The cycle of starting over with macros (why habit streaks fail)

Philip Pape 0:00

How many times have you hit your macros for two or three weeks, missed a day, and felt like all progress was gone? The way most people structure hitting their nutrition targets is designed after gamification, which actually doesn't work as well as you think. Today I'm showing you a different approach, borrowed from video games and RPGs, but not quite the same as gamification, where progress is much more permanent and you never have to start over. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape. And if you've ever tried to build a consistent nutrition habit and found yourself doing really well for a few weeks and then falling off, and then starting over from scratch and then falling off, today is going to explain why that keeps happening. And we always come back to this, but it's not because you simply lack discipline. The problem is systemic, it is structural. It's the system that you are using to set and progress against those targets. Now I'm gonna warn you today, I'm gonna get a little nerdy and talk about some video games. And if you've ever played RPGs like Diablo or Path of Exile or even old school Final Fantasy or Zelda, you already understand the mechanic that I'm going to describe. If you have it, don't worry. The concept is simple. The psychology behind it applies to everyone. You don't have to know video games. That's just my thing. All right, and then stick around to the very end because I'm gonna give you a three-question test to find out whether your current macro targets are in that sweet spot where progress can actually happen, or whether they're in a zone that's more or less guaranteed to make you frustrated and quit. And it takes about 30 seconds. All right, today you're gonna learn about three things. First, why the type of gamification most people use actively undermines the motivation truly needed for long-term adherence, right? Sustainability. Second, the specific psychological mechanism that makes RPG style leveling so effective. So getting leveling up. Okay, when we talk about RPGs and video games in this context, I'm just talking about making progress and leveling up. And then we're gonna look at why it maps directly to your nutrition behavior. And then third, I'm gonna give you a method that you can apply this week to your own

Why gamification borrows the wrong parts of games

Philip Pape 2:32

macro targets to turn this more abstract goal of, say, hit my protein into a concrete progressive system where you're always building and never starting over. So let's get into it and talk about the what is the popular advice and what's wrong with it. We've heard of gamification. I love the concept of gamifying your nutrition, of making it fun, you know, close the rings, right? On your uh on your watch, hit the streak, earn the badge, get the check marks. And you see this in apps, you hear this from coaches, from influencers, you see it in challenges. Plenty of tools are built around it. You see in communities, you know, my own community has a leaderboard. I don't even use it only because I know it actually doesn't work, part of what we're talking about today. It sounds like it should work, right? Who doesn't want to make a healthy behavior feel like a game? Especially something people don't often like to do. And there is a grain of truth there because games are motivating, right? We've all experienced just chilling on the couch, getting lost in a game for hours. Well, maybe not all of us, but I have many times. And you're voluntarily doing, I'll call them hard things, right? They're not hard in the IRL, right, real life context, but games tend to challenge you and get harder as you go through them, right? Whether it's a shooter or an RPG or a simulation, whatever. And so there's this feedback loop and it feels really good and it hits the dopamine center. And so the impulse is to borrow that type of energy and say, how do we apply that to other things like nutrition? And it makes sense on the surface. But the problem with these systems is they borrow the wrong parts of the games. What they borrow are extrinsic motivators, things like points, badges, leaderboards, streaks. And these are these surface elements, the shiny objects. And when you look at behavioral research about them, it's not great. These things actually don't work too well. So I'll give you a couple examples. A little over 10 years ago, Hannes and Fox 2015 ran a study at Indiana University, which by the way is one of my alma maters. I got my MBA there, um, and I know they won the national championship this year in football, which disappointed me because I'm actually a Miami Hurricanes fan. But it, you know, kind of cool that this study is from there. They took a college course and they added gamification. So they added leaderboards, badges, and points for participation. The control group got the same course, but none of that stuff. The gamified group

Self-determination theory and the what-the-hell effect

Philip Pape 5:00

had all that, and guess what? They ended up less motivated, more anxious. They scored lower on the exams, they reported lower satisfaction. So there were more gamification elements, but worse outcomes. Now, why is that? This is the cool thing. This is where it gets important. So there's something called self-determination theory, and it's a great framework where humans have three core psychological needs when it comes to sustained motivation. Three, those three things are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Extrinsic rewards like streaks and badges, they tend to erode your autonomy or your agency. And the behavior then shifts from, hey, I'm doing this because I want to get better to I'm doing this to keep my streak alive. And then when the streak breaks, you've lost the only thing that was motivating you. Kind of makes sense, right? There was a meta-analysis by Kim and Castelli that looked at gamification across health and fitness contexts. And they found a pattern where short-term engagement tends to go up, but long-term adherence doesn't. And the average dropout rate for gamified health apps is around 75% within the first 90 days. So we've got this popular approach, gamify your nutrition, that produces this, you know, dopamine-fueled honeymoon phase followed by a crash. And if it sounds familiar to you, if you've had that experience of, hey, I'm really into tracking for the first three or four weeks, and then I have a bad day or something comes up and it destroys the whole thing, it's because the system isn't designed optimally. And this streak-based thinking specifically creates a psychological trap. Researchers call it the what the hell effect. And that's just putting it nicely because I don't swear on this show. So that's as bad as it gets. Pollavy and Herman documented this across decades of dieting research that when someone is trying to maintain a perfect record, a single slip-up, it doesn't just feel like a slip-up, it feels like total, utter failure. Like, hey, I already broke the streak. What the hell? Might as well eat whatever I want today, right? That's the all or nothing thinking, the all or nothing frame baked into that streak model. And it creates a binary that causes this whole collapse. Because like, oh my God, I just missed my streak. It's all over. And I've actually felt that myself when it comes to step, step counting. I actually lowered my step count target in the app I in the app I was using because I kind of felt that phenomenon as well. It's like, oh my gosh, I just broke a streak. It just, it just kind of disappointed me, right? So here's where we are. Gamification is popular. The the type that people are using, though, with these extrinsic reward systems, undermines intrinsic motivation over time and it sets you up for all or nothing thinking. And then that derails a longer-term process like fat loss, muscle building, all the things that we are trying to do. Okay, so if badges and streaks take from the wrong parts of games, what are the right parts? Think about how a role-playing game works. And I'll explain it if you've never heard it before. Most people do. You start with a character, and the character has a set of skills, and each skill has a level. Okay, forget classes, forget, you know, all the sub-elements of RPGs. We're gonna keep

How RPG skill leveling actually works

Philip Pape 8:15

it simple. So you might have strength, for example, and it's at a level three, intelligence at a level five. Maybe you can distribute your skill points at the beginning, but you have a finite amount of skills, and that's where you start. And you usually start as this lowly character with, you know, a wooden sword or something, right? Or a club or something like that with barely any clothes, if at all. And then when you earn experience by, say, killing mobsters or mobsters, monsters, mobs of monsters. I guess killing mobsters in some games, right? Then you get skill points. You get experience points. And then you can invest those points every time you level up into the skills that you want to develop. Simple as that, right? Now, two things are happening in that model that actually apply to behavior change in real life. First is that the bar is always rising, right? The bar is always rising, but it rises incrementally. Going from level three to four is a meaningful improvement and it's also achievable. You don't just jump from level three to level 15. The game doesn't let you do it unless you're hacking it or using a mod, and your brain doesn't expect that to happen either, even in real life, right? You don't expect to go from a complete beginner to completely advanced, for example. Each level, therefore, is the small win that unlocks the next level. And this maps directly to some pretty old research now. Back in 1981, Albert Bandura studied proximal versus distal goals. So that's just short-term versus long-term goals. And he gave students the same math curriculum. One group got a single end of semester target. The other group got weekly targets that built toward that same endpoint. And the weekly target group outp outperformed on all the measures speed, accuracy, confidence. So the destination is the same, but the path structure to get there was different. And the incremental path won. Teresa Amobile did research on what's called the progress principle, and it reinforces this, but but from a little bit of a different angle. Her team analyzed over 12,000 diary entries from professionals and found that the single strongest predictor of sustained motivation was the feeling of making progress on meaningful work. Okay, not the rewards, not the recognition, but actually the progress itself. Small, visible, regular progress. So that's kind of the first concept of the short-term, step-by-step, you know, micro goals and progress. The second thing, and this is the part a lot of people miss, like when you're comparing it to a gamification of an RPG, you don't ever lose your levels, right? You never go backward. You might have a bad session, you might get killed and die and lose some gold, or you know, in a in a souls-like game, for those of you into that, which are super frustrating to me and I don't have the time, in a souls-like game, you might lose a ton of your progress from the last point, but you don't go past before that point. Your skill points remain. The things you've invested in

Flow state and the "just manageable" challenge

Philip Pape 11:17

so far are permanent because you've achieved that level. Now, if you compare that to a streak, a streak is more binary. You're either maintaining it or you've lost it, right? When you when the streak breaks, you're back to zero psychologically, even if nothing about your body or your behavior has changed. Whereas a skill level, it's more cumulative. Progress is always banked. All right, so now this brings me to the research about flow and flow states, which I absolutely love because there's an overlap with positive psychology. So when we look at flow, it is that state of complete absorption where your effort feels almost automatic. And it occurs when the challenge of what you're doing is slightly beyond your current ability to do it, just slightly. Okay, I've used other frameworks like put, like expanding your comfort zone. So that's flow. It's like the challenge, it's challenging and it's slightly beyond your current ability. If it's if something's too easy, you're gonna get bored. If something's too hard, you get anxious because you you're you get frustrated, right? Maybe that's why I don't like Souls like Souls like games. But other RPGs that have a leveling system, it naturally keeps you in that flow because each new level is one increment above where you proved you could perform. And there's debates about whether video games can even be something considered a flow state. That's a separate argument. All right, then there's the third piece of psychology here that's worth calling out, and that is goal setting theory, where goals have to be specific and difficult, but within reach to optimize your performance. So a vague goal, like I need to eat better or hit my macros, it doesn't produce the same behavior. When somebody responds to me to an email and they're like, hey, I like what I heard, you know, I've been trying to watch my food and alcohol. And that's the way they frame it. I'm trying to watch my food and alcohol. And my brain immediately goes to, okay, how are you watching? You know, you is this a specific, you know, way of tracking, blah, blah, blah, because I know that person is not going to succeed long term with that as their goal. Whereas increase my protein from, you know, 80 to 90 grams this week is a lot more specific, something you can track objectively, something that's achievable, and you could look back and say that you won that. And the RPG model forces that kind of specificity, right? Because think about in a video game, you can't invest a skill point in everything. I mean, you might get five points and distribute one to each, but you can't invest as many as you want in everything. You have to pick a skill and increase it by one increment, hold on to it, and move to the next, you know, incrementally. So the model looks like this: instead of tracking streaks or closing your rings on your Apple Watch, you define your nutrition targets as like skills on a character sheet, where say protein is a skill, calories are a skill, steps are a skill. It's up to you to decide what those are. And of course, we we help our clients and members come up with those, the things that you want to track. And then each week you evaluate which skills are ready for a level up. You add just the one increment, and then you hold on to it because you've built that skill. Now, there's

How to apply this model in practice

Philip Pape 14:20

some timing involved, like how long it takes to do some of these in the real world. There are different models. I like the roughly 45-day model. Like once you've held a skill for 45 days, then it's locked in. So it's not like in a game where you can just blow through it in a few hours, but it's a very important thing. And then you add the next point and the next skill. Now, if you're hearing this and you're thinking, all right, this makes sense. How do I actually build this kind of progressive system for myself? How do I know where to start? How fast to progress, when to hold steady. That is exactly what Eat More Lift Heavy is built around. That's right. Eat more lift heavy. It's a 26-week coaching program. So 26 weeks is six months, but notice 26 weeks, it's it's individual weeks that each help you build these skills. And it involves both training and nutrition progressing together over three phases in the 26 weeks. Phase one is stop guessing, where the first eight weeks we establish your baseline. We figure out where you actually are, not where you think you should be, and we build that skill floor. Phase two, the eat more lift heavy phase, weeks nine through 18, that's where the bar starts to rise and you really start to see massive progress. And then phase three, trust yourself, is the final weeks 19 through 26 where you internalize the system so it's intrinsically motivated, so you can run it without us or without the need for this education or push or accountability if you want. And the whole structure mirrors what we've been talking about today: this graduated progression, never going backward. Each week has one focus and one action item, of course, with a lot of resources behind it, tools, resources, modules. And it is a coached process. It's not a content library. It's it's not a bunch of different courses. It's one focus that takes you through the 26 weeks. And it works for everyone because of how customized it is. So if you are over 40, if you lift, you track, but you're not seeing the results you expect, go to wits and weights.com slash eatmore and get on the wait list. The program launches March 30, and the wait list is going to get early access and founders pricing. This is great pricing that will never be the same again. And you're not gonna find a discount like it in the future. So witsandweights.com slash eat more to get on the eat more heavy lift heavy wait lists. All right, let's keep going as I fumble my words here. And I want to get specific about how you apply this gamification framework in the right way. I want to walk you through the mechanics and then you can start doing it this week. Again, if you want support doing it with over a six-month period and really lock it in, go to witsandweights.com slash eat more. But here's what you got to do. Step one. All right, step one is to define your skills. So for most people tracking macros, your skills are let's say protein, calories, and either fats and carbs, or maybe a combination of those or whatever. In other words, some people don't care about the fats, but they do care about the carbs, some people vice versa, and some people like both. The easiest thing is just do all the macros. And then you can add maybe a fourth skill of daily steps or training sessions per week. So I would keep the whole list to like three or four to start. Otherwise, you're gonna spread your skill points to thin. Okay. Step two is to find your level one, your level one. Remember, we're going from level zero to one here. Okay. You started the game and you're trying to get to level one. Now, some games start at level one, I get it, but this is we're gonna start really low. This is not your goal number. Okay, I don't care. We're not talking about weight loss or anything like that, months down the road. This is where you are right now, consistently without stress, that you can get to for the next level. All right. So if your ultimate protein target is 140 grams because you weigh 140 pounds and you've heard me say one gram per pound in that vicinity, but you're actually averaging like 60 grams of protein right now, then going from 60 to 140 is not your level one. Your level one might be 75 or 90, right? It's a small jump. All right, and I want to pause right here because this is where most people push back, they resist, they feel like Seti, 90 grams of protein, it's not even 100. Aren't I going back, or it's not not ambitious enough, and I'm not hitting the target, right? But that is the streak mentality that we're trying to avoid. You are not lowering your standards here, right? You're establishing a floor that you've proven

Define your increments and level up when ready

Philip Pape 18:48

you can hold, which is your zero, that's where you are now. And then every level above that is progress. Every level above that is something you earn and make progress that can stick. And again, going back to the RPG analogy, if you have a new character and you know, the game said, we're gonna give you a starting strength of starting strength, that's funny, starting skill where your strength is let's say eight instead of one, you know, you wouldn't be upset about it. You'd say, or let's say it's eight instead of 20. You'd say, okay, cool, that's where I'm starting. I'm gonna build from there, right? I kind of butchered that analogy, but you know what I mean. All right, step three is to define your increments. So this is the cool part where you where you do it like a game, and you say, okay, I can increment either by day or by week, whatever makes sense. So, like for protein, a reasonable increment might be 10 grams per day. Like, I'm going to increase my target by 10 grams per day. Now, you might be using an app like Macro Factor and it has a target of 140, and you're currently hitting 80. You can still, like mentally or in a separate place, document, hey, I'm gonna try to hit 90, then 100, then 110, then 120, whatever makes sense. Okay, what I you could stick with the same target all week and then go up the next week, whatever makes sense. So for step count, it might be 500 steps per day increase, right? Just a short walk or a few extra steps around the house, whatever. They should be small enough that the effort required to hold a new level feels barely noticeable and not overwhelming, just beyond your current ability. Remember the flow state research we talked about. So that's step three is to define those increments. Step four is to level up when you're ready. And here's the rule I have: when you've held a level for five out of seven days for at least a week, and you haven't felt like it was a really hard thing to do, like you white knuckled it, you're ready for the next skill point. Now notice I said five out of seven, not seven out of seven. We're not gonna build a streak. We're building a pattern, an average, a slight increase in our ability. Okay, a pattern out of five out of five out of seven is a skill. A streak of seven out of seven, but then you break it on day eight because you can't sustain it. That that's the trap we talked about before. All right, so level up when you're ready. Five out of seven days for a week. You can come with some come up with something similar if it's a longer time horizon. That's what, like 80% consistency. All right, step five, and by the way, we have six steps in here. Step five is to pick which skill gets the point. Ah, okay. You don't level up everything at once. In a given week, only one of your skills is going to get that increment. All right. This is where the where research on what's called endowed progress comes in, where people who feel like they've already started a task are about 34% more likely to complete it. And when you've already banked, say, three levels on your protein and then you're holding steady there, then that momentum is gonna carry over when you decide to invest a point in something else instead. So, in other words, you're you're building up each of the anchors, you're building up protein over here, maybe a couple times, and then you hold, then you Build up calories over here and then you hold, maybe you build up steps over here, then you hold, you get it. So we're doing one at a time and we're building it up incrementally. You can go back and forth, but only do one at a time. And then the final

Logistics problems vs. cognitive problems

Philip Pape 22:10

step is step six to keep the old levels. So if life gets crazy, if travel interrupts your routine, if you have a bad week, you're not going to reset to level one. You're going to hold the last level that you proved to yourself that you could sustain. Now, could you drop back to level one back one level temporarily? Sure. But the overall architecture of your progress is there. You've built the skills, you have the resilience, you know what that is. A bad week doesn't delete them. So sometimes you are going to drop, but you're going to come right back to it because that is your new baseline. So do you notice the difference? What separates this from a streak-based system where every day is like green or red? There is no red day in this system. There's I'm holding my level or I'm working back to my level, and you're still playing the game. That's what that is. All right. There's one more thing I want to address because I do see this all the time with, for example, our clients and our members, just talking to listeners as well. Sometimes the reason that you don't hit your target is not about motivation, it's logistical. It's just logistical and about the environment or setup or something like that or the system. And those two problems need different solutions. A logistical problem is something like, hey, I can't figure out how to get 140 grams of protein across the three meals that I have and stay within my calories. I just don't know what to eat to make it work. Like I'm either going over on one or the other, or I'm coming under on protein or going over on calories. That person doesn't have a problem with their mindset. Like it's not the psychology. They just need someone to sit with them and show them the math, the numbers. Like, guys, sometimes it's that simple. Now I'm an engineer talking here, and sometimes very cold and calculated about these things, but sometimes that's what you need. Sometimes I need to give you some tough love and say, look, it's just numbers. Let's just figure it out. And that it kind of takes the stress out in some ways. Because then there's the trade-offs you can make and you don't get emotional about it. And that's where things like example meals and protein-dense food options and how to distribute your food and how many times that you eat and all that, those strategies can solve the math of it. And you can solve it almost instantly. Like if I if I get my hands on that problem, I'm going to solve it in about five minutes for you. Right. And I have tools for this as well. And by the way, another plug for Eat More Lift Heavy. In Eat More Lift Heavy, we're going to have like, I want to say about 10 really powerful automated tools that I've worked to code up that will help solve a lot of these problems, like how to get all your protein. And they're tools that you can access over and over and over again whenever you need them. And you're going to have human coaches too, but I think it's really powerful to have something you can go to right away. That's not AI, by the way. That's a pre-coded tool just for that problem. So that's the math side of it. That's like a logistical problem. Whereas like a cognitive problem sounds sounds different. It sounds like, hey, I know I should be hitting my 140 grams and I was doing it for two weeks, but now I can't seem to make myself do it and I feel like I'm failing. And that I see a lot too, right? It's somebody who had gotten to the point, but now they're not. And they may need to drop the target, not because they're not capable of it, but because, let's say 140 was level 12, and they were actually at level three, and they skipped levels four through 11. And so the gap between where they are and where they're trying to be is too large for that flow state. And so instead, they're in the anxiety zone. And what does anxiety do? It produces avoidance. You avoid things, you give up, you get despondent, all of that. So this RPG model handles both of these in a different way. So for the logistics problem, you stay at your current level and you just fix the plan. So you stay at your current level, right? But you fix the plan. It's just math, it's just strategies. For the cognitive problem, you're gonna drop to where you can hit five out of seven days without stress. And you're gonna call that your current level and you're gonna build from there. All right. And look, by definition, you're probably not gonna go down a bunch of levels from your current capability. It's probably that you tried to jump up too many levels and you're just trying to find your true level right now. And I know it's hard to hear. I know it's hard to hear. Nobody wants to drop their targets and feel like they're admitting it's not working and they're a failure and all this. But if we reframe it, it's reallocating a skill point. It's a strategy in and of itself. It's saying, hey, this build, this character build I have, this character class, this build isn't working for my playstyle, right? I can't be a rogue or an a sorceress right now. I have to be a barbarian. I got to go with the brute force at a lower level. Let me adjust my character. Or you still have the character, but your build is changing. And the game is still

Bonus: 3-question flow zone test

Philip Pape 27:10

going and you're just optimizing your character. All right, before we wrap up, remember I promised you a three-question test to find out if your macro targets are in the flow zone. I'm gonna share it in a second, just after this. But just another reminder: if the system I described today sounds like, yes, that's exactly what I've been missing. Oh my God, Philip, you're talking, speaking my language of what's been going on in my head, and I have been able to explain it. Eat more lift heavy is the coached and tool-based and automated altogether version of this. Okay, it's my engineering brain put into a really excellently designed program for 26 weeks, training and nutrition progressing together. You're not gonna find this in the industry at this price point. It gives you a launch, we it, not it, I, I and Coach Carroll will give you a launch plan in your first week built specifically for where you're starting, not where you wish you were, but where you're starting, how you should train, how you should track your food. Go to wits and weights.com slash eatmore and get on the wait list. And then you'll get early access. You'll also get founders pricing. There's no risk in doing that. It's free to get on the list. So go to wits and weights.com slash eat more. All right, here's that test that I promised you. And it's three questions, and I want you to answer it honestly. I know I'm giving you a lot of these, so hopefully this one hits if you need it. Question one over the past seven days, did you hit your protein target at least five out of seven days? If the answer is no, then your protein target is above your current level. That's it. I don't care what the excuse is, what the reason is, forget it all and just acknowledge and admit right now your protein target is too high. Not, oh no, no, no, it's fine. I just did this, this, this, and that's why I didn't hit it. No, no, no. No. Your protein target is too high. Drop it to wherever you were consistently hitting it before and call that your floor to build the levels from there. That's question one. Question two, when you think about tomorrow's meals, are you confident that you can hit your targets? Or do you feel a tightness in your chest right now? A little bit of anxiety and heat in your head. Okay, confidence means you're in the flow zone. Like, yes, of course I'm confident. I've been doing it. I'm confident, I've got my meals ready to go. I know what I'm gonna eat. I hit up the grocery store. Maybe I did my meal planning, all that good stuff. Maybe I've pre-logged, whatever it is for you, whatever your system is, if you're confident. But if you're very tight, if you've got butterflies in your stomach, if you're nervous or anxious, it means that that challenge of hitting your targets tomorrow is far, it's too far above your skill level, and you have to back it down one increment. That's it. Again, the levels. Question three. If you missed your target yesterday, did you feel like the whole day was blown? Or did you think, okay, I'm gonna get closer tomorrow? I'm just gonna start again tomorrow. I'm gonna get closer. If you felt like the day was blown, you're still thinking in streaks in all or nothing land, as opposed to levels. And that's okay. That's you've acknowledged it, right? That's step one. And now we want to reframe that hey, yesterday was a four out of five day. Your level is still your level. Today is a new attempt at your same level. You're not restarting, you're not starting from zero, you're just attempting again to the same level, and you have fallback plans that we've talked about in this episode. If it continues to be a challenge. Now, if you answered, yeah, confident, and I use levels to all three of those questions, then your targets are in the flow zone, right? You hit you you hit your protein targets most of the time, you're confident about tomorrow's meals, and even if you missed your target yesterday, if it was one of those two out of seven, you reframe it and like, okay, today I'm gonna do it again. We're all good. And then you build from there. If not, you know what you need to adjust. All right. I hope that was helpful. I hope it helped you reframe and think about levels in skill building, kind of the way I do. I hope you take with it something valuable. And until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, you don't build your best character starting at level 50. You earn it one skill point at a time. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.