Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Here is another way to think about depleting your willpower?

Yes, once again you are up against it. You’ve been working hard to stay on your diet, but you can feel that you are running out of willpower? You gave it all you have and you don’t have any more to give. So you go off your diet, and you stay off for quite a long time, regaining all the weight you lost.

You think to yourself that you depleted your willpower because you were working so hard at sticking to a diet. You wish you had more willpower. Immersed in a self-critical examination of your willpower you don’t look around for other possible explanations for not staying on a diet.

Could it be that going off your diet was not a matter of willpower at all? What if going off your diet was just what you wanted, only you weren’t straight enough with yourself to tell it like this? You needed something to lift you up and make you feel like all you did each day was worthwhile. Your diet and the prospect of weight loss down the road weren’t doing it for you. So you went back to eating some comfort food so you would feel rewarded for all your hard work with your family, your job, and for having to be you each day of the week.

This, as you can see, is not a case of loss of willpower as much as it is a change of heart (and mind). The diet wasn’t doing it for you and you needed something that did it for you, and you needed it right away.  You blew your diet for an important cause and not because you depleted your willpower.

by Maria's Last Diet

Can you will yourself into losing your unwanted weight? Probably not. And it might not even be a good idea to try. Using the power of your will to reduce your weight can actually make it more difficult for you to accomplish your goal.

When you use willpower, you are forcing yourself into accomplishing the various weight loss activities that make up your weight loss routine. A better way, believe it or not, is to keep your mind open. Don’t use force. Don’t use willpower. Think of it as “Will I?” instead of “I will.”

The more questioning attitude of “Will I?” leads you away from the more rigid standards you set with willpower to a more open mindedness and more intrinsic motivation to do what is necessary to lose weight. It is this intrinsic motivation to change and to keep on keeping on that will hold up under fire.

by Maria's Last Diet

If you knew that changing a habit is a process of skill development and not a test of your willpower, would this make a difference in your weight loss efforts? A learnable skill that is key to habit change is breaking down habit change into smaller, more manageable tasks that you can address one at a time.

If, for example, your weight-gaining and weight-maintaining pattern of eating is to indulge in fattening snack food in between meals, how would you go about breaking down this habit into smaller, more manageable tasks?

You could, as a first step, select the between meal snack that is easiest for you to concentrate on and possibly do something about. Next, without trying to change your snacking behavior, you might see what your triggers are for snacking at that time. Then, you could try to eliminate, change, or substitute something for just one of those triggers.

Get the idea? Changing your weight-gaining and weight-maintaining eating habits is what you make of it. It will work best for you if you make it a process of skill development rather than a test of willpower.

by Maria's Last Diet

In order to lose a lot of weight do you really have to have weight loss willpower? When you have setbacks, is it more willpower you need? You will be surprised to learn that your willpower is not what you need to ramp up or even have to lose unwanted weight. Here’s a case in point where willpower won’t make a bit of difference.

Let’s say you suffered a number of setbacks. You didn’t lose any weight this week, last week, or the week before, and these were the first three weeks of your latest weight loss effort. Pretty discouraging, don’t you think? This is exactly the point at which you might review your weight loss efforts over the past three weeks and call yourself out on lack of willpower here and there.

The truth, however, is you believed your setbacks were the result of lack of ability to do what it takes. This self-perception made you feel even less able to right what you did wrong. Instead of focusing on what weight loss strategies you could use to make a difference, you found ways to protect yourself from feeling the impact of your belief that you lack the ability. For example, you threw yourself into your work more and spoke with friends and family more than you had in a long time. You felt good about yourself for doing these things. What you didn’t realize was you were distracting yourself from feeling bad about yourself for once again not having the ability to lose weight.

by Maria's Last Diet

There is certainly a consensus that in order to lose your unwanted weight you have to have willpower and lots of it. What if you discovered that instead of willpower what you really use to lose weight is psychological detachment?

Think of it this way. When you switch off from work, from family responsibilities, from all those things that distract you from focusing on yourself and your weight issues, this is psychological detachment.

Now you don’t have to be totally detached from all these matters, which take you away from yourself. You just have to be psychologically detached enough to give yourself the time and attention you need for the weight loss you so desperately want.

Despite the consensus that willpower is what does it, take a hard look at your willingness to psychologically detach and see what role it’s playing in your difficulty losing weight.  

by Maria's Last Diet

What’s willpower have to do with successful weight loss? Everything, something, or nothing?

For those of you who said willpower is everything when it comes to losing your unwanted weight, you’re right. For you willpower is everything. This means that using your willpower to start a weight loss regimen, stick to the regimen, and then maintain lost weight is the single-most effective weight loss strategy you will be using. If this is so, have you asked yourself what does it take for you to mobilize your willpower when you need it? Can you mobilize your willpower for each and every action you take that has to do with losing weight? Have you ever found yourself without willpower or without enough willpower to get yourself to do what you have to do to reduce your weight and to keep weight off?

For those of you who said willpower has something to do with losing weight successfully, you’re right. It does have something to do with your weight loss? You label your effort and motivation to lose unwanted weight as willpower, when it could be that what you are calling willpower is simply the effects of having lots of success with short-term goals. These successes you’re having build your confidence when it comes to tackling much harder goals. What you are calling willpower might actually be good confidence built on lots of small successes.

For those of you who said willpower has nothing to do with successful weight loss, you’re right. Here are some alternatives to willpower that you are probably already using: playfulness, fact-finding and information gathering, distraction, substitution, planning, reasonable goal setting, and seeing the connection between short- and long-term goals and keeping at this connection

by Maria's Last Diet

If you’ve got the willpower, then you can do it.

This is the override theory of reducing your weight. This is where successful weight loss is the result of regulating your urges, turning down temptations, exerting your self-control, and applying lots of energy and effort to control yourself. In other words, you have to override all of your tendencies to eat too much food, eat all the wrong foods, and stray from your diet. In plain English, you have to turn against yourself and your ways—at least those ways you’ve developed that are maintaining your weight right where it is.

A daunting prospect.

What if you didn’t have to work so hard to lose the weight? No, this is not the usual pitch for the fantasy of easy weight loss—10 pounds in 10 days, or watch the weight drop off you just by taking this magic elixir. There’s a more realistic way. It’s using psychology to lose weight, and you can get a lot of strategies for doing just that by going to the MariasLastDiet.com whitepaper on “Using Psychology to Lose Weight: Because Dieting and Exercise Alone Don’t Work”.

     (The whitepaper is in the left-hand column of this blogsite.)

by Maria's Last Diet

control over

being able to resist

something that’s hard for you to do or to think about, so you exert more effort

exercising self-control

saying “no” to

resisting temptation

self-denial

some people have more of it  

makes you able to stick to it

willpower is an ability

even when you don’t have the motivation, you still can use your willpower

you can put off gratifying yourself  

having willpower is thought of as being strong or strong-minded

willpower is limited; you can’t keep it up forever; you might not be able to keep it up even for very long

exertion of too much willpower for one use might leave you with not enough willpower for another use

keeping your long-term goal in the front of your mind and continuously working for you

focusing your attention and concentrating can take willpower

What if it’s not willpower that’s doing it for you?

Could it be a set of skills like any of the following:

• You might handle the difficult weight-loss situation (e.g., being tempted) by becoming playful, or thinking of it factually rather than emotionally, or by distracting yourself in some way. Are you using your willpower?
  

• What about planning? If you planned for a high-risk situation like eating out, then you probably wouldn’t think you were dealing with the situation by using your willpower.

• Willpower, or what looks like willpower, can be built by focusing on short-term goals, having lots of success with them, becoming more confident, thereby giving you what you need to tackle harder goals later on.

• You can work hard and well on short-term goals, making it look like you’re using willpower, but you’re really seeing the connection between short-term goals and longer-term goals.