Why Willpower Doesn't Work
Do you wish your willpower was stronger?
Well, I have some good news. Relying on your willpower isn’t even the answer. We teach our weight loss clients how to stop relying on their willpower because it is only a temporary fix that doesn’t work long term. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, keep reading.
Typically, when someone decides to lose weight they find a diet that they think they’ve found evidence proving it works. For example, your friend did keto and lost thirty pounds so this must be the key to weight loss you’ve been missing all along so you decide it’s a great idea and go for it.
You do it for a while, using willpower to forgo all carbs. It’s not so bad. You’ve figured out all the foods that please you within the “rules” and you’ve done the research to find the alternative options that mimic what you miss.
Then eventually something happens. A vacation comes up, a super stressful day occurs, or you’re just plain ready to take a break, a “much deserved cheat day.” You eat all of the things. It feels pretty good to be “free.” But this isn’t food freedom.
After that, you either cycle back into your diet, looking forward to your next cheat day, which is misery, or you simply give up by falling back into your old habits because it was too hard all along. That is the diet cycle when you rely on willpower.
When you diet and rely on willpower it’s like shoving a beach ball underwater and trying to hold it there for as long as you can. This beach ball represents your cravings and urges. That beachball is going to pop up eventually. It’s next to impossible to hold it under water forever and you will succumb to your cravings and urges if you rely on willpower alone to get results.
We also call this white knuckling. That’s when you walk into a coffee shop and you see the pastry and you suddenly have an intense urge to eat it, but you tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself to avoid eating it. Maybe you white knuckle it this time but eventually that pastry is going to be yours because it is so irresistible to you now.
What if there was an alternative? What if you could stop relying on willpower altogether?
Wouldn’t it be cool if that beach ball could just float right past you and you didn’t feel like you had to shove it under water and it didn’t have control over you? What if you could walk into the coffee shop feel like you have a choice about what you want instead of it choosing you?
Instead of “will power” we coach clients how to reduce over-desire, address over-hunger, and we work on all of the belief systems and thoughts you have about food and your body. What you make the food mean matters more than the food itself.
