“More effort always gets better results.”
This is the kind of thing some motivational guru on Instagram screams at you every morning, and once you’re past 40, it’s bollocks.
Your hardest efforts can sometimes make the problem worse, and today I’ll show you how that happens.
Let’s dive in…
The Snake Farm
There’s a famous story from colonial Delhi.
The way it’s told, the government wanted fewer venomous cobras, so it offered a cash reward for every dead snake.
Sounds sensible enough!
Clever locals started breeding cobras at home to keep the cash rolling in.
When officials rumbled the trick, they cancelled the reward completely.
The breeders were left with a load of worthless snakes, so they set them free.
Delhi ended up with more wild cobras than before the policy started!
That’s the Cobra Effect: an attempted solution that makes the problem worse!
The Over-40 “Cobra Farm”
Plenty of people over 40 are running a cobra farm with their diet.
You want to lose weight, so you slash your calories Monday to Friday.
By Friday night you’re absolutely starving, and the weekend turns into a free-for-all.
Do the maths.
Undereat by 500 calories a day for five days, and you’ve banked 2,500kcal.
One big Friday night and a Saturday blowout can hand the lot back and then some.
You finish the week having eaten more than if you’d eaten sensibly all along, knackered and wondering why the scale hasn’t budged.
If you’d eaten a bit more through the week, you’d have had far less urge to raid the cupboards on Saturday.
So how do we fix that?
Here’s how to stop breeding your own cobras…
#1. Do the Sunday review
Ten minutes and a pen, once a week.
Every Sunday, give yourself 10 minutes with a pen and answer three questions.
What worked this week? What didn’t work, and what lesson can I take from it?
What should I focus on this week that I didn’t do last week?
Those three questions will take you further than any programme on the planet, because they catch the cobras before they’ve had a chance to breed.
#2. Plan for maintenance over progress
The goal only counts if you can keep it.
Plenty of people obsess over hitting the goal and never think about keeping it.
Losing weight is much simpler than keeping it off, and the two usually need different approaches.
The maintenance approach is less extreme and takes a bit longer, and in return you get something you can actually sustain.
Before you start any plan, ask yourself whether you could eat and train like this for 12 months. If the answer’s no, scale it back until it’s a yes.
#3. Count the cost before you start
Every goal has a price tag. Read it first.
Any kind of success usually comes with a sacrifice or a cost.
Before you chase your next goal, take 5 minutes and write down honest answers to two questions…
What am I sacrificing to get there?
What will reaching it cost me?
Getting shredded to a six-pack sounds brilliant.
Then the energy dips kick in, you can’t eat the same meals as your family, and you’re hangry from morning till night.
If your answers include regularly missing meals at the family table, then unless you’re an elite bodybuilder, the squeeze isn’t worth it.
Sometimes the price is worth paying. Other times the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.
Good things take time. Anything you rush tends to breed cobras, so build something you can still be doing in 12 months.
Your Move
This Sunday, block out 10 minutes and answer the three review questions.
While you’ve got the pen out, run your current plan through the 12-month test.
If you couldn’t live with it for a year, dial it back before Monday comes round.
Thanks for reading this week’s Knowledge Bomb.
See you next Friday for another instalment.
— Jay Alderton