Stoic Saturday: How I Applied Stoic Principles to Lose Weight

But I do not despair even of a hardened sinner. There is nothing that will not surrender to persistent treatment, to concentrated and careful attention; however much the timber may be bent, you can make it straight again. Heat unbends curved beams, and wood that grew naturally in another shape is fashioned artificially according to our needs. How much more easily does the soul permit itself to be shaped, pliable as it is and more yielding than any liquid! For what else is the soul but air in a certain state? And you see that air is more adaptable than any other matter, in proportion as it is rarer than any other.  

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Epistles, Volume 1: 1-65. Translated by Richard M. Gummere (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1917), 333-35. 

Mastering one's appetite is the very foundation of training in self-control. 

Robertson, Donald paraphrasing Musonius Rufus. Stoicism and the Art of Happiness. McGraw-Hill, 2013, 12.

Appetite and thirst are the natural 'sauce' of life and the secret to making even coarse bread and plain water taste delicious. 

Robertson, Donald. Stoicism and the Art of Happiness. McGraw-Hill, 2013, 8.

On June 2, 2015 I weighed 283 pounds. Today I weigh 267.8 pounds. Though there is still a long way to go in terms of achieving my target weight I am very happy with the results so far. I have stoic principles to thank for any success I've had and any success that I may have in the future. Since weight loss is an important issue for many people these days I thought I'd share what I've learned so far.

At the outset I should probably say that weight loss per se is something that falls outside of my control. So at best it's a preferred indifferent. But while weight loss is beyond my control, what I chose to consume is within my control. So diet, I've found, is an excellent method of building self-control and willpower after a stoic fashion. Further, according to Epictetus, we have roles to play in life. Some of mine are the roles of father and husband. As such I need to do all I can to be healthy so I can stick around for my wife and child. 

When I decided to lose weight I knew that the biggest challenge I'd face is portion control. Indeed, up until June 2nd I'd eaten like a wild, ravenous beast. If there was food in front of me, it wouldn't be there for long. I'd tried controlling portions before and always failed. This is where today's first quote from Seneca comes in. It reminded me that I could change so long as I made a serious effort. Habits can be amended. 

Which brings me to the final two quotes above. When I started studying stoicism last year during Stoic Week I began writing short stoic passages in a Moleskin pocket notebook which I now carry around with me at all times. Throughout the day I like to read from the notebook in an effort to ingrain their ideas into my mind. This practice has helped greatly in dieting. 

My diet is designed in accordance with the USDA's dietary guidelines. And it's significantly less food and less tasty food than what I'd long been accustomed to consuming. So I'd get hungry real quick. Now, whereas in my previous attempts at weight loss I'd give in and start eating, now I am armed with stoic philosophy to assist me. So every time I got hungry and wanted to eat something I'd take out my notebook and read those two quotes repeatedly until I convinced myself to abstain from eating anything not in my diet.

So far it's worked for me. It might work for you too.

Stoic Saturday: Epictetus on How to Become an Ornament of Philosophy

For this is the greatest proof of unhappiness and misfortune. I desire something, and it does not happen: and what could be more wretched than I? It was because she was unable to endure this that Medea came to murder her own children, the action of a noble spirit in this regard at least, that she had a proper impression of what it means to be disappointed in one's desire. "Thus," she says, "shall I take vengeance on one who has injured and wronged me. Yet what shall I gain from putting him into such miserable plight? How is this to be achieved? I will murder the children. But that will be punishing myself. And what do I care?" This is the error of a soul endued with great vigour. For she knew not where the power to do what we wish lies; that it is not to be acquired from outside ourselves, nor by altering or disarranging things. Do not desire the man for your husband, and nothing which you desire will fail to happen. Do not desire to keep him for yourself. Do not desire to stay at Corinth, and, in a word, have no will but the will of god; and who shall hinder you, who shall compel you? Nobody could do so, any more than he could for Zeus. When you have such a leader, and conform your will and desires to his, what fear could you still have of failing? Offer up your desire and aversion to riches, and poverty: you will fail to get what you desire, you will fall into what you would avoid. Offer them up to health and you will fall into misfortune, and likewise if you offer them up to position, honours, your country, friends, children, in short, to anything outside the sphere of choice. But offer them up to Zeus and the other gods. Hand them over to these, for them to govern, let your desire and aversion be ranged on the same side as these; and how thenceforth can you be unhappy? But if, poor wretch, you fall prey to envy, and pity, and are jealous, and timorous, and never cease a single day from bewailing yourself and the gods, why do you continue to prate about your education? What kind of education, man? The fact is that you have studied syllogisms and arguments with equivocal premises? Will you not consent to unlearn all this, if at all possible, and make a fresh start, in the realization that hitherto you have not even touched on the principal matter? And, thenceforth, beginning from this foundation, establish the next point, as to how nothing shall be that you do not wish, and that nothing that do you wish shall fail to be. Give me but one young man who has come to the school with this purpose in mind, who has become an athlete in this field of action, and says, "I for my part yield up all the rest: it suffices me, if I become able to pass my life free from hindrance and distress, and to hold up my head in the face of events like a free man, and to look up to heaven as the friend of god, fearing nothing that can happen." Let any one of you show himself to be such a person, so that I may say, "Enter, young man, into what is rightly your own, for you are destined to be an ornament to philosophy."

Epictetus, and Gill, Christopher, ed., and Hard, Robin, trans. The Discourses of Epictetus. London: Everyman: 1995, 117-118.

Italics mine.

Stoic Saturday: Seneca on Personal Resolutions

Making noble resolutions is not as important as keeping the resolutions you have made already.

Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. "Letter XVI." London: Penguin Books, 2004, 63.

Stoic Saturday: How Marcus Wakes Up

In the morning, when you rise unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie under the blankets and keep myself warm? But this is more pleasant. Do you exist then to take your pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Do you not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their separate parts of the universe? And are you unwilling to do the work of a human being, and do you not make haste to do that which is according to your nature?

Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1997, 28.

Stoic Saturday: Epictetus on the Fruits of Stoic Practice and Exercise

Those whose bodies are in good condition are able to withstand heat and cold; and so, likewise, those whose souls are in the right condition can bear anger, and grief, and immoderate joy, and all other emotions.

Epictetus, and Gill, Christopher, ed., and Hard, Robin, trans. The Discourses of Epictetus. London: Everyman: 1995, 314

His body needed a crutch, his mind did not 

Stoic Saturday: Seneca on Friendship and Lovers

To come back to the question, the wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practising friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle. Not, as Epicurus put it in the same letter, 'for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains,' but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose sick bed he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands. Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake. Things will end as they began; he has secured a friend who is going to come to his aid if captivity threatens: at the first clank of a chain that friend will disappear. These are what are commonly called fair-weather friendships. A person adopted as a friend for the sake of his usefulness will be cultivated only for so long as he is useful. This explains the crowd of friends that clusters about successful men and the lonely atmosphere about the ruined - their friends running away when it comes to the testing point; it explains the countless scandalous instances of people deserting or betraying others out of fear for themselves. The ending inevitably matches the beginning: a person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so. If there is anything in a particular friendship that attracts a man other than the friendship itself, the attraction of some reward or other will counterbalance that of the friendship. What is my object in making a friend? To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well. The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal. There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship - you might say it was friendship gone mad. Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity? Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people's hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without hope, too, that the affection will be mutual. How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?

Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. "Letter IX." London: Penguin Books, 2004, 49-50.

Stoic Saturday: Marcus on Proper Thought

Do not waste the remainder of your life in thoughts about others, when you do not refer your thoughts to some object of common utility. For you lose the opportunity of doing something else when you have such thoughts as these. What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking of, and what is he contriving, and whatever else of the kind makes us wander away from the observation of our own ruling power. We ought then to check in the series of our thoughts everything that is without a purpose and useless, but most of all the overcurious and the malignant; and a man should use himself to think of those things only about which if one should suddenly ask, What are you thinking about? With perfect openness you might immediately answer, this or that; so that from your words it should be plain that everything in you is simple and benevolent, as befits a social animal, one that is unconcerned with pleasure, sensual enjoyments, rivalry, envy, suspicion, or any other thoughts that you would blush to admit. 

Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1997, 14.

That's from Book III of Marcus's Meditations. The italicized portion is what I copied into my pocket notebook collection of stoicisms.