Here is an update on the Save the Dan obby. I consulted with a health counselor at MIT Medical. She recommended the book The Sugar Addict’s Total Recovery Program by Dr. Kathleen DesMaisons. I just read it and here is what I learned.

DesMaisons’s research shows that sugar addicts may have their body biochemistry to blame. Three inherited factors apparently contribute to sugar addiction: carbohydrate sensitivity, low levels of serotonin and low levels of endorphin. When you eat carbs, your blood sugar rises, and the body releases insulin to regulate blood sugar. If you have carbohydrate sensitivity, your blood sugar increases faster than it should. Your body overreacts and produces too much insulin, which cause your blood sugar to drop quickly. So, you tend to go on sugar high-low swings. Two hours after a donut, you suddenly find yourself dying for food, you eat whatever is in sight.

If you naturally have lower levels of serotonin in your brain, then you are likely to be more impulsive and prone to depression. Sugar, as well as simple carbs that quickly turn into sugar (bread and pasta), will immediately give you a comforting feeling which temporarily eases the depression.

The third factor that contributes to sugar addiction is low levels of endorphin. Endorphin is the natural pain killer your brain produces that gives you a euphoric feeling. Endorphin levels apparently also affect self-esteem and sense of confidence. Sugar can activate endorphin. If your body doesn’t naturally produce enough endorphin, it tries to compensate by upregulating (opening more endorphin receptors), which will give you a much bigger response when you do eat sugar. In effect, your sugar high is much more intense than someone with normal endorphin levels. This is why a sugar sensitive person feels like he’s in heaven when eating an ice cream cone. All these factors combine to make sugar irresistible.

The book then goes on to outline a simple seven step program to eliminate sugar cravings and overcome the addiction. You will have to read the book to get the details. The key, according to DesMaisons, is to eat some protein with every meal (especially breakfast), and to eat a small potato (with the skin) before bed. I know, the potato part is a little weird, but it is supposed to raise your serotonin levels in a natural way. It’s that or Prozac.

I’m starting Dan on the program as of tomorrow. We’ll see how it works.

Have you ever broken up with someone? Or rather, have you ever contemplated breaking up with someone? If your answer is yes, then you may be familiar with this line of thinking, “I hate the way he … and … and I really can’t stand it when he…. BUT, he is really awesome in so many ways. He is … and … and he makes me … What do I do?!?!?”

If you ask John Gottman, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, he would have given you a pretty good answer without even having had met you or your S.O. Well, let me rephrase. He wouldn’t tell you what you should do, but what is likely to happen, as in whether the two of you will end up staying together in the years to come. After having studied over three thousand couples, Gottman is able to predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple will stay together. The key, according to him, lies in the ratio of positive vs. negative interactions. He found that in order for a relationship to be stable, positive interactions have to outnumber negative interactions by a factor of 5 to 1. For couples that fall short of this ratio, the relationship tends to spiral into negativity and eventually end in breakup.

Contrary to popular belief, Gottman found that a couple doesn’t necessarily have to be excellent communicators who always work out their problems calmly and agreeably. A volatile couple can have a great relationship too because the heated arguments and screaming fights are often offset by passionate makeups and uproarious good times. In contrast, an avoidant couple may rarely confront their differences head-on — they simply agree to disagree. But, these couples tend to lead separate lives and are often more reserved in their expressions of affection for one another. In their own way, they can also strike the 5:1 balance and be pretty happy together. The problem comes when a volatile person dates an avoidant person. In these cases, the avoidant partner would often feel attacked and picked on while the volatile partner would experience a lot of frustration, since from their perspective, their partner is always running away from the problems and never seems to face things head on.

In his book Why Marriages Succeed or Fail, Gottman gives solid advice to help couples fight in a more compatible manner. After all,

total negativity = amount of negativity generated by a fight x fight frequency.

Therefore, both fighting less and fighting better can reduce the total amount of negativity you experience in a relationship. By learning to fight in a more compatible way, the amount of negativity generated by a fight is reduced. When the two of you work on the problems in your relationship actively, presumably, you are able to fight less and less over time.

OK, before I start making bad Fight Club jokes, I just want to shift the topic away from negativity to positivity. I happened upon Gottman’s book a few years ago and it had fundamentally changed the way I view relationships. I used to approach relationship problems with the attitude of “leave no stone unturned”. I wanted to get to the bottom of everything. Underlying that behavior is the implicit assumption that problems in relationships need to be solved ASAP before they breed more problems in the future. There is definitely truth in that and this approach works fine a lot of the time. This belief, combined with the fact that I’m a compulsive problem solver, tend to make me focus on the negative aspects of a relationship. Until I read Gottman’s book, I had never conceived of the possibility that it might be OK to let some problems be.

The choice seems clear when you put things this way: if you can either work to decrease the problem from a 2.3 to a 2.1, or you can devote that same energy to make the amount of fun you have increase from a 4 to a 9, it’s obviously more productive to choose the latter. Personally, I’ve found new meaning in the old advice of “focus on the positive” or “just have fun.” Of course, having fun together often entails having free time and not feeling stressed out. These realizations have been shaping my life choices in the last few years, particularly now. I just wanted to share with you what I learned from Gottman’s book since it had helped me so much. The book Blink that I was reading opens with Gottman’s work in the first chapter but doesn’t go into too much detail. Gottman has a new book out that I haven’t read. It’s supposed to be really good. He also wrote a book called The Mathematics of Marriage. I just checked it out of the library. If I start posting about the trajectory of Brangelina in phase space, you will know why .

Do you believe in true love? As in, there is one person out there that
you are meant to be with? Some people do. Then, there are the rest of us
who hold a more pluralistic view: there is a pool of people out there that
for all intents and purposes, will make us pretty happy. Of course, these
two views aren’t necessarily at odds with one another. For instance,
within any pool there might still be an ordering. Technically, we can
call the person who ranks the highest our true love. Although in our
case, the second and third place is basically almost as good. Whereas if
you believe in one true love, then the drop off is much sharper.

The true love advocates believe that the size of everyone’s pool is
exactly 1. If you subscribe to this belief, then the rest of this post is
irrelevant. But if you think there are more than one person in your pool,
then the question is just how many people are in there? Are there
hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of potential true loves? The
actual number is relevant here, because all else being equal, the
probability of finding a person you love is directly proportional to the
size of your pool.

One way to estimate this number is to ask yourself roughly one out of how
many people do you consider to be true love material. Is it one in a
hundred? A thousand? Five thousand? Ten thousand? I know this feels
rather abstract. One way to ground these numbers is to think back to your
high school. Roughly how many people would you date from your high
school? How many out of that number would you guess would have turned out
pretty well? Then, divide that number by the number of people in your
high school. As I write this I’m realizing that it may not be a good
measure. If you didn’t particularly enjoy your high school years
(speaking from personal experience here), your numbers are likely to be
skewed. Well, all I ask is that you make a stab at it.

Once you have settled on a ratio, the number will fall out. Starting from
300,000,000, the population of the U.S., roughly 2/3 of the population are
adults over the age of eighteen, according to the census. Which leaves us
200,000,000. Then out of this number, roughly 2/3 are married. That
leaves us 66,000,000 single adults to work with. Assuming that you are
only interested in one of the two genders, cut that number by half which
leaves us 33,000,000. Finally, say if you believe that 1 out of 1,000 people
qualifies as true love material, that means your pool has 33,000 people in
it in the entire U.S.. To make that number a little more concrete, say
you live in Boston, a city with population of 600,000. Then roughly 66
people in your pool would reside in the same city. Of course, we have
made many wild assumptions in this calculation, including that the
concentration of your true love is the same in Boston as it is in Lyndon,
Kansas (no offense Liana ).

Another way to make some rough estimates would be to start from the
qualities you care about and ask yourself what percentage of the
population exhibit those qualities. Say you care about honesty, maybe you
think 1 out of 10 people is honest. Say you care about attractiveness,
maybe you deem 20% of all people attractive. Now, what other
characteristics are absolute musts for you? Sense of Humor? Height?
Success? Income? Intelligence? Sense of adventure? Reliability?

Let’s just assume that there are 10 characteristics that you absolutely
care about and that you want the top 50% in each of them. Now, what’s the
probability that a random person will meet all your 10 characteristics?
That would be 1/2 x 1/2 x … x 1/2, or 1/2 to the tenth power, which is
1/1024, or roughly one in a thousand. If on the other hand, there turn
out to be 20 characteristics that you care about, that would yields 1 in
1,048,576. If indeed one in a million meets your criteria then that means
there are only 33 people out of the entire U.S. in your pool! The city of
Boston is too small to contain even one single person. These figures tend
to suggest that we shouldn’t be too picky. Since, each factor you care
about can cut your pool by half. Plus, we are only talking about twenty factors
here. For many people, attractiveness alone can easily occupy ten of the
twenty factors (facial features, body proportion, amount of chest hair, etc.
Shall I remind you the man-hands episode from Seinfeld?).

The good news is that things aren’t quite as bad because previously, we
had assumed that all characteristics are mutually independent. Which is
not true in reality. Indeed, researchers have shown for example that a person’s
height is linked to success. Apparently, a disproportionally high
percentage of CEOs are tall. So if you like tall and successful people,
then your pool might be bigger than if you had picked two completely
independent characteristics. But things can also work the other way. If
you want someone who’s laid back and intense, if you want an adventurous
joker who’s also dependable, or if you want a highly successful person who
won’t make you move when she gets a better job offer at east-bum-f*ck,
then the pool might shrink faster. Since, the personality traits that
give rise to these divergent characteristics are often at odds with one
another and hard to come by in the same person.

Having a better picture of how these characteristics are interrelated will yield more accurate estimates. It would be interesting to construct a probabilistic model for the set of common characteristics. Perhaps the joint distribution can be represented as a Bayesian network. We can use data from social science and psychology to determine the independence relationships between some of the characteristics. Once constructed, this model can be used as the basis for a true love calculator. You select your location (e.g. Boston), the characteristics you care about (e.g. honesty, shoe size, cleanliness) and specify how strictly each criterion is to be measured (e.g. 10% or 20% of the population), hit “enter”, then out pops the number of true loves who live in your city (if it can give you their names and addresses, then we are talking…).

Can you think of other ways to estimate the size of a given person’s true love pool?

How do you help those that you love most? In addition to his extreme chronic body odor problem, my husband also has an eating disorder. He loves candy and pizza. He eats jelly beans till he gets a stomachache and inhales a large pizza in under ten minutes. Well, that was the first 29 years of his life. In the recent months though, he’s been experiencing severe heartburn to the point that he can no longer drink ice water. He recognizes that something needs to be done but it’s not going to be easy because his addiction is deep rooted.

We often become emotionally attached to the food we grew up with. If McDonald’s and pizza made you happy as a little kid, then you are bound to develop a warm and fuzzy attachment for them as an adult. When I think about pure evil, Happy Meals and McD playgrounds invariably come to mind. In contrast, I feel pretty lucky to have been raised on healthy and delicious Chinese food my grandma prepared for me every day. When I first moved to the U.S., the smell of high school cafeterias used to make me sick. Seventeen years later, I still haven’t gotten used to American cuisine. For better or for worse, I’m going to be a picky eater for life.

Over the last few years, my eating habits have rubbed off on Dan somewhat. He doesn’t eat Hostess Cup Cakes anymore and rarely binges on potato chips, but candy and Pizza remain the final frontier that have so far eluded all attempts at intervention. I do realize that if the tables were turned, I wouldn’t want the person I’m with to get too involved. I’d just want him/her to understand what I’m going through and be supportive. But Dan assured me that he needs all the help he can get. So I decided that I’ll go all out on it and create an obby. I will employ a multi-pronged approach and try to attack the problem on different fronts. It will be interesting to learn about the psychology of addiction specifically in relation to eating disorders. I’ll read up on nutrition, do some brainstorming and planning for him to avoid getting trapped in situations with no healthy food. Finally, I’ll cook and experiment with various recipes. If I come across any techniques of general interest, I will post about them. I’m pretty psyched about this project. The time has come, must save the Dan! (BTW, I was just kidding about the body odor. Dan smells wonderful for the most part.)

If you have any tips on overcoming eating disorders, I’d love to hear them!

I’m starting another obby — learn about personal finance and investing. My personal finance up to this point has involved virtually no planning and I know much more about spending than investing. I’ve always assumed that I will get a job some day and a pension plan of some kind and that was that. But now, the situation has changed. As I became more conscious about designing the kind of life I want: a professional hobbyist doing short term projects for a living, I started to realize that there are certain types of securities that I can no longer count on. I think personal finance and investing will likely play a key role in this new lifestyle.

As a starting point, I’m going to read The Little Book that Beats the Market, another book recommended by Eric. I also organized an investment discussion dinner for the end of August to exchange ideas with other people.  If you have any interest or experience in this area, I’d like to hear from you. The actual oobby will be to make a small investment by Nov. 1st. I have to get geared up so I know what to do when my obbies start to generate more income than I can spend. The danger is imminent.