This is part 4 of our Melzaminder Series. Previously we introduced the Mindful Munching with Metrics program, talked about scale weight as a metric, and talked about proxy metrics more generally. Here we talk about how the Metrics part of Mindful Munching with Metrics work.
Alright, any non-nerds who may have wandered in, we do have a normal-person-friendly way to explain this but for our core audience I think it’ll be clearest to jump straight to a graph and an equation.
Consider a simple proportional feedback control system with the variable you want to control on the x-axis and the action you take to control it on the y-axis:
In general, we need two daily metrics: one to measure your objective and one to measure what you’re doing to achieve it. The first we call your gauge and the second we call your dial. To keep things concrete, scale weight is the canonical gauge and daily net calories the canonical dial. You adjust your net calories in order to change your scale weight.
Other examples of possible gauges include bodyfat percent, waist circumference, maybe even athletic benchmarks. As we talk about in Proxy Metrics, the true underlying objective is being strong and healthy and living a long time and things like that. Just that we need a proxy for that that we can put a number on and monitor daily.
Your dial is some very rough measure of your net caloric intake. If you want to literally count calories you can but you can pick something easier or more fun to track. If you like intermittent fasting, the length of your daily eating window can be a dial. Or number of servings, number of total grams, or bites, or maybe probability of it being a fasting day — lots of interesting possibilities.
Before we say more about gauges and dials, here’s the equation for the above graph:
$$ d = \text{clip}_{[a,b]}\left(b-(b-a)\frac{g-(r-m)}{m}\right) $$
where:
- \(d\) is the dial setting (control metric on the y-axis)
- \([a,b]\) is the domain of \(d\)
- \(g\) is the gauge (feedback metric on the x-axis)
- \(r\) is today’s value of the bright red line
- \(m\) is maxflux, how much below the red line you ideally want to be.
If you’re on or below maxflux (\(r-m\)), the dial is shoved all the way to easy (\(b\)) and you’re golden. If you’re on or above the red line (\(r\)), the dial is shoved all the way to hard (\(a\)); that’s you being in the red. For anything in between (the middle of the graph in white), lerp it.
This is all a generalization/simplification of the classic Hacker’s Diet. (See also the Bang-Bang Servo Diet. I’d be inclined to call this one “the feedback control diet” or the “thermostat diet” but Melanie says we really want to keep the d-word out of this.)
In the first post of this series, Melanie talked about the mindfulness side of Mindful Munching with Metrics. The ideal case for the program is that you can master mindful munching and make all the metrics madness moot. The gauge and dial can be thought of as guardrails — rules that go into effect when/if mindfulness alone isn’t sufficing.
Picking your Dial’s domain
Whatever your dial, you need to pick its domain by naming (a) the strictest possible setting, that you hope to never need but that, if so set, would unambiguously improve your gauge, and (b) the laxest possible setting — what you’d do without thinking about it. For example, if your control metric were daily calories consumed the range could be 0 to 3000 calories. If it were length of eating window it could be 0 to 16 hours.
As part of Melzaminder, we put all that in a spreadsheet (only participants can access it) which encodes the above formula. Intuitively, if you’re at or below the maxflux line on your Beeminder graph, hooray, your dial is turned to max laxity (b). If you’re on or above the bright red line, oh no, the dial’s laxity goes all the way down (a). If you’re halfway between maxflux and the red line, the dial will point to the midpoint of (a) and (b).
You don’t have to keep track of any of that math and can treat it as a black box. Enter the value of your gauge each day, see the computed dial value to know how much to eat/burn that day. The summary tab of the spreadsheet looks like this:
(More participants have gotten their gauges and dials set up since that screenshot.) Each participant also has their own tab of the spreadsheet with all their data. Again, if you’re mindfully munching successfully, the black box will peg the dial to its upper bound (shown as all green above), which means doing what comes naturally and listening to your body (and to Melanie).
Seeing How You Eat
Tied with net calories for most popular choice of dial in Melzaminder is plates of food, as measured by the number of squares in the See How You Eat app. Here’s a typical day for me, with 6 squares filled in:
(Ok, fine, I scrolled back a week till I found a non-embarrassing one.)
Using number of meals, i.e., squares in that app, is a nice compromise between simplicity and accuracy. Sure, there’s the ice cream truck loophole of eating a single plate stacked two feet high with fudge but (a) there’s the social pressure in the group to not abuse it like that, and (b) even if you did, that would just back you into the corner of eventually getting your dial pushed to zero plates/squares and that will move your gauge tout de suite.
I can feel Melanie grimacing at me here. Emphasis on part (a) above. Follow the spirit of the dial!
But I do also recommend picking the “impossibly strict” extreme to be something that makes failure kind of theoretically impossible, up to and including full-on fasting. Just work hard on the mindfulness side of things to avoid ever letting the dial get pushed that far. That makes it a true guardrail — something painful to crash into but still better than the alternative of careening off a precipice.
Exercise as a Dial?
Sensible as this sounds, we don’t recommend this. It’s surprisingly hard to control weight via exercise and movement. The lopsidedness of calories in vs out is downright discouraging. I’ll spend half a day building up a calorie deficit and then undo it all in five minutes of mindlessly eating cookies. So “keep dialing up your workout minutes or steps until your weight goes down” doesn’t tend to work by itself. “Keep dialing down your calories until your weight goes down” does. As does pretty much any other measure of the amount of food you’re consuming, even very coarse ones, like the example above of squares in your food collage.
Net calories
Other than the onus of counting them, I feel like net calories is the best of all worlds. This is what I’m personally using (and Bee as well). A Fitbit or smartwatch tracks calories burned pretty similarly to steps. So if you did want to focus on exercise for your dial you could hold calories consumed constant and do as much walking as dictated by your gauge.
The extrema I’ve chosen are -2000 (“impossibly strict”) to +2000 (“maximally lax”). That -2000 could be achieved, for example, by a fasting day with 500 calories burned on top of my basal metabolic rate (BMR) of 1500. And “maximally lax” would allow sitting perfectly still all day while eating 3500 calories, since I’d always get my -1500 BMR. Again, we don’t expect to hit the extremes, we just need to define theoretical bounds to make the math work.
Servings of veggies
This is the one Melanie’s using. If her weight is in the danger zone she ups her daily fistfuls of veggies as high as 10. But Melanie’s kept her dial fully green almost every day so this one is still fairly untested as a guardrail. My gut (which, admittedly, is a lying fiend) tells me that there should be a more explicit clause about the veggies displacing other food. I’m imaging my dial deep in the red, I’m stuffed full of ice cream, and still choking down another 7 handfuls of veggies in order to hew to the dial.
Maybe at the very least a rule that all the veggies have to get eaten first, before any other food? [UPDATE: Melanie confirms that this was in fact implied!] That still allows for the Dessert Stomach loophole but maybe Mindfulness can keep you from exploiting it. And at least you can’t totally back yourself into a corner if you commit to getting all the prescribed veggies in first.
Do mindfulness and metrics mesh?
I’m more and more excited and optimistic about this Mindful Munching + Metrics hybrid. My sense/prediction is that, long term, mindfulness lapses are natural, that mindfulness takes at least a trickle of ongoing mental energy, and that without guardrails mindfulness would curb but not eliminate gradual unbounded weight gain / loss of fitness. (Mindfulness is still very worth it, to be clear!) Mindful Munching without metrics might keep one’s weight steady or going down for a long period but then holidays or vacations or work deadlines happen. My impression from all of Melanie’s reflections on her own mindfulness progress is that this is true even for her. Her weight sometimes creeps up when not running a mindful munching group and comes back down during it.
Interestingly, you could think of the responsibility of running the group as itself a kind of guardrail. Melanie has to model all the best behavior! For a participant who wants this to work lifelong, setting up guardrails might be a necessary component. Metrics aren’t the only way to do that — you could rejoin the program a couple times a year? — but I think the metrics (gauge + dial) might be hard to beat in the long term.
But I’m very biased and extreme and bright-line-y in my own thinking. Also I’m finding that I’m not super susceptible to many of the pitfalls of diet mentality. I don’t relate to feelings of guilt, for example. So for me, hewing to my dial and practicing mindfulness go hand in hand and support each other rather than hinder each other. Or at worst it’ll be a bit less of a chance to practice assessing satiety and such if my dial dictates only one meal, say. But then the next day or the day after probably the dial will be back to mostly green so no real harm.
That’s all how I’m experiencing things personally. We’ll see how other participants assess this. And if you want that to include you next time, fill out the interest form.
PS: This all works fine for weight gain as well as weight loss. We have one participant keeping their weight above their bright red line.