The Fate Diet

I'm extremely surprised to discover that I have never blogged about the Fate Diet.  As you may recall from my very first post (!), Fate is a dungeon crawler / role-playing game in which you and your pet kill underground-dwelling creatures (as Robert notes, always non-humanoid ones - it's family-friendly!) with magic and brawn for fun, profit, and fame, becoming increasingly bad-ass until you defeat your chief nemesis and eventually retire, leaving an heirloom for your descendant, so she can start in a more advanced position (by far the most realistic part of the game).

The Fate Diet, however, does not involve eating the carp, grouper, perch, snapper (etc.) that you fish out of the lakes or the bodies of bugbears, wyverns, salamanders, zombie kings (etc.) that you kill in the dungeon.  Nor does it require magic.

The Fate Diet is simple.  Instead of eating an unnecessary snack (e.g., due to boredom or simple availability), you play Fate, which is a fun distraction and uses both hands (one to move and slay, one to deploy spells and potions). 

This seems to work rather well for me, but I haven't come across research linking distraction with better eating behavior.  Typically, distraction has been associated with overeating among dieters / restricted eaters in lab studies, and paying attention / monitoring one's behavior is often presented as a way to improve eating behavior (including in this recent, rare empirical study on the popular topic of mindful eating).  And of course, let's not forget the importance of thinking of a pretzel as a stick or a marshmallow as a cloud to foster self-control.  So I was pleased to read about the research going on in Traci Mann's lab:

"Most people think that the more attention they can place on their goals and behavior, the better they will be at controlling themselves.  Our work shows that there are certain situations in which people are better at controlling themselves when they are distracted.   First, we have found that there is an optimal amount of distraction that leads to exceptionally good self-control.  We think that amount of distraction keeps people from noticing, and therefore being tempted by, whatever they are trying to resist.  Second, people are also able to control themselves when they are distracted more or less than that optimal amount if they are surrounded by very noticeable reminders of their self-control goals.  Our next step is to see if we can teach people to use these distraction techniques as self-control strategies in their daily life."

For me, Fate hits a sweet spot.  It's challenging enough to be engaging and distracting, but not so difficult as to be stressful or depleting (both of which have bad implications for self-control of eating). 

But by the time my last character (Leopold) retired, he was so bad-ass that the game had gotten boring.  So I gave his awesome magical ring not to his own descendant (Olga), but to the descendant's pet cat (Vlad).  Playing a character on the highest difficulty level without a powerful artifact has been tough but really enjoyable. 

Sadly, however, the advantages of the Fate Diet have been offset in the last few weeks by the myriad disadvantages of the Stuck in the Airport Diet, the Wined and Dined by Marketing Programs Diet, the Watching Live Sports for Hours at a Time Diet, the Feeling Sick and Wanting to Eat Crackers Diet, the I Guess I'm Bringing Another Peanut Butter Sandwich on the Plane for Lunch Diet, and the I Ate Dinner at 4 PM and Now I'm Going to Die if I Don't Eat More Diet.