This morning I was walking to a class and found myself stuck behind a giant 300+ pound gym junkie ambling along at a pace that my grandmother could put to shame.

I don’t know about all of you, but while going to the gym is something that I try and do regularly, it is usually not something that I do easily. It is always a mental struggle against my own laziness to get me out the door and on my way. And yet I know many people who I would deem far lazier than I am that spend 2+ hours at the gym every day.

Strange as this may seem, I believe that there are three separate, logical reasons for this phenomena.

1. Endorphins feel good – once you get to a certain level of physical fitness, working out ceases to be as much of an effort and actually becomes pleasurable.
2. The power of routine – when doing something difficult becomes a part of your daily routine, getting yourself to do it ceases to be a challenge.
3. Tiered procrastination – doing a difficult task is far easier when you know that it is putting off doing an even more difficult one. This is the reason that I will be discussing today.

How it Works

Have you ever found yourself cleaning your room or doing dishes instead of doing homework? Why is it that cleaning then is so easy but when you have no obligations at all during a day it seems so difficult?

Webster defines procrastination as “to put off intentionally the doing of something that should be done.” In essence this stems directly from one of the base laws of physics: an object will always attempt to take the path of least resistance. When applied to humans, this is sometimes referred to as the Principle of Least Effort (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort).

Taken to its extreme, this would mean that people would sit around and do nothing whenever possible. And while this is, sadly, sometimes the case, usually it just means that when presented with two or more things to do we will generally try and take the easier task. One could then be thought of as procrastinating as long as they are doing anything but the most difficult of the tasks laid out before them. This explains both the gym phenomena and that of the dishes.

If you have some difficult work to do such as math homework or doing your taxes, suddenly going to the gym or doing the dishes becomes the easier of the two options. And yet you can do it without feeling entirely guilty because after all, at least you are doing something productive.

How To Use It

What makes a task easy or difficult to do is all about how you approach it in your mind. The next time you have a lot of work to do, take a step back and think. Instead of getting intimidated and thinking “this is a ton of work, what’s on tv?” think “that essay is going to be a paint to write, let me delay that by doing this other required reading.” Or, if you really don’t want to do any of your work at the time, instead of just watching tv try going to the gym. You will find that making yourself go then suddenly has become a whole lot easier than usual.

The two primary factors involved in gaining weight are lack of exercise and an unhealthy diet. The former takes a lot of physical effort and a modicum of mental effort, the latter takes a larger amount of mental effort but essentially no physical. Physical effort is unavoidable, but mental effort can be extremely variable based on the individual and the techniques used. T

An unhealthy die usually stems from either A. unhealthy meals and / or B. too much supplemental junk food. Adjusting your meals really doesn’t take too much willpower, just an initial expenditure of effort in figuring out how to adjust your meal content. Limiting junk-food intake, however, can be very difficult, especially for those like myself who are cursed with a strong sweet-tooth.

Here are two simple techniques that will greatly reduce the level of willpower needed to control your junkfood intake: (and, as we now know, willpower is not an infinite resource)

Technique #1: The Miser Method

I don’t know about you, but one thing that I definitely value more than my junk-food is my money. Even if you are really craving a chocolate bar, if you see that the cheapest one they have at the restaurant you are in is $10, odds are you will be able to resist buying it fairly easily. Even if you just shelled out $60 for a fancy steak.

Why is this? Because you know that you could go right across the street and buy the same bar from CVS for only $0.99. Even if you know that you probably won’t end up actually buying it from across the street, the fact that you could lets you resist the urge to buy now.

The Technique

Get out a piece of paper (or open a text document) and write down a list of all the unhealthy food that you enjoy eating. Now, figure out the cheapest place in your neighborhood that this food can be purchased. Usually this will be a big supermarket or wholesale store. Now write down on the paper the cheapest unit price of each item on the list. Familiarize yourself with all of these numbers (you can carry it with you too, but that’s not so important as long as you have a general sense of all the prices).

From this point on, use this list as your baseline. If you’re at school and feel an urge for something sweet from the vending machine, look at the prices. It will be a lot easier to stop yourself from buying that small Snickers bar for $0.75 when you know that you could easily get 3 or 4 for the same price.

One of the situations where this technique has helped me the most over the past three years is with buying ice cream. On my campus there is a Coldstone Creamery less than a five minute walk from my apartment. And I love ice cream. Yet I have only ever been to Coldstone once in the entire time I’ve been here. Why? Because I know that for the same price as a milkshake at Coldstone I could go next door to CVS, buy a whole tub of ice cream, and get many, larger milkshakes for the same cost.

The next problem is preventing yourself from buying too much when you’re at the cheaper place, but if you give yourself a monetary cap for those excursions it shouldn’t be too bad. (I’ll probably talk more about that technique in a later article.)

Technique #2: Stretching Sweets

If I offered you $50 to down a milkshake in 30 seconds, would you do it?

I’d be willing to bet that most of you just thought “yes.” But do you think that you would get the same enjoyment out of that milkshake drinking it like that vs taking your time to down it? Probably not.

Food stimulates your taste buds and can induce pleasure. Yet the enjoyment you can get from a small amount of food in your mouth is fairly similar to what you would experience from a large amount of the same substance. Two M&M’s may be a little bit more satisfying than a single one, but definitely not doubly so.

Next time you’re about to eat some junk-food, stop for a second. Take only half of what you were going to, but make a conscious effort to eat it at half the speed. This may take some getting used to, but once you do you will find that that small Crunch bar really did satisfy you just as much as the king sized one would have (as long as you’re not using candy as a meal replacement, which I hope not…).

I have friends who constantly remark on how I can stay so thin while at the same time seeming to eat so much candy. The answer is really very simple: I can spend two minutes eating a single peanut M&M.

What methods do you use to control your sweet-tooth?