Speaker 1 (00:00):
You are listening to, Not Another Diet, the podcast episode eight. Why is my willpower so weak? I am bursting at the seams to talk about this today because understanding willpower is what fundamentally changed my life and then my weight. It was the absolute game changer for really understanding how to get a handle on my chronic weight gain. I cannot wait to share all my ideas and tips and everything with you today.
(00:42):
Have you ever wondered why your willpower fails so often? Maybe you've got ice cream in the freezer and you tell yourself you're not going to eat it, but you just go padding into the kitchen and grab some. Or maybe you go to your favorite restaurant and before you go, you think I'm going to order the healthy thing today, and you get there and nope, you do not order the healthy thing. Or maybe you find yourself reaching for a treat and before you've even thought about whether or not you wanted the treat or really you needed it or anything, it's kind of in your hand and then in your mouth, right? And each time you have those experiences, you think like, why is my willpower so weak? That's a perfectly natural question to ask of yourself, but it's actually a fundamental misunderstanding about how we function as human beings.
(01:38):
And you can be forgiven for having that misunderstanding because literally all of modern weight loss and diet culture is predicated on the idea of willpower, that you are an autonomous being going through the world and you should be making healthy choices. And I've talked about how making healthy choices is a diet culture idea. I believe in episode two when we're dissecting diets is when I really talked about this, but today is where we get to the root of the issue, which is the fundamental idea underneath there of making healthy choices is you should just use your willpower. I know what's around you, but if you had better will, you would be able to consistently make healthy choices. This is what creates so much shame because we are completely misunderstanding ourselves as human beings and then over and over and over and over, both putting ourselves in situations we can't win, but also asking of ourselves things that we just can't do with any consistency.
(02:47):
So it's not that I think that willpower can't ever be used for anything for short-term goals probably great. You need to stay up all night to write a paper or make a deadline, like really pushing yourself to do short-term things. Great. Willpower is super useful for that, but having a healthy weight is long-term, daily self-care and or long-term daily practices as I call it in my program. And that is a whole other way of thinking about how to have success basically. So I want to read you a quote that somebody wrote to me a while back that I just think is so perfect. And I might've referenced this quote before, but as you can tell, I love to talk about things in multiple ways. And so today we're going to look at this quote under the lens of willpower. And here's the quote, I would love to hear more.
(03:38):
For those of us surrounded by office, potlucks, donuts brought in always a cupcake here or a candy bowl there, what's being asked here is how can I have more willpower in the face of all that temptation? Or I'm going to reframe the question to you as I like to call it Rebecca, how can you help me be less of a human being? And I'm not laughing at the idea of trying to be more resilient in the face of temptation. I am trying to introduce the idea to you that we're approaching the problem all wrong. And today what I'm going to do is lay out for you all of the components. And so it's really important to stick around because you're going to want to hear about how I define environment, how I define will power, and then how we define agency, which is that magic ingredient that everyone is looking for to actually make the necessary changes and stick to them as I have for the last 14 years.
(04:41):
And this is really important to understand because if you don't see the problem with clarity, you are going to keep running up against a brick wall by trying things that just can't work. And then you take the information away that you are a failure. You can't stick to anything. Your willpower is weak. Well, I got news for you. Your willpower is weak. Mine is too. And I say this as a person who 14 years ago began to understand these concepts that I'm going to teach for you today and allowed them to change me profoundly, profoundly. And what ended up happening with this journey of self understanding, which is a very important part of weight loss, to understand yourself personally, to understand your humanity, and understand what you can actually have control over, it not only transformed me as a person, but it created an incredible amount of peace and self-acceptance. And I think that those underlying structures are what have allowed me to stick with my practices all of these years. I know who I am I my humanity, and I understand how to create the architecture in my life in order to protect the practices that lead to the outcomes that I'm looking for. In this particular case, it would be the ability to have a healthy weight and sustain it.
(06:23):
The first step in understanding willpower is to take a little bit of an in-depth dive into environment. And if you trust me a little bit and you hang on, you'll see how all of these ideas come together. But the very first building block is environment. And I'm going to start out by talking to you about a book called Live Wire by David Eagleman. And it's essentially the story of the brain. And look, you don't have to go read this book, but I'll certainly link to it so that if you're interested in understanding brain science, you can jump into it. But I read these books so you don't have to. The reason this one is so profound is that it helped me understand why we continue to be so affected by our environment. And the bottom line is this, your brain is about 50% developed when you are in the womb and when you come out, this is not an accident that much of the ways that the brain creates synapses and learns, develops the rest of the brain.
(07:26):
Now, where we have a big misunderstanding about that is that it ends in childhood. No, it goes on for the whole of your life. You have a brain that is wired to take in your environment all the time, and that is part of your development as a human being that is part of how you grow and understand the world and react to other people. Keep yourself safe. Listen, this is a primal brain. We might live in the modern world, but your brain is functioning much in the same way that human beings brains always have. So then when we talk about what does it mean to have an environment, well, I define it in three categories and this is exactly how I teach it in my program, and that goes to your physical environment. So what is around you? A big one is your home. Our homes have a big effect on our weight.
(08:19):
They just do. And you are often, we live in constructed environments, as I call it, because your home is your constructed environment that we profoundly misunderstand. And anywhere you have a physical presence that is part of your environment. So it could be work, it could be your car could be driving down the street. It could be if you go over to a friend's house on a regular basis, guess what? That's part of your physical environment too. That's what defines a physical environment. Your next environment is your emotional or internal environment. And so a big part of my program is also self-talk and how you speak to yourself in your own mind and how you regulate your emotions is a big part of your personal environment. And this goes into the aspects of self-soothing, which is a huge part of having a healthy weight. I'm not going to tell you how to not self-soothe in this.
(09:12):
We're talking about willpower today. But know that your emotional environment and how you self-soothe and your physical environment are often the toxic intertwining that lead people to eat a lot when they feel anxious or bad. And the last pillar, the three pillars of the environment is your relational environment. So that could be your work wife or your work husband, your actual partner in your house, anyone that you see on a regular basis and have a social interaction with. Because often some of the most problematic aspects of our eating come from our social interactions and we discount those because we are social creatures and we want to love and be accepted and all of that. But those are the three pillars of your environment. And here's a really interesting part of that. There's so much evidence of how our environments affect us all around us that we readily accept.
(10:11):
We don't even think twice about actually about raising children. We know that having a household with a regular schedule and healthy foods and people who read to children and all kinds of stuff, that's really, or you have a place where your child can go outside and play, and we think hard about the environments that we're bringing our children into, but somehow we don't apply those to ourselves. And I guess the idea being that, well, children have little brains that are growing, but if you understand that your brain is always taking in information your whole life and you're being stimulated by it or acting on it, then you start to think about that differently.
(10:56):
How about marketing those Facebook ads that come up over and over again? You click on it once and then you see it's 700 more times. Well, the very act of repetition, first, you're in an environment to be marketed to, right? Like you're on Facebook, but the repetition itself, they know it wears you down. There's a reason for that. You see the ad once you can dismiss it, you see it four times. Well, now you're starting to be interested in it. You see it seven times and now there's a countdown and all kinds of other stuff. Well, how that applies to your actual life is that here's the direct application of that idea. I'm going to put a plate of brownies on your kitchen island. You got to walk by them. You got to walk by them. Every time you go into the kitchen, you got to sit where you can see them across the whatever.
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I have an open kitchen, maybe you don't, but you get the idea. And every single time you either look at them or you think about them or they're in your line of sight. That's a pinging, pinging, pinging. How many times are you going to get pinged before you get up and eat the brownie, right? So that's an element of misunderstanding environment. And think about the context of that for a second. What if I just stood there going, you should make healthy choices. You should make healthy choices. But that example is a really good one about how most of us actually function in our everyday lives. And there's some fun ones too about the role of environment. Like you go to regional places and they have accents. Is it that all those people came out of the womb with an accent or they all sort of grew up pickled in it, essentially like that's all that everybody was doing and their brains took it in and now they have it.
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And by the way, I grew up overseas and in fourth grade, my parents sent me to a British school because that's all that was available at that particular post. And my dad picks me up one day and lo and behold, I have a perfect British accent about four months into this thing. And it's a source, it's a funny story in my household, but it just goes to show you put somebody in an environment and they will become a product of that environment. And you see it with hairstyles. There's regional hairstyles, there's ones that we make fun of that look insane, but you see groups of people dressing alike who are friends, these are micro environments, right? They're all buddies and they're wearing the same clothes and then they start having similar ideas about life. These are all products of environment, but somehow the one place, and I can tell you where this comes from, the one place that we utterly discount this idea would be weight loss.
(13:54):
And I think part of the reason for that is diet culture. It's really hard to sell you a diet if that's not the solution, right? If you have to account for the role of environment, I'm not sure what an app is going to do for you, and therefore they say nothing about it or very little about it. Here is the last example of an environment acting on you that I think is profoundly interesting, and that is your friendship environment. Some years ago there was a study done. There's an article in the New York Times, which I'll link to in the show notes, and it knocked my socks off for two reasons. One, it so profoundly shows the role of environment in our lives, and the other is how the media spins it and keeps us misinformed. And again, I'm not anti-media. I think it's important to see how badly they missed the fundamental problem here.
(14:57):
In any case, a study was done in the New York Times. It is called Study, says Obesity can be contagious, LOL Contagious. So what essentially happened was that they studied a group of friends over time, and some of the friends put on a lot of weight together over time. And it was clear that their microenvironment, the environment of their friendship was one of the biggest issues. And here's a direct quote from the article. The greatest influence of all was between mutual close friends there. If one became obese, the odds of the other becoming obese were nearly tripled. So instead of the conclusion being that weight is behavior oriented and that our behavior is highly affected by other people in our environment, the title of that article was How weight gain is contagious like a virus, which is bananas. Of course, that's not what's happening. There's nothing, I hope they meant it tongue in cheek.
(16:12):
I really do, because otherwise it's this endless myopic focus on what's wrong with my body. And now you're supposed to be suspicious of your friends that they're giving you a virus to make you fat. It's ridiculous. The whole thing can be boiled down to one conclusion, which is that weight loss is behavior change and behavior change is highly affected by the other people in your life. And you are not going to undo the desire to fit in, the desire to be close to another person and the desire to follow that person when they are ordering takeout again and again or whatever, or making life decisions that make it really difficult to take care of yourself. There's all kinds of different ways that we sabotage our own good health. And guess what? If you do it, your friends might do it too. So that's something to think about, which also leads to the idea of being triggered by your environment that's closer to how we actually function.
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You have an environment and it triggers you to do things. I don't mean that in the millennial media sense. I mean it in the sense of what the word actually means, which is that, I'll give you an example of a good trigger. I leave my walking shoes next to the door, and when I see them, I'm reminded to head out the door and get my daily walk. Now at this point, it's so ingrained I probably could move them, but I've done this for so long that just seeing the shoes makes me think, ah, get out the door. Let's get after it. And that is an example of a really good trigger. It's a simple thing, it's an easy thing. But most of modern life does. The opposite of most of modern life triggers us in detrimental ways, and that's because companies are constantly trying to sell you obesogenic food all the time.
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And I talk about this in episode six about highly processed food and the huge marketing budgets in general. I buy food that doesn't have a marketing budget. Beans don't have a marketing budget, and I eat a lot of them. But most packaged foods do have a marketing budget. And every time an advertisement or something comes up, you're triggered. And think about it this way, have you ever driven by a fast food place and had that taste come up in your mouth? You know exactly what that food is going to taste like or how it feels or whatever. That is a trigger. That's a very clear trigger. And when you see that big sign towering above our eye line, what they're actually doing is triggering you to have a moment where you go, I remember what that tasty thing tastes like, and hopefully you will veer your car off and now you've been triggered to eat that meal, as opposed to just having some idea that you were going to eat a cheeseburger or whatever.
(19:19):
I don't mean to pick on cheeseburgers, but you get my drift. It wasn't something that just came up from nowhere. It's something you took in from your environment. And the last thing I'll say, this is a little quote, there was a really amazing article that came out recently, which I will also link to. There was a MD PhD who does all kinds of stuff about free will. He studies the concept of free will, and I'm going to get into that. We're going to talk about the application of willpower, and then we're going to talk about agency or free will and agency, which is where the solutions happen, which is where we bring light into the subject. And what he says is we are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control our biology, our environments, their interactions. Now, I take a little more optimistic view than the scientists.
(20:16):
I do think that there's things that you can do to not rely on willpower and make real progress in your life, but it doesn't come from this idea that you're going to be so motivated one day, which by the way, motivation is an extension of willpower. They're two. I like to couple them together as the world's worst bad ideas when it comes to taking care of yourself. But it doesn't come from this idea that you're going to rise up one day and be the kind of person who cannot wait, eat salads. No. It comes from calming down, seeing your built environment and making the right changes over time. And we're going to get into it.
(21:08):
How do we use willpower? And by the way, they're all pretty flawed ideas, but these are some of the ways, and we've been taught in families and culture about what willpower is. We think of it as being a way to stick to something. I'm going to hold on. We use our willpower to do that, to stay away from things. That's another place that we think about the use of willpower. And when I say willpower, you could almost put a hyphen between those two words, just separate them willpower. And we also think about it as a tool to make us do unpleasant things. And that one actually could work. It's just that it won't work for very long. You're just not going to keep doing unpleasant things. But if you've got a short-term unpleasant thing to do, like meeting a deadline or running up a big hill or whatever, sure use that will and power and power through it.
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But here is the big idea that I want to share with you. Now, we get into solutions or maybe not a solution because as I've mentioned in episode one, weight is a thorny issue. And this is exactly what I mean when I say it's a thorny issue. It comes in multiple ways for most people. Those three pillars that I gave you, emotional, relational, and physical are all factors in weight gain, all of them, which is why it's far more important to see yourself and your life accurately than to look for yet another plan that you're going to have to use willpower to stick to. But here is the big idea that I want to share with you. You don't have free will you have agency. I'm going to say it again. You don't have free will. You have agency. And what I mean by that is that you don't have the option of being unaffected by your environment.
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That's not your primal brain, how you're constructed as a human being. You don't have that option. And thinking that you do is really just saying, I'm going to cut out a whole portion of my humanity and hope for the best. Well, I don't know if you've gotten the best out of doing that. My guess is if you're attracted to my work, you have not gotten the best out of doing that. And maybe it's time to think of things in another way. But what I like about that statement is that it shows you progress is possible. So let's talk about what agency is, and I gave it a little definition that I think will be really helpful to you. Agency is the deliberate manipulation of your environment to get a desired outcome. And I mean all three pillars, I mean all three pillars of your environment can be, and when I say manipulation, I don't mean like you're manipulating people.
(24:13):
We'll use that term in its most positive light. What I mean is that you're making changes. You are making changes. What you cannot do as a human being is go through life thinking, I won't be affected by my physical environment. So here's a good example. If you would like to be a person who walks, but you are living in what is a typical American development at this point where there are no sidewalks and it's very difficult to get, you have to walk with cars on the road and that kind of thing, and you just say to yourself, I don't care about any of that. I'm going to get out there and do it. But you're actually afraid of being hit by a car and the whole thing feels kind of unsafe. You can't just force yourself out the door. That's not, I mean, maybe for a few days, but eventually all that friction is going to put you right back in your house.
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So what you have the option of doing, and this is one that came from my own life to tell you the truth, is that I ended up moving to a place where walking was super easy. Just got to, I walk everywhere. It's actually easier to walk to most places for me than it is to drive. And so I drive very little and I walk a lot. I don't have the option of not being scared to walk on roads with no sidewalk. I do have the option of putting myself in an environment where walking is easy and plentiful and safe, and that is a really good example of where somebody has agency. But you can use that in every aspect of your life, in every aspect of your life. That has to be when you talk about self-soothing. So let's talk about that one where you have agency over that.
(26:01):
That one is going to be a multi-pronged agency. I wish I could tell you, oh, if you just blah, blah, blah, then you'll never want to self-soothe again. No thorny, thorny, deep, difficult problems that plague you in your life are not going to have one singular solution. But that does not mean you can't make progress. That does not mean that you can't make changes. That's not true. And I'm living proof. I did all of the things, whatever you can think of as a bad idea. I drank too much. I ate too many sweetss, I didn't move enough. I put myself in environments that made it difficult to do that. And my relational environment made it difficult to do that. Everything. I made all the mistakes and I made them all. So you don't have to, but also so that I can help you understand that you can see yourself and your life differently and make the right changes.
(26:54):
But the self-soothing, let's talk about that one. Self-soothing is actually you're being acted on in a couple of different ways or maybe three or four different ways. Your emotional environment is that there's some sort of anxiety or unmet need there. And look, I still have anxiety. I just handle the whole thing very differently now. But you have anxiety and you have a household with obesogenic food in it, or you walk by a place and you go get it, or somebody else brings it into your household. There's a number of different ways. Or you go get it thinking, I'm going to feel better when I eat this thing. Which of course, there's a little bit of a dopamine rush. So now we're bringing in the food environment where you're being marketed to all the time, feel better, feel better, feel better, feel better. Eventually, you're going to believe these messages that you'll feel better if you eat this chocolate thing or this whatever, I don't know.
(27:49):
But that's a lot of messages coming your way. And you have some unmet needs internally. And this is where your internal environment and the obesogenic environment come together to really upend you what turns out where you have agency in the process. Because that's what we're talking about is you go to therapy, you start rewiring your self-talk, which is a big part of my program because I understand how important self-talk is either in lifting you. And I think of self-talk as rewriting your internal environment. How you speak to yourself is your internal environment, but then you also help yourself by not having things that upend you in your home. Now, you might be thinking, oh, but other people bring it in, or my husband says he has to have this, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, that's your relational environment. That's also upending you. And you have agency over those things too.
(28:50):
But it doesn't look like willpower. It doesn't look like forcing yourself to do one thing while everyone around you just gets to do what they want and which is why one of the things that I teach is that we construct households for the most vulnerable members. We do this for children and we should be doing it for ourselves. And that is agency. You have control over what affects you, but you do not have control over being affected by your environment. And that is the ticket to liberation I That is your ticket to reshaping your life in a way to produce the results you're looking for. In my case, the results I was looking for, and what I deeply connected to was that I wanted a healthy weight. I wanted that I said it out loud to myself. I made it a desired priority in my thinking and in my personal evolution.
(30:03):
The right question when you let go of willpower is what do I need? And I want to stop there for a second because that's such an affirming thing to do. And for those of you who have followed my work, you have heard me say that weight loss for me has been an incredibly affirming, positive and joyful experience. And where I'm coming to right now is exactly what I mean when you accept that willpower is not real, or at least in this application, it is not useful. Or as I say in my program, it's finite and unreliable. That's how I describe it there. It's finite and unreliable and therefore not useful for weight loss. And all of that is true, and I've made a pretty good case for you today as to why that is. When you let that go, what you're doing now is saying to yourself, okay, what do I need to move every day?
(31:04):
What do I need in order to have the time to make myself healthy food? What do I need in order to feel great about the kind of movement I want to do? And the last one is, what do I need in order to stop being triggered by things that are not good for me, that are constantly making me struggle with myself? And I want to convey the profound nature of that kind of approach. This is what I mean by having an approach that is about self-exploration. I think one of the first ways that I described my program was a program of self-exploration and weight mastery. And that's still a pretty good term. It's one that's understood better after people go through the process. So it's why I don't use it so much anymore. But this is exactly what I mean. You have to understand yourself inside your own life when you let go of the idea that you should be better, that you should, and in quotations, that you should be the kind of person who can resist the Oreos.
(32:08):
I got news for you. You're supposed to want to eat them. That is not a personal failing. That is exactly how you're designed as a human being. And 14 years later, passed my own weight loss. I am still a person who wants the donut or wants this or wants that, but I generally don't partake, not because I've sort of given myself a lobotomy, which I guess is what would be necessary for me to no longer be triggered by these foods, but because I understand that to calm my eating, I have to calm my environment. And that is the work of letting go of willpower and of understanding that you don't have free will, but you do have agency. You have agency to calm your particular environments. And the last little bit that I'll leave you with is that this is the miracle of self-acceptance. This is the miracle of learning to say, I'm not deficient, but in fact need certain things in order to flourish and succeed.
(33:20):
And I think of that as the true embracing of yourself as a human being and why I have loved this process, why it has been life-changing for me, and why I continue to do this work so that other people can have that experience as well. So I encourage you to take a day to go through your own life. Look at what every time you get an inclination to do something that is contrary to your healthy weight and you know what it is, ask yourself what preceded it. Just make yourself a little like a one page note. What proceeded that? What thought, what thing did you look at? What advertisement, what friends suggested anything, anything at all what proceeded it? And that'll start to give you some of the clarity around letting go of willpower once and for all. If you've enjoyed the ideas in today's podcast, then I would direct you to my free workshop, which you can [email protected] front slash weight loss for life. In it, I talk about weight loss. Without tracking your food, without denying your hunger, without any kind of deprivation, it's a game changer and it's free and available to you right now. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.
