Slob 2.1

I kicked off the holiday season in the travel mode. So I can tell you, with consummate authority, that all roads lead to my plate. Meanwhile, whether traveling or not, the rhythm of the holidays seems to march to the drumbeat of food. Egads, at this rate I won’t be able to fit into my skinny jeans by New Year.

Hey, I’m not the only one. Many people are keeping a wary eye on their belt notches. The battle of the bulge is a perennial topic but the holidays sure do amplify things.

I never try to sell anyone, least of all myself, on having any good habits, so you know you’ll never get any finger-wagging from me. I just want to get maximum mileage out of my bad habits.

So I keep in mind, like any experienced navigator, that it’s more effective to make a few little corrections early in the game than to make big corrections later on. Toward this end, I’m embarking on an experiment called Slob 2.1, an update to my Slob 2.0 regimen.

The Slob 2.0 approach rolled along about six months ago, and I mentioned it in this space on June 14. The approach was to cut French fries and sugary soda out of the picture. Simple? Sure.

Having made this small course correction, as the holidays loomed closer, I wondered if I could make some other course corrections just for the heck of it.

Slob 2.1 merely adds some more useless and unhealthy fare to the list of stuff I’ll avoid, including, notably, the panoply of junk food and sweets we’re all tempted to reach for. None of this fare is important; all of it is frivolous.

I never considered what a habit snacking can become until I was a corporate executive. The vice president of administration got fired, and instead of hiring another one they just stapled the entire administrative department beneath my name, further proving that nothing good ever happens on Mondays.

Anyway, in the following months, as I’d tend those new responsibilities, I began to notice that many of the clerks were eating all day long.

One enterprising lady came by the building twice a day, once mid-morning, and once mid-afternoon, going floor to floor selling snacks from a large ice chest on wheels. I noticed that she was assiduous about maintaining a reliable schedule, and she did a great business giving the office workers a regular junk food fix twice a day.

I think the regular schedule helped cement the routine in the minds of the workers until it became such a habit they didn’t even notice it.

Oh, but I did. Not that I was some sort of observational genius, but by pure randomness I stumbled across the phenomenon that during a few meetings, many clerks suddenly appeared fidgety and distressed for no apparent reason. I mentioned this to one of my pals, a far older and more experienced manager than I was at the time, and he’s the one who clued me into the fact that those meetings were keeping the clerks from their regular snack times.

My theory, which might be totally wrong, is the disappointment in missing an anticipated snack was more painful than the act of actually eating the snack was pleasurable.

For example, if you give someone a soda and a candy bar, it might be a nice gesture, but it’s not that big of a gift. On the other hand, if you take away someone’s soda and candy bar, they might really register a sense of loss.

In terms that an economist would use, the loss of utility by missing a snack seems to exceed the gain in utility by eating it.

Which might be one reason that some habits, once acquired, can be so hard to break. It’s not that the habit itself is so fun (Is eating a bag of potato chips really so fun?), it’s that denying the indulgence, once the specter presents itself and the indulgence is expected, can be disproportionately unpleasant.

I suspect that we all have little clerical departments in our heads, departments that have fallen into regular habits that we won’t even be aware of until we say “no.”

And, bringing this point home, these habits can add up. A rule of thumb I’ve seen is that if you change your intake of calories by 500 per day, this will result in changing your weight by about one pound a week. Well, that’s no big deal on its own, until we consider that one pound a week adds up to 52 pounds in a year. I’m taking this rule of thumb at face value; I hadn’t audited it, and I don’t care to, since if it’s even in the ballpark it’s sufficiently instructive.

Such is the big idea behind Slob 2.1, which is, in summary, my concept to loosen up for the holidays without having to loosen my belt as a consequence. Ending the year on this note might be a good way to start the next one, but, for now, we’ll just have to wait and see.

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