The Shoelace Effect

When I was a much younger and angrier man, I used to read a lot of poetry and prose by the late Charles Bukowski. If you’re unfamiliar with the name, you might know Bukowski for his semi-autobiographical screenplay Barfly, which was turned into a film of the same name in 1987, starring Mickey Rourke. Bukowski died in 1994, leaving us five decades of razorsharp insight into human nature, often set against the backdrop of Los Angeles’ skid row, where he spent much of his life.

Buk’s tales typically involve lots of drinking and fist-fighting, losing money at the dog track, and toiling away at soul-sucking unskilled labor jobs (he spent more than ten years working as a filing clerk for the U.S. Postal Service).  As you can probably imagine, his writing has always held a special place in the hearts of chronically under-employed young males; mostly actor/waiters, artists, and struggling musicians. His gravestone reads “Don’t Try.”

One of my favorite Bukowski poems is The Shoelace. It’s based upon the premise that it’s not war, disease, and failed relationships that drive people to insanity or suicide, but rather, it’s the cumulative litany of small horrors in everyday life- a clogged sink, hitting consecutive red traffic lights, a shoelace that snaps when you’re on your way out the door- that eventually leads to a spontaneous full-blown nervous breakdown. Buk contends that for one out of every hundred broken shoelaces, somebody gets thrown into a padded cell.

The poem succinctly ends with the sage advice, “So be careful when you bend over.”

I’m with Bukowski 100% on this one. I’m an extremely patient and good-natured person, and I’ve never actually been in a physical altercation in my life. But minor annoyances from inanimate objects have the ability to enrage me. If I bump my head on a cupboard door, I’ll immediately bash it with my fist. I recently took a malfunctioning iPod and stomped it into tiny shards of plastic. Force me to build an Ikea shelving unit or untangle a mess of computer cables, and it’s inevitable that I’ll completely lose my shit and hurl something against a wall.

It’s juvenile behavior of course, but we Irish are hard-wired for this sort of thing.

For many people, there are few environments where the Shoelace Effect resonates as deeply as the typical home kitchen. You open a cupboard door and an avalanche of mismatched plastic containers and lids comes tumbling to the floor. Or maybe you’ve just come home from a huge grocery run, but finding the space for everything in your crowded refrigerator is like assembling a massive jigsaw puzzle. Your spices are all jammed into a shoebox. Your main knife is a piece of crap. If you ran a business this way, you’d go insane and bankrupt, in that order.

If you’re trying to build a better body, a mismanaged kitchen can actually be one of your biggest obstacles.

When I get a new training client who wants to improve their body composition, I try to make it painfully clear during our very first conversation that there’s a enormous amount of personal responsibility involved in the process. I am not a magician. Sure, I can make you stronger- that’s pretty easy. But if you want to get leaner, almost all of your results will be determined not by what WE do in the gym, but by what YOU do in the kitchen. You will simply never be able to offset a poor diet by increasing you level of activity- that’s not how this stuff works. You need to eat modest portions of whole, unprocessed food, at frequent intervals throughout the day. Meals that contain ample lean protein, fibrous vegetables and fruit, and healthy fats. The kind of meals that are probably impossible to find in the food courts or even “healthy” restaurants near your office.

All this is to say that unless you have your own private chef or you use one of those pricey (and almost always dreadful) meal delivery services, you’d better come to terms with a sobering yet irrefutable fact: You’re going to have to cook for yourself, and you’d better get used to carrying some Tupperware around.

“Yeah, but I Hate to Cook”

When I break all this down for someone, the reaction I often get is, “Yeah, but I hate to cook”, or “I suck at cooking.” And I really don’t get that. I don’t understand how you can hate cooking on a fundamental level. Once you look a bit deeper into the situation, you can almost always blame the Shoelace Effect.

It’s a bit like when I was a kid, and I drove a beat-up 1985 Ford Tempo. The car was a complete pile of garbage, held together mostly by duct tape. It stalled at every red light and needed a litre of oil every day- kind of like the Sanford and Son truck. The situation would make me so insane that I’d routinely throw tantrums and kick dents into the driver’s side door. I remember always saying, “I hate driving” or “Driving sucks.” But it’s not like I fundamentally hated driving, it’s just that my car drove me bananas. Now that I have a nice new vehicle, I don’t mind driving at all.

Maybe cooking in your home kitchen is a similar experience. It’s only human nature that unless you’re actually getting paid to perform an activity, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to stick with something that causes a lot of cumulative frustration- even if it’s something you know is really good for you. That’s not to say you need to go out and buy $10,000 fridge, but it does mean your kitchen could probably use some purging, and you may want to take a serious look at how you manage your time. Toss out those crippled old kitchen gadgets and earmark about $200 for some high-quality essentials (a chef’s knife, a solid cutting board, a couple of heavy non-stick skillets). Move the “junk drawer” to another room. Allocate two or three hours a week to get your cooking done, and don’t flake out- treat it as seriously as attending a meeting at work. This kind of thing doesn’t require a degree in culinary management- I know bouncers with a grade five education who’ve been pulling it off seamlessly for years. If you fail to make kitchen organization a priority, I guarantee you’ll be spending two crazy-making hours per night trying to get your meals ready for the next day, and there’s no way in hell you’ll keep that up for very long.

But let’s say you’re the type of person who doesn’t hate cooking. In fact, maybe you’re a hardcore foodie. Your kitchen is spotless, your equipment is all high-tech, and cooking is your passion. That still wont won’t save your ass. Cooking in bulk for the week is an entirely different discipline than making a gourmet dinner. To adhere to “fitness style” eating on a long-term basis, it’s necessary- oddly enough- to approach meal preparation in the same way that fast food chains like McDonalds do: Streamline your workflow and make all operations idiot-proof. Keep the turnaround time for your product as fast as possible. Have a system in place whereby food inventory is regularly checked, and minimum quantities of staple items are always on hand.

Say what you want about the nutritional trainwreck that is fast food, but they’ve got the efficiency thing down to an art.

When all’s said and done, the most a brilliant nutrition plan (much like a great training routine) is all for naught if you can’t manage to actually execute the plan on a consistent, long-term basis, with a minimal amount of hassle. I’d like to think you’re not one of these zipperheads who loiters around the gym drinking Red Bull while yapping on a cell phone. Don’t do the equivalent of that in your kitchen. Go in with a plan. Treat it like a place where serious work gets done with serious tools.

Anyway, here’s a little video we shot at my place a few days ago. I came up with a handful of key things I do in my kitchen to make to some of this stuff a lot less stressful. It’s certainly not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good foundation. Excuse the Gestapo lighting- we’re still getting the hang of this new camera.

Got any of your own tips for making the kitchen a less grievous place? Head on over to the FBD Facebook page and share the wealth.

Filed Under: Featured • Hot Air • Nutrition + Recipes • Videos