Muke's growing journey

So I figured instead of miserating I’d try and be all analytical and constructive and such. Bad behaviour patterns, as the Greek philosophers would say, tend to stem from not actually understanding the best way to proceed. If we examine the antipattern, we can find out what’s going wrong and how to fix it.

So:

Gaining Antipatterns: The “shutdown” response to scarcity
(number one of what could possibly become a series)

The problem to be examined: A gainer’s resources, money and time in particular, are limited. This is a problem for the gainer, because he’s trying to put on weight, but may not have the money for sufficient food, or the spare time in which to eat it.

A breakdown of the factors involved:

• The gainer needs to eat large amounts of food to get fatter.
• The gainer needs money to buy large amounts of food.
• The gainer has other things that require his money (bills, clothing, transportation).
• The gainer needs time to eat large amounts of food.
• The gainer has other things that require his time (work, society, hobbies).

The easy, but wrong solution: The gainer eats less. He still tries to gain but doesn’t commit extra time and money to the process, and errs on the side of caution to make sure ends meet. The rationale is “I can’t afford this” or “I don’t have time for this.”

The resulting state of affairs:

• The gainer only ends up eating enough to maintain—or ends up losing weight.
• The limited time and money the gainer does spend on gaining is thus wasted.
• The lack of results is discouraging.

Clearly this is not a productive use of the resources.

So, potential ways to overcome the factors and make progress:

To reduce the need to eat large amounts of food:
Find ways to adjust metabolism.

Personally I’m not a big fan of this idea and have never had much luck when trying to manipulate it, but I know it does work for some.

Choose calorie-dense foods to gain more with less.

I generally have had decent luck with this, but I’ve been neglecting it lately. Something to work on.

To reduce shortness of money:
Find ways to make additional income.

Hello, Paypal button.
(Of course that’s the wishful solution. More practically, I may have to lower my art prices and start selling.)

Manage food reserves carefully—if less is wasted, less has to be bought.

I’ve taken to doing this lately. I keep a list of stuff in my pantry, and choose meals that use the stuff I already have so I only have to buy supplementary stuff, instead of a whole week’s worth of food at a time, and I prioritize meals that go through produce and other things that’ll go bad quickly, so I use things up instead of throwing them out. The past couple of weeks I’ve done this and managed to reduce my grocery spending from $50 for a week to $20-$30. (But I still need to take the next step and start making use of that savings appropriately.)

Regarding other things that require money:
Make a budget and see how much can really be spared for food.

I’m going to have to adjust my budget shortly anyway… I think I’ve mentioned things’ll be getting tighter and my cash flow forecast is a downward-facing dog, but we’ll see what balancing it’ll do.

To reduce shortness of time:
Find ways to free up more time.

Haha, this is a hard one. I do have mealtimes in a schedule, but some of them are pretty short. Mind you, large swathes of free time don’t particularly help me to eat—it’s the weekends I end up eating less, just because my time isn’t as well structured.

Spend less time on food preparation.

This doesn’t mean going out to eat; you may not be exerting yourself preparing food, but you’re probably still spending half an hour on the drive to a food joint, waiting while you’re there, and driving home… so if you’re going to spend the time, you may as well save yourself the cost of labor and gas, and eat at home. But even at home you can end up spending more of your time cooking than eating. One thing I’ve been doing regularly is doing a lot of cooking for the whole week on my weekend—then I can go through the weekdays without having to worry about anything more than the microwave.

Have snacks at hand. Not to live off of, but in case for whatever reason you don’t get your regular meal, or do find yourself with extra time to eat, you can have handy calories. (This is one I definitely need to work on, just because the usual types of snack aren’t really appealing to me. But I’ve been finding breakfast cereal to be decent munchings.)

Regarding other things that require time:
Take time out to eat.

Outside of meals it doesn’t have to be large amounts of time. Even if you’re busy at work you may not spend all your time working—when you get up to use the restroom or fetch a drink, even a small snack on the way back helps. (This one I’m really bad at at home: I get too focused and I don’t give myself time to eat, even when the food is within reach. Another thing to work on.)

Anyway, so I guess from what I’ve thrown together here I’ve found a few things I need to start doing or get back into, some habits to cultivate… Anything else you all might suggest?