoying thing about this roommate was how she would eat half of a candy bar and then leave the other half sitting in its wrapper on the kitchen counter, or eat half a bag of chips and then throw the rest away after they got stale.

It wasn’t my place to take over the meeting or contradict the advisor, so I kept my mouth shut, but I would have liked to tell the group that learning to not eat food even though it’s available is vital to learning to control your weight and develop healthy eating habits. Why was the latter storyteller bothered that her roommate would leave a candy bar half-eaten? Was she tempted to eat the other half? Probably not. More likely, she was irritated at the physical demonstration that it’s possible to stop eating halfway through a candy bar. It’s difficult to enjoy a candy bar when you’re above your preferred weight, and so one of the great tricks to assuage feelings of guilt is to to convince yourself that once you start eating the candy bar, you simply have to finish it. That way, the crime was merely ripping open the wrapper — after that, the offense becomes water under the bridge, and you can enjoy eating the bar, knowing that it’s just not proper to stop halfway through. When her roommate did stop halfway through, it was extremely irritating to this woman because it reminded her that she could do the same, and thus spoiled her enjoyment of candy bars and other sweet snacks.

Thinking about it later, I formulated a few simple exercises in self-control, which I would recommend to anyone who has similar feelings that the availability of food is an irresistible destroyer of good eating habits:

Exercise 1

• Buy a box of individually wrapped snack cakes.
• Take it home without opening it on the way.
• Open it in the kitchen and eat one of the individually wrapped snacks.
• Put the remainder in a kitchen cabinet where you will see it periodically, and leave it there for one week.
• Take it out and throw it away (into a trash receptacle from which it cannot be retrieved).

When you have successfully completed Exercise 1, move on to Exercise 2:

Exercise 2

• Go to a fast-food burger restaurant and buy a typical meal — one burger, one medium-sized order of fries, and a medium-sized soda.
• Consume half of everything: Half of the burger, half of the fries, and half of the soda. (Do not pre-divide the meal into halves before eating — just start eating and then stop at half.)
• Throw the rest away on your way out of the restaurant. Don’t eat anything else for at least two hours.

When Exercise 2 is performed correctly, move on to Exercise 3:

Exercise 3

• Go to a party where snacks are in plentiful supply.
• Wait until at you have seen at least three other people graze the snack layout. (Persons who already have a plate of snacks in their hand when you arrive don’t count.)
• Make yourself a plate of snacks.
• Eat most of it, but leave a little uneaten.
• Don’t touch the snacks again for the rest of the party — find a conversation or activity to keep yourself busy instead.

In case you’re wondering: Yes, I have actually done these exercises myself, exactly as described. They seem so trivial, yet they can really begin a change in your mind about who you are and what you can do. In 2002, CNN ran a show about sustained weight loss and fitness titled Fat Chance, featuring two persons as prime examples of successful lifestyle change (sustained weight loss): a woman named Karen Brown and a man named Robert Romaniello. Each, the show revealed, keeps a big stash of junk food in one part of their kitchen: Karen has a “goodie drawer” filled with “fudge-covered ice cream cones, tacos, popcorn with lots of butter,” and Robert has a “secret cupboard” containing Wheat Thins, lemonade mix, angel food cakes, and fudge-dipped chocolate-chip granola bars, among other things. He also has ice cream in his freezer — as presumably does Karen since her fudge-covered cones wouldn’t be much fun to eat by themselves. Clearly, both Karen and Robert have learned not to eat such foods even though they’re nearby, and they are not under the spell of thinking that they can be healthy by insulating themselves from opportunities to be unhealthy.

Why Fitness Is So Difficult

Why is fitness so difficult for so many people? The answer is tied into the phenomenon of hidden difficulty masked by apparent effortlessness. Let’s start with the basics: If you eat healthy foods, in moderate amounts, and exercise regularly, you will become fit. Not immediately; not overnight — expect it to take about three to six months. And once you’ve become fit, you will stay fit as long as you maintain that eating/exercise pattern.

Fact A
healthy food + moderate amounts + regular exercise = fit

(“Healthy food” in this case means food that derives most of its calories from protein and complex carbohydrates, as opposed to sugar and fat. You probably also need to take supplementary vitamins.)

If you eat unhealthy foods, in excessive amounts, and don’t exercise (or exercise way too little), you will become fat. And once you’ve become fat, you will stay fat as long as you maintain that eating/exercise pattern. (That’s right, fatness has to be maintained — if you don’t maintain an unhealthy eating/exercise pattern, you cannot stay fat.)

Fact B
unhealthy food + excessive amounts + little exercise = fat

We’ve all heard this before, probably many times, from various sources: friends, family, nutrition experts, fitness gurus, and scientists who interpret experimental evidence of how the body works. I myself certainly have heard message A-B many times over the course of my life. But is A-B the only message we’re getting? I think it can’t be. If A-B were all there was on the table, I think fitness would be the rule, not the exception. Most people would have no trouble at all staying fit, and fat people would be a small minority of the population. Further, among those who were fat, the great majority wouldn’t be chronically frustrated about it. They might not want to be fat, but they would know that Facts A & B are the way it works, and they would be stoically resigned to the fact that they are simply choosing path B at the moment. If and when they wanted to become fit, they would know exactly what to do, and about how long to expect it to take.

But the actual situation (in the USA at least) is that about two-thirds of the population is overweight,27 and a large percentage of them are very frustrated about it. They feel depressed, discouraged, confused, misled, and have a strong fear that nothing they do is going to work. New diet plans emerge every few years, but none of them seem to help, except on a very temporary basis.

Some other message must be on the table besides A-B. But what? The answer is that people don’t just listen to what fitness experts say — they also observe what other people around them are doing. And what do they see; i.e. how do people behave around others with regard to fitness?

Fit people do not like to stick to their fitness diet all the time — they like to eat unhealthy food every now and then — not too often, of course; maybe 10% of the time. When do they most like to eat with abandon? When they’re socializing with friends or family members, or attending special functions or events. That’s when they don’t want to stick to their diet; that’s when they want to kick back, relax, and take it easy.

Fit people also do not make a special point of talking about the exercise they’ve done recently. It looks bad for a fit person to be purposely mentioning recent exercise; it looks like bragging, and it alienates people. Further, since fit people exercise a lot, they’re usually not sore from recent exercise, and don’t have that physical reminder. And to the fit person, exercise doesn’t seem like anything special — it’s like showering or brushing their teeth: something they do all the time, and doesn’t need to be shared.

Fact C
Fit people eat unhealthy food when socializing, and don’t make a point of talking about recent exercise.

On the other hand, fat people do like to talk about recent exercise — they feel sore from it, and it’s a special event that doesn’t happen very often. Plus, it makes them feel more positive in the eyes of others to be “fat but exercising” — it suggests that they haven’t thrown caution to the wind, and are actively trying to do something about their weight. An overweight person who, earlier in the day, put on jogging shorts and ran a mile, and is now socializing with friends, thinks, “These friends of mine can see that I’m fat, but they can’t see that I ran a mile earlier today. They’re getting only the bad part of the picture. I need to tell them I exercised so they can see the whole me.”

Also, fat people don’t like to eat large amounts of unhealthy food in front of others, so they do it in private when friends and coworkers aren’t watching. It’s not that they plan to deliberately deceive others, or mislead them about how fitness works — they just feel embarrassed and uncomfortable chowing down while others are watching, and the only other time to do it is in private (or in public among anonymous strangers, which is equivalent to privacy).

Fact D
Fat people eat healthy food and/or moderate amounts of food when socializing, and make a point of talking about recent exercise.

Facts C and D have a profound effect on what appears to be true to the casual observer (i.e. to just about everybody). C and D create the illusion that facts A and B are not true. We will call this illusion X-Y:

Illusion X
Fit people can eat unhealthy food whenever they want, and don’t need to exercise except when they want to — for recreation or to show off. Fit people are naturally fit; they’re just built that way.

Illusion Y
Fat people are naturally fat, and they must go on special, restrictive diets and exercise programs just to keep their fatness to a manageable level.

Facts A and B are not what people observe most of the time — they observe the facts C and D, and interpret that observation as X and Y. Again and again, X and Y are impressed upon our minds by C and D. If you asked fitness experts to name the most harmful fitness myth, they would probably say, “spot reduction” — the idea that you can rid yourself of belly fat by doing abdominal exercise. I think, however, that Illusion X-Y is more prevalent and far more harmful. What effect does it have on the average person who is fighting the battle of the bulge? A typical chronological scenario might go like this:

1. You have been on path B and are therefore overweight. Y tells you that you will always be overweight, and can make only a small dent by trying to slim down. X tells you that fit people are getting to eat whatever they want, and don’t have to bother with exercise, so why should you sacrifice just to be a little less fat? You decide not to bother, and you stay on path B, remaining overweight.

2. Every now and then, you hear some fitness pitch of A-B, and it gives you the motivation to switch to path A. You remain on path A for a week or two, but then look in the mirror and see that while you are noticeably less fat, you’re still fat. This seems to confirm Y. You become discouraged and decide that it isn’t worth it. You go back to path B.

3. Eventually, one of your sporadic efforts to get in shape sticks; this time you religiously keep with a good fitness program (path A) for a few months. The results are striking, and you have finally achieved a healthy, fit body. But you believe that you have arrived at point X — that you have become one of the “naturally fit” and can now leave dieting and exercise behind. This is a mistake; there is no point X, and no one is really there. Believing you have arrived at X, you are in reality switching back to path B. The weight comes back, and now you become totally convinced that you must be “naturally fat,” as predicted by Y.

The Future

What can be done about illusions X and Y? Not much, as far as I know. C and D are natural consequences of the fact that people know when they are being watched, and naturally reinforce X and Y in the minds of the watchers. Exposés of this situation — such as the one you are reading here — may help for some, but X and Y are stubborn creatures, not easily unseated from the heads of Jane and John Q. Public. Look at my story of Al, and you can see how hard it was for me to believe what I was being told, until I saw it with my own eyes.

Also, X and Y are difficult to unseat because they are beautiful. Like evolutionists who want to believe that complex body functions arise automatically out of simple physical rules, or Christians who want to believe in a hand-waving God whose desire creates by magic, many people cling to point X because it offends their concept of beauty to believe that lengthy, painstaking, manual effort is required to create an attractive effect. No one really wants to believe that the price of fitness is perpetual dietary sacrifice and exercise. It’s a much prettier vision to imagine that fitness can be free and automatic as described by X. And Y is also very attractive to those that are fat — for how comforting must it be to believe that you’re naturally overweight, and that getting to eat lots of delicious food every day is your consolation prize for being trapped in a permanently fat body. And how damaging to your self-esteem would it be to get in great shape and, in so doing, reveal to yourself and to everyone else that you could have done so long ago? It’s just another case of maintaining the illusion of infallibility by refusing to publicly change one’s position.

The most important step I ever took towards fitness was the simple realization that there is no magic point X where constant junk food, frequently skipped workouts, and fit, trim bodies all coexist. Remember that everyone (yourself included) wants to appear magically powerful, blessed with the ability to look great without even trying, and it doesn’t take much in the way of selective revelation of your habits to foster that image in others’ minds.

Cause For Hope

How many times have you heard someone say, “Diets don’t work.” If you asked this person to elaborate, you might get a story like this: “I tried Diet M, and it worked for a while, but then the weight came back. So I tried Diet N, and it worked too, but the weight came back. Same with diet O. Diet P didn’t even work much at all. I’m sick of it — I’m sure that diets just don’t work.” It’s a harrowing tale we’ve all probably experienced to some degree or another, but what’s really going on here? I would like to say to this person, “Diet M worked until you stopped doing it. Same with N and O. Diet P, presumably, really doesn’t work. So you have three diets that work to choose from, and instead, you conclude that diets just don’t work. Why not return to diet M, if it was no harder than N or O?” What this person really wants is a diet that takes the weight off permanently — in other words, a diet that takes him to point X.

Diets do work — the trick is to find one that doesn’t coddle illusions, and that you like enough to keep doing for the rest of your life. I recommend using these two simple screening devices:

Diet Screen 1: Is this diet promoting the A-B model of fitness, or the X-Y model? A helpful fitness plan (one that focuses on A-B) will tell you what kind of sacrifices and actions must be achieved to stay on path A, and how to combat urges to revert to path B. A harmful fitness plan will offer some magic shortcut to point X, where you can do anything you want and still be fit. Such plans usually sell a message of the form, “Just do such-and-such, and you can eat all you want and still lose weight.”

Currently, the most popular diet28 is Atkins, which in a nutshell says “you don’t have to worry about fat intake as long as you avoid virtually all carbohydrates.” Clearly, this diet is promoting something like the magic point X. How can you eat large quantities of fatty foods like nuts, fried eggs, and bacon, and expect to get healthy? The only reason I can see why Atkins has even a chance of working is that you might get sick of eating high-fat foods and stop eating them. Of course, if that causes you to jump back to carbs, then you’re no longer following Atkins, and cannot attribute your subsequent weight gain to the Atkins plan. Michael Fumento’s (pre-Atkins craze) The Fat of the Land does a splendid job of debunking other just-do-this diets, such as the fat-free frenzy championed by Susan Powter in the 1990s, Stuart Berger’s food allergy diet, and the widely exploited claim that fat people eat the same amount (or less!) than fit people.

One more bit of it’s-so-easy bunkum deserves mention: Several years ago I saw a health expert making a guest appearance on a nighttime news magazine. She held up a tiny cube of fat about the size of a sugar cube, then proceeded to inform the audience that this is the amount of food they need sacrifice every day to keep from becoming overweight. Her logic was that if you take the average weight gain over a period of many years for a survey group, and divide that gain by the number of days in the survey period, then it comes out to the number of calories in a tiny cube of fat! Is it really that easy? No, it isn’t. The math looked sound (as I recall), but it was based on the ridiculous assumption that average persons make no attempt at weight control for the multiyear period of the survey — they just eat like pigs and throw exercise to the wind. That’s absurd, of course. What this expert’s math really indicates is that average persons (of the type surveyed) won’t gain weight if they make all the sacrifices they’re already making, plus the tiny-cube-of-fat-per-day sacrifice that she said is “all they have to do.”

Diet Screen 2: How fit is the promoter of this diet? How many success stories can this diet show off, and how fit are those people?

Dr. Phil McGraw — as bluntly noted by “shock jock” radio commentator Howard Stern — is fat. He isn’t immensely obese, and he looks okay in a suit on the cover of his weight-control bestseller, The Ultimate Weight Solution: The 7 Keys To Weight Loss Freedom, but you can tell just by looking at his face and neck that he couldn’t pose in swim trunks and expect very many people to jump at his fitness program. David Letterman got big laughs when he included Dr. Phil in his Top Ten Signs You’re On A Bad Diet: “It’s a Dr. Phil diet, and after two weeks you look exactly like Dr. Phil.”29 A&E’s Biography program about the late Dr. Atkins showed no pictures in which Atkins looked significantly more fit (or less covered with clothing) than the current Dr. Phil, even though the show went all the way back to the 1972 first publication of his diet. Nor did the show reveal any particularly impressive before-and-after examples of non-celebrity successes. I have to admire Jared Fogel for turning around a 425-lb. body to just 190 lbs. on his self-styled Subway sandwich diet, although it should be noted that his diet was only a little closer to normal than the I-wanna-be-on-Richard-Simmons diet. (Perhaps becoming a long-term Subway spokesman gave him the motivation to learn a normal eating pattern after he reached his target weight.) But I’ve never seen a Subway commercial where Jared’s body wasn’t hidden behind fairly loose clothing (or once, in a beach-set spot, behind a very out-of-focus camera lens). Clearly, Dr. Phil, Dr. Atkins, and Subway’s Jared cannot pass Screen 2 — unless your honest, inner goal is merely to avoid extreme obesity.

Of course, it must be noted that a truly fit spokesperson does not guarantee a valid program, because who can say if the spokesperson is truly following his or her own program? Powter is a case in point — eat all the carbs you want and see if you wind up looking like Powter in her ultra-fit, Stop the Insanity prime. But at least a fit spokesperson knows how to be fit, and thus might be giving you the advice you need. And if large numbers of ordinary people have gotten great results by following that advice, then the odds of soundness go way up.

My Own Fitness Experience

For these reasons, I have to endorse Bill Phillips’s Body-for-LIFE program as the best fitness plan available today. Mr. Phillips is in no way involved with my book, and I’d be surprised if he didn’t take exception to much of what I’ve written on these pages, but his program is perhaps the only well-known plan that passes the two Diet Screens described above (other than a few similar programs, such as Tony Horton’s Power 90). It took me several tries before I did Phillips’s BFL program exactly as required, but when I did, the results were astounding. I also found that it was the first diet/fitness plan I’d ever tried that I can seriously visualize myself doing for the rest of my life — and that’s important, because otherwise, what’s the point? But as easy as the BFL program is compared with things I’ve tried to do in the past, it still requires a separate motivation. Why do you really want to be in great shape? If you can’t answer that question with anything more specific than, “It would be really cool,” then you haven’t found the motivation you will need to stay on path A.

Besides giving me strong reinforcement of the A-B message, doing BFL also taught me by direct experience that my fitness state is primarily a function of what I have been doing for the past three months, and secondarily the three months before that. Before doing BFL, I would see diabetes-supplies commercials starring Wilford Brimley, and I would think that his rotund, puffy body was a function of how he’d been eating and exercising for decades. But now I know it isn’t: Brimley’s current body is primarily a function of how he has been eating and exercising for the last six months, with a special emphasis on the most recent three months. In other words, the reason that Brimley is very overweight today is not because he spent most of each day on the couch ten years ago, or because of anything he ate five years ago, or because of any exercise he failed to do two years ago. It’s because he has been on path B for most, if not all, of the past three months. He has been eating badly and exercising inadequately very recently.

Have I been fit ever since doing Phillips’s challenge? No! I haven’t slid all the way back to my “before” state, but I’ve slid maybe halfway back for extended periods. As of this writing, I’m very fit after completing my twenty-fourth consecutive week on the program. But keep in mind, neither BFL nor any other fitness plan will ever magically compel you to stay on it. I recommend BFL here because not only has it worked very well for me, and largely rescued me from a chronic weight problem that I had for many years before finding BFL, but because it puts my mind at ease about the whole fitness situation: Even when I’m not in peak condition, I’m not frustrated, confused, or in despair over it. I know exactly why I’m out of shape, and I know just what I need to do to get back in shape. And I know that when I do it, it will work, and it’s very doable.

Free Will and Fitness

In any discussion of fitness, free will is bound to surface. Earlier in this book I essentially deny that truly free will really exists, and assert that the concept of free will is useful for describing how one part of the brain has final say over decision- making. Does that mean that trying to get fit is impossible, because we are powerless to choose to do so? It’s a good question, and the answer may not be within human grasp. Let me just say that if you try to decide whether to get fit based on whether you have free will, you are searching for your answer in Johnson’s “hall of mirrors with no exit” (see chapter two). You may as well try to decide whether to go to work today, as opposed to relaxing on the beach, based on whether or not you have truly, metaphysically free will to make that choice. No decision can be reached that way; you must find another basis for your selection.

I certainly do not know that I chose fitness “freely.” If I had never heard of BFL, I might be very overweight today. Perhaps Phillips’s program, like Joe’s strawberry challenge discussed earlier, caused me to get fit. Perhaps the advent of great-tasting supplements like Myoplex made it possible for someone with my sweet tooth to be fit at all. I don’t know; but I do know that trying to figure out if I have free will is not the road to fitness, or to anything but perpetual confusion. Just as the necessary starting point for science is to assume your own rationality, sans proof (see Figure 2-9), so the necessary starting point of fitness is the presumption that you can do it. This starting point is so important that motivational speakers like Tony Robbins have made whole careers out of persuading people of this one point; in effect, issuing the strawberry challenge en masse to people mired in a sea of self-doubt; trapped in Johnson’s “hall of mirrors.” Grand, metaphysical questions of free will, like the physics of Einstein and Bohr, must be put aside when dealing with day-to-day, practical matters. We build buildings and bridges with the presumption of Newtonian mechanics, and we build our bodies with the presumption that we have the power to choose to do so.