Get Fitter Before Getting Leaner
Welcome to Effective Habits, a weekly newsletter where I share evidence-based strategies and tools to help you live a happy, healthy, and productive life.
Today at a Glance:
You’re Missing Hundreds of Tiny Joys Every Day
Being Fat and Active
The Life-Changing Magic of Active Optimism
“This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to them again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today.”
You’re Missing Hundreds of Tiny Joys Every Day
Dr. Ian Bogost
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
We spend so much time trying to become happier, healthier, and more productive that we can miss something much simpler: the hundreds of tiny pleasures already scattered through an ordinary day. In his new book, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, professor, writer, and game designer Ian Bogost argues that gratification doesn’t require a dramatic experience, a major accomplishment, or even more free time—it often comes from paying closer attention to the physical world already around us. The feel of a well-made object, the satisfying click of a switch, the pattern of light on a wall, or some other detail we normally ignore can become unexpectedly enjoyable once we stop treating everyday life as background noise. The problem may not be that life offers too little pleasure, but that our obsession with happiness and efficiency has trained us to overlook it.
🎬Action!
Look for gratification, not just happiness. Keep pursuing the big things that make life meaningful, like relationships, health, purpose, and accomplishment, but don’t make them your only source of a good life. Happiness often depends on goals that take months or years; gratification is available immediately through ordinary sensory experiences. Notice the warmth of a cup in your hands, the sound of a zipper closing, or leaves crunching beneath your feet. We’ve been taught to think these experiences are background noise, while the “real” parts of life happen somewhere else. But those tiny moments aren’t distractions from a meaningful life; they’re part of what makes life meaningful in the first place.
Reconnect with the physical world. Convenience has removed many of the small physical interactions that once filled everyday life. Buttons became touchscreens, keys became sensors, tickets became apps, and countless tasks became automated. You don’t need to reject technology, but pay attention to the physical interactions that remain: buttoning a shirt, opening a window, washing a dish, sharpening a pencil, or petting a dog. Let yourself actually feel these interactions instead of rushing past them.
Find pleasure in ordinary activities. Don’t wait for vacations, celebrations, or major accomplishments to feel alive. Most of life consists of ordinary activities—cooking, cleaning, walking, gardening, fixing things, getting a haircut—and they are full of textures, sounds, smells, and movements worth experiencing. Pay attention to the rhythm of chopping vegetables, the feel of paint spreading across a wall, or the sound of gravel underfoot. Gratification is often hiding inside things you’re already doing.
Linger in small moments instead of rushing through them. Stop treating everyday tasks as obstacles between you and the “important” parts of life. Occasionally slow down just enough to experience what is happening: notice the sound of scissors during a haircut, the weight of a watering can, the feel of warm sunlight, or the air against your skin while walking across a parking lot. You don’t need to turn this into another mindfulness practice or task. Simply stay open to sensory pleasure when it appears.
Spend more time experiencing life through your body. Modern life keeps us inside our heads with planning, worrying, remembering, problem-solving, and chasing future goals. Regularly bring your attention back to the physical world you’re already inhabiting: the objects you handle, the places you move through, the weather, sounds, textures, and people around you. Your circumstances don’t need to change for life to feel richer; you may simply need to notice more of what is already there.
Being Fat and Active
Gordo Byrn
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
Body fat comes up constantly in endurance training, often with a simple prescription: train more and eat less. But for active people, that can backfire. More volume and intensity also mean more stress, hunger, recovery demand, and often temporary weight gain from glycogen, water, sodium, and increased food intake. Trying to force fat loss on top of heavy training can lead to depletion, rebound eating, poor recovery, and ultimately less productive training. The better lens is to separate body composition from performance and focus first on building “general capacity”: the ability to handle more activity at a lower physiological cost. That usually comes not from pushing harder, but from spending more time training comfortably below your limit, recovering well, and gradually expanding what your body can absorb. As that capacity grows, you can complete more work and burn more energy without the same fatigue, hunger, or recovery cost. Over time, that creates a much better foundation for both stronger performance and sustainable improvements in body composition.
🎬Action!
Build capacity before chasing fat loss. Keep most training comfortably below your limit and gradually increase how much work you can handle without excessive fatigue, hunger, or recovery demands. A higher general capacity lets you burn more energy and train more consistently at a lower physiological cost. A higher level of fitness and strength is also a more potent driver for healthspan than weight alone.
Fuel training instead of using it to create a deficit. Do not deliberately deplete yourself during hard or long sessions. Underfueling increases hunger, slows recovery, raises the risk of setbacks, and can ultimately reduce the amount of quality work you complete.
Reduce stress outside and inside training. Avoid stacking excessive intensity, racing, travel, poor sleep, caffeine, alcohol, and other stressors on top of one another. Protect plenty of genuinely easy days and use signals like energy, sleep, resting heart rate, or HRV to notice when your total load is becoming too much.
Match your approach to your current priority. During demanding training blocks, focus on performance and appropriate fueling rather than weight loss. When body composition is the priority, keep training manageable enough that a modest energy deficit does not compromise recovery or consistency.
The Life-Changing Magic of Active Optimism
Sahil Bloom
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
Optimism is powerful, but only when it moves you. Research links optimism—the expectation that good things will happen—to longer lives, stronger performance, and a greater tendency to confront challenges rather than avoid them. But there’s an important distinction between passive optimism, which assumes things will somehow work out, and active optimism, which pairs that belief with action. A pessimist leaves the wagon stuck because pushing seems pointless; a passive optimist leaves it stuck because they expect someone else to solve it. The active optimist trusts the wheel can move, then puts a shoulder to it. That mindset changes how we interpret setbacks: rejection becomes temporary rather than proof we are doomed, uncertainty becomes something we can act through, and obstacles become problems to engage with rather than reasons to retreat. The useful kind of optimism isn’t blind faith—it’s the quiet confidence that things can work out, strengthened by a willingness to help make them so.
🎬Action!
Practice active optimism. When something feels uncertain or stuck, assume it can work out, but don’t leave the outcome to hope alone.
Ask, “What can I do right now to improve the odds?”, then take the next concrete step. Treat setbacks as temporary and specific rather than proof that the whole effort is doomed, and keep adjusting your actions as new information arrives.
TOOL TIP
Spurious: A platform dedicated to making statistical literacy fun. They find surprising correlations between completely unrelated datasets — real data, ridiculous connections, zero causation. It includes hundreds of real-world datasets spanning food consumption, government statistics, celebrity metrics, health data, economic indicators, and more.
FUN FACT
Cats prefer to sleep on their left. This preference may help them engage the right hemisphere of their brains, so they can better visually process their environments and dodge potential danger upon waking.
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Disclaimer: The information provided in this newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult a medical professional for advice, diagnosis, or treatment. We are not liable for any risks or issues that may arise from using this information.
