Applying the Potato Chip Rule to transform your life
[Extending (pun intended) what was written in So many resolutions dead already. SHOCKER? Not at all…]
There is a rather unpretty reality for most of us who graduated from high school in the mid-1980s, or before. Our hairlines that used to go all the way to our forehead now stop at our ears or way behind them (and many don’t have enough hair to form an actual line anymore anyway). The belts we wore to hold our (much smaller) pants up hung closer to our hips than our armpits. Our six pack was something we could proudly show by taking our shirt off (and now we do so by taking it out of the refrigerator). Our heavy breathing late at night usually had to do more with passion than simply getting up to use the bathroom.
“What happened to me?” is a common question asked on the morning of every high school reunion, but is more emphatically raised after the 15th, 20th or even approaching the 35th for some of us. The answer for the most part is, thankfully, “NOTHING TRAUMATIC!” Indeed, most of us live relatively blessed lives of slight overabundance: no major traumas with more time, food and comfort than the conditions we were evolutionarily hardwired to have. When we are stressed, however, the stressors are NOT the ones we previously had to deal with (real tigers eating us vs. “paper tigers” psychologically attacking us) and we no longer have to react to them in the same way (by running away from the real tigers we, instead, stew in a toxic soup of stress hormones until the fear subsides). This combination is the perfect recipe for our gradual downward transformation. A series of almost imperceptible changes over a long period of time lead us from healthy and vibrant kids to bald(ing), overweight and over-stressed adults.
So what is the “Potato Chip Rule”? How does it relate to the information above? And how does it apply to LIFE?
The average potato chip contains approximately 15 calories. Not a tremendous amount, but not an insignificant amount. Importantly, the 15 calories in a single potato chip is a tiny fraction of the 2,000 to 3,000 calories that many people (subconsciously) consume daily — so its presence or absence goes unnoticed in some ways: it’s within the “background noise” of an average person’s normal diet. Unnoticed does not equate to innocuous, however. If a person adds just one potato chip-worth of calories to their diet on a daily basis (or decreases their overall physical expenditure by the same amount) and does this for the next 10 years, do you know how many “extra” calories he or she has consumed? And how many extra POUNDS this equates to? Although not scientifically validated in all instances, a simple “2,000 calories equal one pound of fat” conversion can be used to best guess the effect. Using this math, nearly 55,000 extra calories and over 25 pounds are gained over 10 years … by just an extra potato chip each day.
The cumulative effects of stress, negativity, inactivity and unnatural chemicals are similar to the nutritive impact of a potato chip. Simply adding these together would be bad enough, but we know that they interact with one another and lead to supra-additive results (i.e. not in a 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 fashion but a 1 + 1 + 1 >> 3 way). Multiply this by a few decades, and you can easily see how the mirror is met with screams of horror the morning of someone’s 35th high school reunion.
Thankfully what drives the demise in one direction is the saving grace in the opposite. Excluding the equivalent of one potato chip per day, a practice that again goes largely unnoticed on a daily basis, saves the system the equivalent of 75 pounds worth of calories over 30 years. Decrease the amount of stress by a small amount, stop ingesting even a tiny fraction of bad food, or kick your happy-ometer up a teeny bit, and you can see that a life can be completely transformed?
Critical to this is the addendum: OVER TIME. Yes, massive transformations can happen quickly but they do not usually happen overnight. And for good reason: our brains and bodies are ideally designed for large-scale changes to not happen, especially when we ask them to do “too much too quickly.” This thought will be detailed in a future blog, but suffice it to say now that it is through small — even to the point of being imperceptible — steps that we most dramatically change.
To put it in graphical terms, which life would you like to live:
We MUST keep this information at the forefront of our minds — and our daily routines. Whatever we did yesterday should not be dramatically changed today (upward or downward). We should only SLIGHTLY modify the routine and keep that level of activity as the new baseline until our mind and body adapt and consider this the new “us.” Only then should we begin another round of nearly imperceptible change(s). We don’t need to change things dramatically or try and do heroic things. Just one potato chip per day…
Let’s help each other this new year to realize that we don’t need to radically alter our lives to begin living healthier ones. Let’s simply recognize the power of the small — and use it to transform our lives?
