Willpower Is Not A Prerequisite

Oct 9, 2015

“This should be the worst thing that anyone can ever say about you (that you have no willpower where food is concerned),” a wise and compassionate therapist once said to me as I mentally and emotionally tortured myself for caving in yet one more disappointing and demoralizing time. I never forgot that and by some grace I could get with that sad but true fact and move on to sharper tools in my toolbox.

If you can relate to this, you are not alone. In his book The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, Dr. David Kessler explains the food industry’s relentless and successful pursuit of the “bliss point” in their products. This is the point at which your natural appetite regulating mechanisms will no longer kick in to stop you. Sound familiar? Add to that the hyper-eating we may have conditioned our brain to connect with relief, fun, all kinds of moods, people, places, times of day, you name it.

Just like a computer however, you are not stuck with this conditioned default. Any time you decide to you can write a new program right over the old one for the response you wish you’d had. Repeat it enough and it can become your new default, particularly if temptation is not right under your nose overriding this morning’s self-recrimination and sucking you into its gravitational force field. Better yet, if you stop relying on that fickle willpower altogether and instead stage your support in advance, you will no longer need your head to be in the right place to make your best decisions. Freedom from the tyranny of your own negotiating? What a relief and far more reliable!

I think we wake up each day with a limited number of times we will be able to say no, and once those chits are used up, they are used up. I never know how many chits I will wake up with, but I do know that certain things seem to limit my allotment – like being tired, being stressed, being overwhelmed, having tasks I secretly resent, having eaten badly the day before…just for starters.

Accepting that long term weight management will be an on-going task seems to be a bitter pill to swallow for many. Recently a client wrote “I hope one day to arrive at a place where I can have all these goodies around me in my home and just be able to take or leave them.” After 20 years in the field of weight management, my very professional response was, “Don’t hold your breath.” Oh, it will get easier with routinization and a intentional and practiced lack of negotiability for sure. But the best news yet is that your success is not one bit dependent upon you “getting over it.” Willpower is absolutely not a prerequisite for weight management success. Your success is dependent upon what you learn to do to help yourself. Period. Interesting that a dear friend who is a concert level pianist, didn’t seem to fight the need to take a piano lesson every week of her life from the age of 6. She is now 70. How many lessons was that? She just understood and accepted that that is what it takes to be that proficient.

Perhaps the most clearcut example of grace in my own life has been the complete acceptance of this lack of willpower where food is concerned, despite a very tenacious and disciplined personality in most other matters. (See Got Grace?) Baffling, but fortunately easily solvable. Armed with this life altering insight, I learned to use willpower only as the strategy of absolute last resort and began to deliberately plan my day/week/vacation/holiday season as if today could be my least strong, least motivated day ever; soliciting support, picking the restaurant in advance, thinking through and mostly pre-staging my meals – just like diet plans do for you only I do it for myself for free! I do lots of advance planning for other aspects of the holidays  aspects – where and when I will shop, what I will get for people, details about entertaining, traveling, decorating, etc. Why not just do the same thing with my food choices? Lord knows back in my baking days I planned the cookies weeks in advance, often cutting out Christmas cookie recipes in February for gosh sakes.

And by the way, so what if I do a little preparation overkill from time to time? What have I lost? But if I under prepare, then what have I lost? The loss is not so much the extra food I will likely consume either. It is the loss of confidence, the loss of self-esteem, the loss of mojo, the loss of hard won bullet-proofness that took 1000 times of saying no in a row to earn. Have a couple of “special” Christmas cookies at the office in November ever been the catalyst for an entire derailed holiday season and even whole winter – or at least till it is warm enough that you have to confront what is under all those layers? (see “After This” is Now)

Want to help yourself? DO something! In fact, do three things:

1 Use your history to figure out where and when you are fragile or defenseless
2 Start taking steps now to keep your head in the right place – listen to health radio, read/listen to the many health bestsellers available free from your library, search out holiday veggie recipes, join a CSA, review your latest blood work
3 Figure out what specific actions will be required to keep you on track even when your head isn’t – going to the gym, enlisting a buddy, providing extra veggies, eating before you go places, where you sit, which foods your friends and family think you want

Were you surprised by what derailed you last holiday season? I wasn’t. I have lived through 61 holiday seasons so far. One would hope that I am nothing if not predictable at this point.

It’s only October. There is tons you can start doing right now to head off disaster and make these your most successful weight-managed holidays ever. There are plenty of days between Halloween and New Years to allow some indulgence and still compensate as you go so that you have not allowed six weeks of daily derailed eating to pile up on your hips or belly. It’s the same pay back. Pay it in advance, or as you go…or later. Same bill.

And BTW that does not mean denying yourself every indulgence. That is just threatens your inner cookie monster and becomes permission to give up right now. Wouldn’t it be great to celebrate the New Year with no regret, nothing to undo calorically, nutritionally or behaviorally?  Best holiday present ever!

What could be one degree of change from last year?