As I tracked, I noticed several aspects of eating that make monitoring difficult. For one thing, it’s often surprisingly hard to gauge “servings.” We’re poor judges of how much we’re eating, and studies suggest that we can eat servings that are about 20 percent bigger or smaller than a “serving size” without realizing it. Also, in what’s called “unit bias,” we tend to finish a serving if it seems like a natural portion of “one,” and we tend to take one serving, no matter what the size. In a study where people could help themselves to big pretzels, people took one; when people were instead offered big pretzels cut in half, they took one half-pretzel. Also, eating directly from the container makes it impossible to monitor how much we’re eating. Whether the product is candy or shampoo or cat food, the bigger the package, the more people use. (In what seems like an aspect of the same principle, I’ve noticed that I finish books faster when I have a bigger stack from the library.)
Taking bites while cooking, eating off plates, sharing food, or eating food served in multiple bite-sized servings—dim sum, tapas, hors d’oeuvres, petits fours, appetizers ordered for the table—also make it hard to track consumption accurately (which is likely part of their appeal). One way to monitor is to save the evidence left behind—the pile of bones, the peanut shells, the candy wrappers, the day’s coffee cups or soda cans or beer bottles.
Context matters, too. One study of package design showed that people avoid the smallest and largest beverage sizes; therefore, if the smallest drink size is dropped, or a larger drink size is added (such as the Starbucks Trenta), people adjust their choices upward.
As the weeks wore on, along with keeping a food journal, I added a new monitoring habit: No seconds. When people preplate their food and eat just one helping, they eat about 14 percent less than when they take smaller servings and return for more helpings. I’d often pulled this trick myself: I’d give myself a small serving, then go back for more. The need to monitor exactly what I’d eaten, in order to record it, forced me to stop this little game.
As part of the Strategy of Monitoring, I decided to buy a digital scale to weigh myself. Although some experts advise people to weigh themselves just once a week to avoid becoming discouraged by natural fluctuations, current research suggests that weighing each day—which may strike some people as excessive—is associated with losing weight and keeping it off. Until now, I’d only weighed myself when I went to my cardio gym, but now I wanted to get serious about monitoring. (Side note: people weigh their highest on Sunday; their lowest, on Friday morning.)
I’d wanted to buy a scale for more than a year, but I put it off because of Eliza. Eliza is very easygoing, and although she spends a lot of time choosing her outfits, changing the color of her nail polish, and trying to grow her long brown hair still longer, she isn’t preoccupied with her weight or any particular body part. Nevertheless, plunking down a scale in the bathroom that she shares with Jamie and me seemed like exactly the wrong message to send to a thirteen-year-old girl.
One of my Personal Commandments is to “Identify the problem.” What was the problem? “I want a digital scale, but I don’t want Eliza to see it.” Solution: I bought the scale and put it in a little-used closet where she’d probably never find it.
People find other ways to monitor their bodies. A friend has a pair of jeans that she never wears except to pull them on to see whether they’re tighter or looser than before. For myself, I’m much happier relying on my digital scale than on form-fitting clothes. Most days, I wear yoga pants and a hoodie—the point of which is that they’re delightfully stretchy and nonconfining.
When I first started to use the UP band, I ignored its mood-monitoring and sleep-monitoring functions. Perhaps surprisingly for someone who’s preoccupied with happiness, I had no interest in tracking my moods. As for sleep—I was a sleep zealot, so I didn’t think I needed to monitor it. Sleep, as I remind anyone who gives me the opportunity, is crucial for good mental and physical health and a critical time for bodily repair and regulation. Lack of sleep negatively affects mood, memory, immune function, and pain sensitivity; it makes people more likely to fight with their partners; it contributes to weight gain.
Lack of sleep also leads to dithering. Procrastination expert Piers Steel reports that being “too tired” is the most common reason people give for procrastination. One study estimated that for every hour of interrupted sleep during the previous night, people wasted 8.4 minutes in online puttering—checking email, Internet surfing, and the like. And while many people claim, “I’ve trained myself to get by with five hours” and say they don’t feel particularly sleepy, research shows that the chronically sleep deprived are quite impaired. Yet many adults routinely sleep less than seven hours.
On a flight to San Francisco, I saw with my own eyes the evidence of people’s sleep deprivation. At midday, many passengers were fast asleep. Not dozing; completely zonked out.
I mentioned this to a friend, and he bragged, “Oh, I always sleep on planes. I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime.”
“Maybe you’re chronically underslept,” I suggested. It took all my strength not to launch into a lecture on the importance of sleep.
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I’ve learned to adjust to very little sleep.”
“If you sit still for ten minutes in a quiet room,” I asked, “can you fall asleep?”
“Yes.”
“Are you dragged out of a sound sleep by the alarm every morning?”
“Is there any other way to wake up?”
“Do you depend on caffeine and sugar to give you energy spikes?”
“Sure.”
“Do you feel too tired at night to do anything but watch TV or surf the Internet?”
“What else would I do?”
“Do you binge-sleep on the weekends by sleeping in very late or taking lots of naps?”
“Of course.”
Hmmmm.
He didn’t mind being sleep deprived, but I needed my seven hours, and I fought to protect my sleep time against any encroachment. Or so I thought, until I decided to use the UP band’s sleep-tracking function. (Or try to use it—some nights I forgot to press the button to start the sleep tracker. Finally, instead of trying to “remember,” I piggybacked this new habit onto my old habit of setting my alarm.)
To my dismay, the UP band revealed that even an avowed sleep nut like me often stayed up too late. I’d fallen into a classic failure-to-monitor trap: because I felt smug about my good sleep habits, I remembered the nights when I went to bed at 9:45, but overlooked the nights when I stayed up until 11:30 or later.
Once monitoring showed that I wasn’t getting enough sleep, I decided to give myself a specific bedtime. Every night, if I was home, I’d aim to be in bed by 10:30.