So now it’s week three, the final week of the course in self-discipline.  Here’s what you need to do:

Day One - Go to the store and buy your favorite brand of chips or cookies or whatever snack you really like. Go home, open it up and eat one serving size. Leave it on the counter and do not touch it again the rest of the week.

Day Two – Skip breakfast then go into your favorite fast-food place for lunch. Get one small thing to eat and a water and leave.

Day Three – Set your alarm for 3:3o in the morning. Wake up, do two jumping jacks, go back to bed.

Day Four – Bake some cookies. Wrap two in foil for yourself and then give the rest to a neighbor or co-worker.

Day Five –  Go to an all-you-can eat buffet (a cheap one). Fill up your plate just once. Eat it and go.

Also, gather up all your old diet books and donate them to the public library.

Day Six – Do one sit-up a minute for 60 minutes.

Day Seven – You made it, congratulations. Have your favorite meal to celebrate. A lot of books will tell you not to celebrate weight-loss or sticking to a weight-loss plan with food.  That’s because they think you’re too weak to be able to enjoy a nice meal without completely going off the deep-end. But I disagree. You can have a good meal and then go back to whatever your weight-loss plan is as soon as you set down the fork.

Also, if no one else in the house has eaten it in the past week, throw out whatever it is you bought on day one.

There you have it.

See how it builds? In week one you practice doing random things you don’t want to do. In week two you practice doing thing you don’t want to do that may have some emotional weight to them. In week three you practice doing things you don’t want to do that have some relationship to your overall goal. So if your goal is to stop smoking then in week three you’ll spend one day not smoking after you eat (or whenever it is people smoke) or going out drinking and not smoking. Or whatever, I don’t know, I don’t smoke.

What you want to do is to put yourself in the position to fail, and then when in that position, make the choice not to fail.

You might say, “Well sure, I can put myself through these little tests, but that doesn’t mean I’ve developed any self-discipline.” I understand that logic. But here’s the deal, everything is just a series of little tests.  Waking up 20 minutes early to walk a mile every day is a daily test. Getting a single doughnut as opposed to a half-dozen is a test you might deal with once a week. But now you can look back and say, “I can wake up a little early to get in some exercise. Hell, one time I woke up in the middle of the night to do two jumping jacks.” Or, “I don’t have to eat everything they have at this superbowl party. One time I went to an all-you-can-eat buffet and just had one plate of food.”

I know the argument will be, “Why practice eating one doughnut? Why have one serving of the snack-food you know you shouldn’t have any of. Why not just practice not going to the doughnut joint or buying any junk food.” Because, I don’t want you to be scared of food. I want you to have mastery over it. Even if it’s a complete struggle for you, you can still master the impulse.

I may have used this analogy before — and whether I have or haven’t I know I’ve thought about it before which is pretty disturbing. If I have to have a pedophile living next door to me, I want the one who has dealt with the impulses and is now able to be around children without acting out on those impulses. I don’t want the guy who has locked himself away so that he doesn’t see any kids and that’s what keeps him from acting out. That guy is weak. And as soon as it happens that he has cracked the door open to get the newspaper at the exact moment my son is walking by, then POOF, there goes Junior’s pants.

Self-discipline is about having the impulses but not acting on them (or, in the case of exercise, not having the impulse but doing it anyway). I want you to be able to walk into Taco Bell and just come out with one or two things. I don’t want you hiding from high calorie food and subsisting on just lettuce and puffed rice and one day when you pass a Taco Bell you end up raping a burrito. Got it?

Well, I will find no greater summary than that last statement. I hope my attempt to codify the manner in which I kind of organically improved my own self-discipline will help others or give them something to think about. If you have any questions, send me an email.

In week one the goal was getting yourself to do things you had no desire to do, but they were all random, meaningless gestures. This week you are going to do one thing per day that you have been putting off. These are 7 things that you know you should do, but you haven’t been able to get yourself to do for at least a month.

Now, I can’t tell you what these tasks should be because I don’t know you. But they should be things you’ve put off for some time now. Some examples:

• Household fixes you’ve been putting off: changing a light bulb or a smoke alarm battery, fixing a wobbly table leg, tightening a screw that is keeping a cupboard door from closing correctly, cleaning out a junk-drawer, taking down that out-of-date calendar.
• Write a letter to someone you haven’t communicated with in a while that you don’t want to lose contact with.
• Make a doctor or dentist appointment.
• Drop off old clothes at Goodwill

Make your list.

You might assume this would be an easier assignment than last week when you had to do 7 meaningless tasks, but I find it’s not. There’s no psychological weight to meaningless tasks, and they’re novel, so they’re easier to do. But making an appointment with a doctor or doing things to take care of your home can have meaning to you beyond the action itself. And that meaning can get in your way much more so than the actual difficulty of the task will.

So don’t think about why you should do the task. Don’t think, “I should go through these magazine and throw out the ones I will never read again. I don’t want to do it. But if I don’t do it, nobody else will. And then we will have magazines all over the place and the house will look like a shit-hole. And then my mother-in-law will visit and think I’m not good enough for her son. And then I’ll question this whole stupid marriage.” You don’t want to fall in that hole of critiquing yourself or trying to justify things or finding faults and flaws in things — you just want to throw out the fucking magazines. So instead your thought process should be this, “I should go through these magazines and throw out the ones I will never read again. I don’t want to do it… but getting myself to do things I don’t want to do is my new thing so I’ll just go ahead and do it.” Try to think of nothing else about a task other than that you know you should do it but don’t want to. The goal here is that hopefully one day your desire not to do something will be your cue to actually do it.

Look, I’m not a self-help guy, and would never want to be. I’m just trying to break down a technique that I came to organically in my life. It would be great if this helped someone else out too. But if not, I hope it’s at least an interesting thought experiment.

So, in week one you do 7 pointless things you don’t want to do.

In week two you do 7 productive things you know you should do, but still don’t want to do.

In week three you will apply this technique to whatever your specific goal is. For the purposes of this blog it is weight-loss.

Ok, so self-discipline is all about being able to get yourself to do things you don’t want to do. So to work on that we’re going to do some things we don’t want to do. The first week is devoted to doing things that serve no functional purpose whatsoever. These activities aren’t going to help you lose weight, or affect any area of your life other than your self-discipline muscle. In most other respects they are completely useless. That’s okay. Some of this will probably seem childish because doing something for no reason is the type of thing children do. But just try to get past that this week. Next week we will focus on doing things you don’t want to do that are actually beneficial in some way.

So here’s the plan:

Day One – With your feet together, stand in one spot without moving or shifting your weight for 5 minutes. Realize that this simple act is something you’ve probably never done before unless you’ve worked as a human statue.

Day Two – Buy a bag of sunflower seeds. Count the number of seeds in the bag.

Day Three – At some point today, put the palm of your right hand on your forehead. Keep it there for 15 minutes.

Day Four – When you’re out somewhere, find someone you don’t know, who is not physically attractive to you, and who is not wearing a jacket you like. Say to them, “I like that jacket.” This will be very easy for some of you to do, and very difficult for others. That’s okay.

Day Five – Take a shower. At the end of it, turn the water to cold and stand under it. This will be unpleasant. Stay under the cold water and say the pledge of allegiance at a normal pace, then you can get out.

Day Six – Get a metal spoon and put it on the table. Stare at it for 5 minutes and try to bend it with your mind. Don’t let your mind wander. This is not about looking at a spoon while you think about your day, this is about concentrating for 5 minutes on bending the spoon. This is a particularly useless exercise because psychic powers don’t exist. It doesn’t matter. Try it anyway.

Day Seven – Get a sheet of paper and write this sentence 100 times, “I don’t want to write this sentence.” Fold it up and put it in your wallet or purse.

At the end of the week you will have done seven things that you did not have any natural inclination to do. Good job. That’s how it starts.

I had a revelation last week while watching The Newlywed Game. Yes, I know, who hasn’t.

It was The Newlywed Game that is currently on the Game Show Network with Carnie Wilson as host, and it was “Celebrity” Week. The definition of “celebrity” on the Game Show Network is stretched farther than the waistband on Carnie Wilson’s yoga-pants. The celebrities in two of the episodes I saw included four former contestants from The Biggest Loser. They all looked… fine, certainly better than they did before they started The Biggest Loser, but it was clear that they had gained back some of the weight. In some cases, a lot of the weight. And then I looked at Carnie Wilson, who got her stomach stapled years ago and is now pretty damn big again. And I was reminded of Oprah (who you may recall I wrote a letter to about a year ago) and her declaration that she was going to give up her weight-loss battle. Oprah, of all people, who has every resource imaginable (including someone to cook healthy food for her!) can’t figure out a way to work this shit out. And the Biggest Loser people who have access to amazing personal trainers and learn everything there is to know about diet and nutrition and have the added pressure/incentive of walking down the street and everyone saying, “oh, there’s the guy who used to be fat.” They don’t seem to be able to keep it together. If these people who have been given all the tools  for success can’t lose weight, or can’t keep it off, what chance do you have? What can you bring to the table that Oprah can’t? Nothing! Oprah can buy and sell you 1000 times over. Her favorite things are cashmere sheets and gourmet macaroons. Let’s be honest, your favorite things are double-ply toilet paper and Cheesy Gordita Crunches at Taco Bell. Oprah bests us in every category but one. And this one category is the only thing necessary to lose weight: self-discipline.

Yes, I know it blows that that’s the answer, but it’s just a logical progression. If it’s not about having the right personal trainers, personal chefs, exercise equipment, knowledge, or motivation — what’s left? Just you, and me, and our ability to get ourselves to do things we don’t want to do.  Self-discipline.

There are hundreds of thousands of weight loss tips,diets and exercises online and in books, and yet there is almost nothing written about how to gain self-discipline. After my Newlywed Game revelation last week I listened to an audio lecture by a guy named Brian Tracey called The Miracle of Self-Discipline. It didn’t tell you how to gain self-discipline, it just told you what to do once you have it. “Get to work an hour before everyone else and leave an hour after.” Uhm, no thanks. Then I read a book called “Self-Discipline in 10 Days” which was a pretty typical self-help type book, and those tend to make feel sick. And it didn’t say much about how to get self-discipline.

So, that’s the question: how to acquire self-discipline. Well, just like anything, you acquire it by practicing it. This is not a new concept to me. This blog was started on the notion that unnecessarily challenging yourself was beneficial to the process of losing weight. The psychologist William James said, “Do every day or two something for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.” Doing something for no other reason than you’d rather not do it is the basis of practicing self-discipline. In this old post I mentioned some challenges one could take on to work on their self-discipline in regards to weight-loss. Those exercises gave me the idea for a step-by-step course on self-discipline that I will post starting next week.

The idea being this:

- You will practice doing things you don’t want to do.

- You will begin to see yourself as someone who is capable of doing things you don’t want to do.

- The next time you find yourself alone with a pizza, wanting to eat the whole thing, and not wanting to stop after 2 slices you’ll say to yourself, “Yes, I don’t want to stop eating this. But I know I should stop. And I’m capable of making myself do things I don’t want to do, so I’ll stop now.”

- The habit of self-discipline grows. (That’s the theory.)