Why YSK: many countries have issues with weight, such as mine with 74% of US adults being overweight or obese. The global weight loss industry is over $200 billion yearly, with many influencers, pills, and surgeries promising quick results with little effort. These often come with side effects, or don’t work long term.
Studies suggest filling yourself with foods low in caloric density and high in fiber, like fruits and vegetables, can help reach and maintain a healthy weight. It’s good to have these foods available in our living spaces to make the choice easy. Your taste buds will likely adapt to love them if you’re not there yet.
This is a joke, right?
Insistence that willpower is sufficient for weight regulation is a big cause of people going on diet after diet that just doesn’t work.
No, that’s caused by a specific lack of willpower. Going on diet after diet is exactly why focusing on being ok with being hungry is so important.
Get a clue.
And people should just “choose to be happy” too, right?
Learn how biology works. Willpower helps you execute a a desire even when it’s uncomfortable. Your hormonal systems control what you desire in the first place. If you’re just trying to ignore your body, it will eventually inform you that you no longer care about weight loss.
Willpower based diets and weigh loss strategies are mostly driven by people who sell them who take advantage of the “intuitive” nature of what boils down to “don’t eat even if you’re hungry”.
If you do lose some weight, which you likely will at first, it’s because the diet works. If you don’t or you fall out of adherence, it’s because you’re not good enough.
That’s why essentially all research on the topic says you should use your willpower to change what you eat and your activity level, and let those drive the weight loss.
It’s easier and more effective to use your willpower to make positive choices than it is to enforce restrictions on yourself.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10015774/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/health-and-human-nature/202109/finding-the-self-control-lose-weight
Next time you need to get more done, just try sleeping less and you’ll have a whole six or seven more hours a day to work.
You definitely won’t spend your time being distracted by how tired your are, or spending more time thinking about sleep than if you had spent less effort and willpower on making a schedule that made better time management choices.
You had a distinct lack of willpower, you lacked the willpower to be nice to someone.
He’s saying what you’re attributing to “a specific lack of willpower” now has scientific backing that disagrees. Your take is old school and misinformed if the current science is correct. I personally haven’t done research on the subject or read many studies but Adam Ragusea, a YouTube food science journalist covers this concept in one of his vids and several podcasts surrounding food science and (in my case) the drugs coming down the pipeline to regulate body weight touch on the research as well.
Precisely. And to be entirely clear: it will always take willpower and motivation to lose weight. Your body is thought to have a sort of target weight that it wants you to be at all else being equal. If it were effortless to maintain a healthy weight, it would be because that’s where your body was pushing you to be.
The key is not to be stronger than your body, but to work with it. Use your finite supply of willpower on things like “making a healthy shopping list and not deviating from it”.
Instead of insisting you need to “not be lazy” and always cook a healthy meal at home, be realistic and accept that sometimes you’ll be tired and have a lazy dinner option that’s a better choice than pizza.
Buy apples instead of Oreos, so that when you feel hungry between meals it isn’t a choice between feeling hungry and eating a sleeve of Oreos, but just eating an apple. You’ll feel more full after the apple than after 20 times more calories in Oreos. If you choose to be hungry, you’ll be aware of being hungry and food in general until you eat, which will likely either make you fail hard, or eat more at the next meal because food is more appealing when you’re hungry.
It can also take a lot of motivation to work through which desires to eat are hunger, which are boredom and which are, of all things, thirst. Eating is a source of dopamine, and so if you’re bored “food” is an easy source of entertainment (your body is so dumb that just chewing is often enough for it, hence “gum” is pleasant). Sometimes your body asks for sugar when what it needs is water.
“You” don’t control what “you” want, you just get to figure out how to get it. A deeper, vastly stupider, part just shouts vague demands you get to act on. “WATER. FOOD. <GENDER> SEX. SLEEP. SCARED. BORED.” it doesn’t stop shouting if you ignore it. So use your willpower to give it what it wants in the healthier but more difficult way, and to make doing so a habit that it won’t veto.
And that’s before you get to things that need a medical intervention in addition to behavioral.
If your pancreas or hypothalamus have decided to be shits, there’s absolutely no amount of willpower that can regulate things.