The Harajuku Moment

When I start exercising and tracking how many calories I burn, I realize how hard it is to outrun your diet. Thinking, "This cookie would cost me 35 minutes on the treadmill," is a huge deterrent.

When I stop working out, I quickly forget what calories actually cost.

> and was amazed at how many calories I would have to eat in order to stay the same weight. It was huge.

Can someone explain this to me? I try to stay under 2000 calories. To me it means eating almost nothing. Let's say I have berries and yogurt. That ~300. Add a morning latte (no sugar). Now we're at 500. I've effectively had a tiny breakfast and already spent 1/4th of my calorie budget.

Taking what I just ate and multiplying by 1.5 x 2 meals are two more tiny meals and I've hit my limit. And that's no snacks and avoiding all sugar

The only way to make it lots is to eat heaps of veggies with no dressing / oil.

This isn't an account of the cultural moment that indi-fashion hub Harajuku had before its gentrification by Major international brand stores, or a inane J-Travel blog complaining about being out of shape and there being too much walking, It's a possibly interesting story of personal growth only coincidentally related to Harajuku.

I think there's some evidence for this, and it's consistent with my experiences with myself and what I've seen in others.

It's basically the idea behind the motivation to change literature, that there has to be some point at which the person has to be on board and interested in the change. It may be the desire to change isn't a discrete thing, that something builds over time, and we just become conscious of it at a particular time, or only remember certain moments, or whatever.

There has to be an opportunity though as well, which is another point people get tripped up on and why they lose motivation. Even if someone wants to change, if they don't perceive it as being possible for whatever reason, correctly or incorrectly, the desire for change doesn't have an outlet. It may rise to consciousness and then be immediately quashed because there's nowhere to go.

A lot of the time I think that's the bigger obstacle; it's not being aware of some desire to change, it's having some sense that the change isn't possible or that they don't know how to go about it, which amounts to the same thing.

On the tracking point: I’ve found that a coding agent that can modify a file system (create and update CSVs) that’s accessible on both my laptop and phone to be the single best way to track things I’ve ever used. Bar none.

Even apps with the best UX, like Strong for tracking workouts, feel exponentially clunkier than having an agent that can answer questions, analyze pictures, and write things down on a persistent file in real-time.

I see this post is from 2024. Maybe I would have enjoyed the hook and enjoyed reading along to figure out what this "harajuku moment" was back in 2024. But since being exposed to AI slop daily, and having to scan through so much verbose AI outputs during day-to-day "coding", I've now started skimming so much that I got annoyed that it meandered, then just couldn't bother reading the rest of the post after I've figured out what the harajuku moment is.

It's like my brain is responding to blog posts now in the same way that people scroll past tiktok videos in the first few seconds if there isn't enough of a dopamine hit.

I used to enjoy longform content... alas.

> We all went down to Harajuku to see if we could see some artistically dressed youngsters

Over 95% of the people in Harajuku are tourists going there to do exactly that. Locals completely avoid the area.

As Nike might say… Just do it.

Ancient Greek philosophy on mind-body developmental balance can help. A physically fit human with no intellectual development and a propensity to follow orders might be the fascist reinterpretation of the classical Spartan ideal, but this would have been viewed as unbalanced aberration. Similarly, producing geeky nerds who can rearrange complicated equations in their head with ease but who can’t run a mile or lift heavy objects is just as undesirable.

This is a historically valid concept, not a convenient utilitarian fiction for the indoctrination of the youth into proper behavior. The idea was that γυμναστική (gymnastikē) and μουσική (mousikē) should be balanced for optimal human outcomes.

Plato’s Republic:

> “Those who devote themselves exclusively to gymnastic become more savage than they ought to be, while those who devote themselves to the other arts become softer than is good for them… The former, if they had no contact with the Muses, become filled with brute force and a mindless boldness; the latter, if they have no training in gymnastic, become cowardly and feeble in soul.”