Use Willpower To Lose Weight

Willpower can help you to lose weight, but in order to take full advantage of it, you must learn what it can and can't do. People who say willpower doesn’t work are trying to use it in a way that is beyond its capabilities. Willpower has its limits and you must learn how to work within them.

What Is Willpower?
Willpower is your ability to set a course of action and follow it through.

Willpower provides an intensely powerful yet temporary boost. It is best to think of willpower as a one shot thruster. It burns out quickly, but if directed intelligently, it can provide the burst you need to overcome inertia and create momentum.

Willpower is a concentration of force. You gather up all your energy and make a massive thrust forward. You attack your problems strategically at their weakest points until they crack, allowing you enough room to maneuver deeper into their territory and finish them off.

The application of willpower includes the following steps:
1. Choose your objective
2. Create a plan of attack
3. Execute the plan

With willpower, you may take your time implementing steps 1 and 2, but when you get to step 3, you’ve got to hit it hard and fast.

Don’t try to tackle your problems and challenges in such a way that a high level of willpower is required every day. Willpower is unsustainable. If you attempt to use it for too long, you will burn out. It requires a level of energy that you can maintain only for a short period of time. In most cases the fuel is spent within a matter of days.

An Example
Suppose your objective is to lose 20 pounds. You attempt to go on a diet. It takes willpower, and you do OK with it the first week. But within a few weeks you have fallen back into your old habits and gained all the weight back. You try again with different diets, but the result is still the same. You can’t sustain momentum for long enough to reach your goal weight.

That is to be expected as willpower is temporary. Willpower is for sprints, not marathons. Willpower requires conscious focus, and conscious focus is very draining. It cannot be maintained for ever.

Here is how to tackle that same goal with the proper application of willpower. Accept that you can only apply a short burst of willpower, maybe a few days at best. After that it has gone. So you need to use that willpower to alter the environment around you so that maintaining momentum won’t be as hard as building it in the first place.

So you sit down and make a plan. This doesn’t require much energy, and you can spread the work out over many days.

You identify all the various targets you need to strike if you want success. First remove all the junk food from your kitchen, including anything you have a tendency to overeat, and replace it with foods that will help you lose weight, like fruits and vegetables. Secondly, you might know you will be tempted to get fast food if you come home hungry and don’t have anything ready to eat, so you may pre-cook a week’s worth of food in advance each weekend. That way you always have something in the refrigerator. You set aside some time each weekend to buy groceries and cook all your food for the week. Plus you get a decent cookbook of healthy recipes.

Then you execute, hard and fast. You can probably implement the whole plan in one day. By the end of the day, you’ve used your willpower not to diet directly but to establish the conditions that will make your diet easier to follow. When you wake up the next morning, you find that your environment has dramatically changed in accordance with your plan. Your fridge will be stocked with plenty of ready made healthy food for you to eat. There won’t be any junk foods in your home. You will have a regular block of time set aside for grocery shopping and food prep. It will still require some discipline to follow your diet, but you have changed things so much that it won’t be nearly as difficult as it would be without these changes.

Don’t use willpower to attack your biggest problem directly. Use willpower to attack the environmental and social obstacles that perpetuate the problem. Habit puts action on autopilot, such that very little willpower is required for ongoing progress, allowing you to coast towards your goal.

About the Author:
Jon Rhodes is a popular clinical hypnotherapist from the UK.