How to make less more

September 28, 2015 by Joshua
in Awareness, Fitness, Models, Nature, Perception, Tips, Visualization

I eat a lot of mixed nuts and peanut butter. As far as I know, they’re all healthy to someone without allergies. I eat a lot of them.

I found a site that shows pictures of two hundred calories of various foods. I like and eat a lot of broccoli. Here’s two hundred calories of broccoli:

200 calories of broccoli

Looks like an amount that would go a long way to filling me up.

Here’s two hundred calories of mixed nuts:

200 calories of mixed nuts

Not much! They would taste delicious and I love their crunchy, creamy texture, but if I wanted to fill myself with food, I’d choose the broccoli.

Here’s two hundred calories of peanut butter:

200 calories of peanut butter

Not much either.

So how to make less more?

I decided that as much as I loved eating nuts and peanut butter, I love vegetables like broccoli too and can eat a lot more of them while getting more definition on my abs, so I would eat less nuts.

You might think eating less of something I like would lower the pleasure and reward in my life. I expected so too, which is why I ate so much nuts and peanuts in the first place.

My experience was otherwise. Instead of grabbing and eating handfuls of nuts, I found myself picking up a few or even one nut at a time and eating it with more attention and focus. What I lost in quantity of nuts I more than made up for in quality of experience. I didn’t expect this result, despite having already experienced it in drinking less wine, beer, and scotch.

My reaction and feeling about something partly depends on the thing, but also on my perception of it, which depends on my attention as well as my beliefs about it.

Meanwhile, I’m eating more vegetables than ever. Beans and other legumes too.

What can you enjoy more of through more attention and focus on less quantity of it? It could be food, activities, projects, friendships, and many other things.

Come to think of it, the opposite works too: you can lose appreciation for something by increasing your exposure to it and losing focus and attention.

 

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