Language and How It is Used

For the past year I have been working on learning Chinese. It is fun and not easy, and in the process it has made me think about grammar choices in English and how our language can shape us. Specifically how we use certain language to assert our thoughts or how we don’t want things to offend us or otherwise. What fascinates me is the often miss use of the word “belief”. Here is the definition (from google):

be·lief

/bəˈlēf/

noun

1. an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.

“his belief in the value of hard work”

2. trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something.

“a belief in democratic politics”

Often people can say that they don’t believe in something that is demonstrably true. For example Birth Control. In this case you aren’t using the language correctly. Birth control exists and it works quite well for most that use it. What most people mean or are getting at really is their principles, which are fine. However, in this case what these folks mean to say is “I don’t practice or use birth control and want other people to do the same”. It is odd, but changing the language can quickly change our discussions. Using the term Estate Tax generates very different feelings than Death Tax. Also the Affordable Care Act has very different emotional baggage than Obama Care. Those terms both are explaining the same thing.

Think about the language that you use with yourself and you use with others. How are you using language to sabotage yourself or your relationships? How often do you use negative self-talk like; “I can’t” when what you really mean is “I won’t”. How you speak to yourself and others that creates self-fulfilling prophecies and built in limiters to your own potential? Thanks as always for reading, and I hope this makes you think a bit more about how language shapes your life.

Active Gaining, Passive Gaining or Active Losing, Passive Losing

When it comes to manipulation of body weight the key to changes in body mass will always be calories in to calories out. As you gain weight you are in a caloric surplus, meaning that you are taking in more calories than you are burning consistently. The greater the surplus the faster the weight gain. The same is true for weight loss. So when it comes to the methods of how you get in to this surplus or deficit I want to introduce to you the concept of active and passive work.

Active work requires some energy or effort to accomplish and passive is just that, you are passive and let it happen. Now active work when it comes to gaining weight is eating. Relatively straight forward, and in order to gain more and more weight you need to eat more and more which is not easy. The active part of losing weight is actually working out. In order to get yourself more and more weight loss you have to do more and more active work. When it comes to the active work it is important to find the things that you enjoy doing, with food this is easy in that you eat the foods you enjoy. With the active weight loss you need to find the types of exercise that you enjoy to get yourself to do more of it. This is why for your average person you need to find the exercise modality that they will enjoy and adhere to.

Passive work for weight gain is to sit and avoid exercise. This is also just doing enough work so that you can gain more weight by having less calories burned throughout the day. In order to lose weight the passive work is to not eat. It is relatively simple, but quite hard for many people to do. Having to sit there and be hungry can be daunting, but it is important to develop if your goal is to lose weight. In order to make the passive work easier the goal here is distraction. It is obvious this is super effective when it comes to avoiding exercise since many people watch multiple hours of TV, social media, etc. instead of exercising. This becomes much harder to do when you are hungry. For me it was always video games where I can play them for a solid amount of time and not even realize how hungry I am or how I need to use the bathroom. So with your client or yourself, try to find the distraction that will keep them from thinking about how hungry they are.

When it comes to weight loss or gain be aware of the active and passive work that you need to do in order to achieve your goals.

Calories per Bite

A fun concept that I came across recently was when eating to gain weight or lose weight think about how many calories you are taking in per bite. How dense your food is per calorie is an easy way to help yourself get in more or less calories relatively rapidly. So if your goal is to eat more calories, aim to eat foods that are much more calorically dense. This means more meats, nuts, and even desserts as a means to get in more calories quickly. If your goal is to lose weight aim to eat less calories per bite. This means more plain vegetables. If you think about always eating about the same amount of food in a diet (pounds of food) this will help a lot with helping you feel about the same level of fullness. Taking the time to really think about how calorically dense your food is can be a useful way to help yourself lose or gain weight.

The key to this is to find foods you enjoy that are not calorically dense and those that are. Celery is not calorically dense but few people enjoy it plain. Meanwhile lard is very calorically dense but most people won’t like that either. So find foods that aren’t calorically dense, but you enjoy the taste like fruit and most vegetables. Then for calorically dense foods, find ones that have vitamins and minerals in them like meat and nuts.

Some caveats to throw out there is that density is one thing, satiety is another. Fat digests slower so you feel fuller from it compared to simple sugars. This is just part of the puzzle, but keep it in mind and as always thank you for reading.

Exercise Conversion Example List

Thanks as always for watching and if you have any questions please comment below.

Cost To Entry

Recently I have been having some conversations about how much parts of social media is annoying since anyone can broadcast anything way too easily. This comes down to issues with decreasing the cost to entry. It is easy to set up a social media account and dog pile with other people without having all of the information of what is going on (look up the Sony and Disney kerfuffle over Spiderman).

The basics of Aristotelian thinking is the first thing you need to do is verify your facts (great podcast primer on his philosophy in general) before jumping to any conclusions. This was much easier to do in ancient Greece, not in the finding of the facts and verifying them, but we didn’t have the speed of information that you can currently put information out through social media.

Think about simply twenty years ago, if you had a horrible encounter with a business you would write them a letter. Heck, maybe put them on full blast and write a letter to the editor of your local paper. This would require you taking the time to write this by hand most of the time or use a type writer. Then you have to find the address and information to send the letter to. Fill out the letter, pay the postage and then put it in the mail. By the time you have done all of this you have had hours to really think over if it is worth blowing someone up because your order was slightly messed up. Now you can live tweet about how horrible a business is and rapidly write about all of your grievances.

Let’s take a look at this cost to entry in a few different ways:

Sports

When it comes to sports the cost to entry is quite interesting. Take the sport of basketball or soccer. They have incredibly low costs to entry and that is part of why they are so popular worldwide and attract the greatest athletes on the planet. Meanwhile sports like golf, tennis, and hockey have a higher cost to entry so you naturally don’t have to compete against as great of talent since the majority of the world’s population will not have access to the sport (that isn’t saying the highest level isn’t full of great athletes). Now some folks might disagree with me, and that is fine, but just look at how hard it is to get together all of the resources you need in order to become a high level swimmer compared to a cross country runner. Both do cardiovascular work, but one you can just go out and do. The other you need a pool and swim gear, this adds a great deal of cost.

Life

So how can we manipulate the cost of entry to help us with our life? Well we can make things that waste our time harder to do and things that make our life better to do easier. This can mean never using the drive through for fast food. Make yourself park in the back and walk in to just make that a little bit harder for you to do. Set up all your clothes for the gym the night before so everything is made up and ready and the same with the food you are going to eat (meal prepping is a great thing to help yourself out with by doing). Learn easy and simple meals for you that you enjoy and are healthy for your goals, or healthier options for where you go out to eat. Think about how you can make things easier for you to help yourself out and make things harder for things you don’t need. You can put the remote on the other side of the room and unplug your Wi-Fi each day and plug it in only when you want to use it. There are a wide variety of ways you can change the cost to entry to help yourself make progress by incentivizing what you want and disincentivizing what you don’t. Take advantage of this effect. Thanks as always for reading and have a great day.