Why Willpower Is Not Enough to Make You Thin

Willpower is not enough to make you thin. In fact, willpower might be the worst way to try and lose weight because it relies on a motivation that diminishes over time.

December 2024 Update: I originally wrote this 7 years ago. After working with women trying to lose weight for the past five years, I am even more convinced that willpower isn’t the problem.

This is because most women have lots of willpower. But food, our bodies, and our weight is more complex than just how many calories are you eating.

I teach women to mange their eating and dissolve eating problems without willpower, beyond the small amount we all have available each day.

Your weight loss motivation often begins with good intentions. You’ll begin a healthy eating plan, eat high quality foods, and establish a weight loss goal.

And the assumption, that if you just have enough willpower this time, you are going to avoid temptations and create new healthy habits.

​Sounds about right?

Research shows that this so rarely works, that it’s kind of unbelievable anyone tries to diet anymore. About 95% of diets fail meaning you quit or you end up gaining the weight back.

Not only that but many women secretly engage in binge eating and other dangerous habits.

So what is the problem and why isn’t your willpower the answer?

It’s very common for people to think that it’s their lack of willpower that is the reason that they are overweight or just can’t eat in a healthy way.

The problem with this is that the toxic thought behind this is that there is something wrong with YOU if you can’t stick to a diet.

We all know or have read about people that apply willpower to the task of losing weight with some success. It used to leave me feeling like the most undisciplined person in the world. It seemed so simple; eat less and exercise more.

There is nothing wrong with you. The problem is with the entire premise of dieting. It is a system that just does not work long-term and often not even in the short-term.

Instead, what works is to take care of yourself using consistency in building healthy habits. 

Why Willpower is Not Enough to Make You Thin

If you blame yourself because you don’t have any willpower you are not alone. Most of my clients start with the idea that there is something wrong with them and that’s why they can’t lose weight or change problem eating habits.

I can remember feeling that it was hopeless to even think about losing weight. I didn’t feel like I was overeating but I still couldn’t budge any weight off for over eight years. I was resigned to being overweight forever.

Then a few years ago, I discovered that I could lose weight and I could do it without dieting or crazy exercise regimens.

If you are feeling hopeless, I want to share some hopeful news. It really is possible to eat in a way that not only makes you feel good; it can help you maintain a healthy weight.

To do that, it’s helpful to understand why willpower is NOT the best way to make you thin.

Long-term weight loss or management has to begin with a new way of understanding your mind, your body, and even your spirit/heart.

Our relationship with food is absolutely mental, physical, and emotional.

Most diets only look at the physical part. Eat this, don’t eat this and you’ll lose weight.

But the available mind power is only about 5% of your total power and this is where your willpower is and it just can’t power you through a sustainable behavior change.

Your mental health is important as well as stress management. Diets tend to make us more stressed and feel more negatively about ourselves. 

Many people still believe that to lose weight, it’s all a matter of willpower and self-control. In fact, willpower is more often cited as the reason people can’t lose weight or create positive change than any other reason!

To get started making changes, you will need to have some intention and a plan. Your mindset is important and it will help you determine what healthy behaviors you want to create.

But as a life coach, I am also interested in a healthy lifestyle for you. What do I mean by that?

Most of us are familiar with the ideas of calories and creating a deficit of calories. But our bodies are way more complex than that.

Your body is designed to hold on to weight and fat. That meant survival back in the days when food was not readily availabe.

Now we are faced with way too much food, and much of it is designed to make us crave it and overeat it. 

Modern food literally messes up your brain!

Not only that but it affects our bodies by screwing up our hunger hormones and insulin which plays a key role in our weight management.

You are up against a food culture that promotes fast food, non-food, and horrible information about what is healthy or not. 

In addition, we have outdated ideas about how to diet. We think we should deprive ourselves for months, lose weight, and then somehow keep going with a process that was very unpleasant and unsatisfying.

We all know women, and perhaps we have been her, who lost weight, looks fabulous, gets a ton of compliments and then just gradually puts all the weight back on.

Your brain will keep telling you that you’ve got to get back on that diet again and won’t do things that will actually work long-term.

That short-term win, even though it was years ago, will keep calling your name.

Finally as part of your overall healthy lifestyle, we have to look at the part our emotions play in our attempts to manage our weight.

We use food to cope with our lives.

And it is very difficult to remove the thing that seems to help us cope with life. Food is, a way to bypass our painful emotions that come from work that is too hard, relationships that are unsatisfying or painful, and from this underlying feeling that we aren’t enough in some way.

What Works Better Than Willpower?

I believe in your and in your overall self-control. You have used it to create so many good things in your life that it seems crazy that you can’t make it work with food.

As I’ve said, the food we live with and are surrounded with is created so that you can’t contril yourself around it.

In addition, you are stuck on the idea that you have to deprive yourself with a special diet.

And you are using food to cope with painful parts of life.

Honestly, the very thing you need is to feed yourself. Almost every overweight woman I have ever worked with doesn’t eat enough–at meals. 

Number one, is eating real meals.

Number two is developing the mindset that you can eat and eat food you like and not gain weight. 

Number three is actually feeling your real emotions instead of pushing them down with food.

These three things, though simple can be difficult. However, they are not impossible and will change your life in profound ways.

When you take care of your basic need to eat and be nourished; you will begin to take care of yourself in other ways as well.

Why Willpower Doesn’t Work

Here are some of specific ways that modern life gets in the way of self-control working in regards to lifestyle changes around food and eating.

I encourage anyone reading this to have compassion for yourself and your experience. We cannot know what we don’t know or haven’t been exposed to. 

Part of the problem is most of what you will read online or even what your doctor will tell you is just old diet culture sound bites. 

You cannot solve this problem with the old ideas that created the problem. Another tired old diet will not create the shift you need.

Here are five things that make your attempts to change how you eat much more difficult.

Modern Food Culture

Most of us accept that fast food and non-food are normal parts of the human diet even though we know they can be bad for us if we eat too much of them.

So many of you, instead of eating a real lunch will graze on candy and snacks or worse not even take time to eat and end up pigging out after work on whatever you can get your hands and mouth on.

Or you might run through a fast food drive through for a “real” meal. Even though most of us eat things like pasta, crackers, yogurt, bread, and things like this; these things provide little nutrition. 

To go with our non-food things we drink beverages that are filled with sugar and other unhealthy things. I see shelves devoted to soda and energy drinks. Trust me–these are not providing anything good for your body.

Another product of diet culture is the restrictions we place on our meals. We try to satisfy ourselves with low calorie foods or we don’t eat enough to fell full.

This undermines all our attempts to at healthy eating. 

Foods that Create Cravings

Part of the problem with trying to use willpower to control our eating is that we are trying to limit foods that have been created in laboratories to induce cravings. That’s right, the chips, pasta, breads, and other foods are designed to make you want to eat MORE.

When you are eating these things; it is hard to quit eating them. Not only do you want to eat more, you will keep eating even when you know good and well that you are not hungry anymore.

This isn’t you not having any self-control. This is you eating foods designed to make you not have any willpower! The fatigue that comes from trying to resist these foods is real.

These foods trick your brain and your body into eating more and they take away your natural ability to quit eating when you are full.

That’s right. Your body really does have the ability to know when it’s full and to remove that feeling of wanting to stuff your face when you’ve eaten enough. But when you eat foods that create cravings and override this system, you overeat and can’t understand why.

If you are trying to reduce cravings, here’s a post on how to eliminate cravings.

Restricting Fat

Sixty years ago, our country had a crisis. Men were dying of heart attacks at an unprecedented rate. It the effort to fight this, something really bad happened. Medicine, science, and the government decided for the first time in the history of humans, to recommend a diet for all people.

It advised things like eating only lean meats, not eating saturated fat, and removing things like eggs, butter, and cheese from our diets.

Most of you reading this will probably see nothing wrong with that recommendation since we have all grown up hearing that this is how we should eat.

The only problem is that is was wrong. No research ever showed that this way of eating would be helpful. Not only that, but much research showed that it was actually harmful. Look around. Obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease run rampant in our society.

In fact, no one is surprised by any of these conditions any more. We all accept that it is a part of aging. Except that it is not. It is a condition of a science experiment going horribly wrong.

One takeaway is that fat isn’t bad. Fat is one of the most important foods you need to eat to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight. Let that sink in.

Here are some examples of healthy fats: fat from meat that is of good quality, coconut oil, butter, eggs, olive oil, avocados, and nuts.

So, instead of pasta have some squash with butter. Eat your salad with a delicious fatty dressing. Leave the skin on your chicken. Buy the higher fat ground meat. Add avocados and nuts to your meals. Eat whole eggs.

You Don’t Understand Your Body

Our body is a complex collection of systems that are regulated by hormones. Unfortunately our lack of understanding our hormones has turned most of us into fat-storing bodies instead of fat-burning bodies.

Our bodies are designed to use fat as energy. While our hormones systems are sensitive and complex, working with them is not. You have to limit foods that raise your insulin. Unchecked eating of processed carbs literally wrecks havoc with your hormone systems.

Your body goes haywire inside and instead of using fat for energy it continually stores it. That’s why even if you are watching what you eat and perhaps even eating low-fat to stay thin, you find yourself gaining more and more fat each year.

Here is a link to the Fat-Burning Secrets that Everyone Needs to Understand

Not Understanding the Big Picture

Here’s the big picture. We are here to live healthy active lives into our 80’s and beyond. We’re not here to try and have a skinny body for a few years and then be in horrible shape from our 50’s on.

On some level we know starvation and fad diets are not the way to go but we just can’t trust ourselves enough to eat real food.

We restrict at our meals and then we go overboard on snacking. Snacking alone can double our daily calories!

And we keep on doing these things even though year after year they do not work!

I see women starve themselves to try and get themselves into an unrealistic body shape. How many women still lament that they can’t fit into the jean size they wore in high school?

The big picture is take care of yourself now in a way that will get you through your entire life in a way that keeps you active and happy. Eat real food. Exercise. Learn about the food you eat. 

Take care of yourself. Take care of you physical, mental, and emotional health. You are way more than a body.

Often to make significant changes in how you eat, you must address the rest of your life and understand your own big picture.

Seriously. Make decisions today that will build a solid foundation for the rest of your wonderful life. Don’t believe for a second that everyone is going to get sick and need lots of medication when they get older.

Why Willpower is Not the Best Way to Lose Weight

Willpower is only a way to lose weight in the short term. In the long-term, you can harm your metabolism and set yourself up to be overweight and sick. It’s so much better to eat real food.

To help you with that, I’ve written a lot on the subject. I don’t care if you are skinny or how you look in a bathing suit. I care that you have a happy healthy life and that you are fit enough to actually enjoy life.

Eating good foods is not deprivation my friends. It is freedom.

Here’s to real freedom my friends!