It’s possible to take some pressure off willpower and greatly increase your capacity to finish the weight loss race by toggling to alternate fuel sources. Chief of those sources is habit.

I used to believe my extra pounds correlated to insufficient self control amounting to personal failure. I just assumed that slim, fit people routinely reached deeper and mustered more willpower. As a reasonably diligent person who could be considered successful by most common measures, being considerably overweight frustrated me, to put it mildly. And made no sense. In other areas of my life, I had made commitments and followed through.

While I seemed to lack weight loss willpower, I surely didn’t lack incentive. I was approaching the age where several relatives had first experienced stroke, heart attack or diabetes. I was (am) a thankful and happy wife and mom to three young kids, content with the turn my career-centric life took for home and family some years back. I had every incentive to stay healthy.

But time and again I’d make a weight loss commitment with a clear & reasonable plan and within weeks or days, slide down a spiral of little lapses, exceptions, and start-tomorrows. 

When I began to look closely at the research, I came to realize that the masses of us who drop out before the weight-loss finish line every year are nearly all making the same mistake. We’re expecting too much of willpower. Especially considering the evidence that for many, hyper-palatable processed foods engage the same brain mechanisms of addiction as narcotics do. 

Sure, willpower is needed. But alone, it just won't take us the distance. 

What if, to power our weight loss race, we could use a hybrid approach, tapping alternate fuel sources for long stretches, switching to “willpower mode” only sparingly and periodically?

Here’s a simple little epiphany. It’s possible to take some pressure off willpower and greatly increase your capacity to finish the weight loss race by toggling to alternate fuel sources. Chief of those sources is habit.

It's what you're running on when you do things with so little effort you barely notice. It's regulated by an entirely different section of the brain from the over-worked section that makes executive decisions all day. And, it can be cultivated to reliably yield dividends long after you’ve stopped investing effort.

For me, understanding the potency of habit, how ultra processed and refined foods can hijack the brain...how some people are wired to be more susceptible to that hijack than others...and how relatively quickly these short circuits can be repaired...was nothing short of an act of grace. I don't discount that my first steps to implement that understanding came on a morning centered on meditative prayer. That was many years and pounds ago.