How to Get That Weight Off

NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS AND WILL POWER

Did you resolve to lose weight this year? Here's an article from MSN about will power. Combine that with the Arbonne Weight Loss system and you have a winning combination.

Can You Increase Your Willpower?
by Tamim Ansary

Many of us say we'd like to be more well rounded. And, by golly, we achieve this goal during the holidays. Six weeks of gorging and lounging can easily make some of us a little too well rounded.

It's never too early to start thinking about resolutions, or at least get a vague idea or two about making some changes. What's on your list? I'm vowing to get fit, quit watching so much TV, shed some pounds, start a new business ... yadda, yadda, yadda.

The mystery is how to do it. How do you resist that truffle? Where do you get the willpower (or the won't-power, as in I won't eat that truffle)?

For that matter ... What the heck is willpower?

In some circles, it's a bad--or at least an unfashionable--word. Addiction counselors say the whole concept is counterproductive. It makes people blame themselves, damaging their self-esteem, and poor self-esteem makes them weaker.

"Willpower is a negative concept," says Lori Feldman, a psychiatrist who specializes in helping people break bad habits. "I prefer the word motivation, because people can't change a behavior unless they have motivation."

I called Jenny Craig, Fitness USA, and the Habit Abatement Clinic, and they all said the same thing, "We don't use the word willpower. We prefer the word motivation."

The method these folks seem to recommend is that the best way to battle a craving is to fool it or to distract yourself. Crave a truffle? Go ahead, eat ... a carrot. Or go ahead and indulge yourself, not by eating, but by going shopping (if that rings your bell).

So okay, let's say the word willpower is no-good, what about the thing itself? Does willpower exist?

Until recently, no one doubted it. Ancient philosophers such as Plato put the will smack dab at the center of human personality. They believed human action resulted from three forces: reason, desire, and will.

Medieval philosophers had a paradox that seemed to prove the existence of this thing called will. It was called Buridan's ass. It went like this: Suppose you place a donkey halfway between two bales of hay. If it only has reason and desire it won't move at all because it will be pulled equally in opposite directions and will eventually starve. There must, therefore, be a third force. Enter the will.

But 19th-century psychologists such as Sigmund Freud downgraded will and started talking more about drives. To put it simply, Freud located the source of these deep inside the self, where no one could see them except through dreams and neuroses.

In the 20th century, B.F. Skinner argued that we should forget about the inner self because behavior is shaped entirely from the outside by reinforcements. Any behavior followed by a reward gets strengthened. This is the premise of behaviorism, the school of psychology Skinner helped pioneer.

To change your own behavior, Skinner and his colleagues would say, reward yourself each time you do the right thing. (I tried this and it worked! I wanted to quit eating pie, so every time I didn't eat a slice of pie, I rewarded myself with a nice slice of pie. Now I'm giving up pie ten or twelve times a day!)

Can we measure willpower?
Early psychologists worried that willpower was unscientific: It couldn't be seen, touched, or weighed. But neither can intelligence, and psychologists figured out ways to measure that. They can even, they say, rate a person's IQ (intelligence quotient) with a single number, like gas in the brain tank.

That can't be done with willpower. Or can it?

A classic experiment conducted with 4-year-olds seemed to measure what we call willpower. The experiment, which is quite reproducible, went like this.

A child was left alone in a room with a cookie. He was told that he would get two cookies later if he didn't eat the one in front of him. A hidden camera then watched to see how long he held out.

Here's the kicker. The kids in this experiment were tracked afterward, and those with a high resistance to the cookie (a.k.a willpower) generally did better in life.

But is willpower like intelligence? Are we born with a certain WQ (willpower quotient)? If so, how come we criticize people for their lack of willpower? We'd never tell a kid who's struggling with a math problem, "Just have more intelligence," but we say this kind of thing all the time about willpower. "Suck it up, soldier! What's wrong with you? Have some willpower."

The willpower muscle
Some recent experiments suggest that willpower may be like a muscle, at least to the extent that it can tire.

One such experiment was done by Dr. Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University. Baumeister had two groups of people skip a meal. Then he put them in a room with plates of cookies and plates of radishes. Some were allowed to eat cookies. Others had to eat radishes. Later, both groups were given a tedious, exacting task (tracing a complex maze) and told to keep at it as long as they could.

The cookie eaters generally lasted 18 minutes. Those who had been eating radishes (that is, resisting temptation) lasted about nine minutes. Their willpower, it seems, was exhausted.

So if willpower is like a muscle, can it be strengthened? Yes, says Dr. Baumeister and others. One psychologist, Howard Rankin of the Carolina Wellness Center, even runs a willpower-training program.

Baumeister says that to strengthen your willpower, you must exercise it. But don't set yourself up for failure. Start with stuff your out-of-shape will can handle. Hold your breath. Stand on one leg. Write with your left hand, if you're right-handed. Skip a meal. Look for ways to pit willpower against want-power. It's like a weightlifter doing reps.

Learned helplessness
Then there's a theory propounded by University of Pennsylvania cognitive psychologist Martin Seligman. It started with an experiment Seligman witnessed. Two groups of dogs were subjected to a slight shock. One group had a lever they could push to turn the shock off. The other dogs had a lever that didn't do anything.

Next, the psychologists tried to teach these dogs to jump over a little fence. The dogs that had working levers learned it quickly. The others wouldn't even try. They just lay down and gave up.

Seligman believed the dogs had learned to be helpless. And he spent the next 20 years exploring this concept of learned helplessness. He's linked it, among other things, to a person's tendency to give up. He also believes learned helplessness can be unlearned.

This is where I sit up and take notice.

The key, he says, is in a person's explanatory script. What Seligman means by script is that little voice in your head that's always analyzing and explaining what happens to you.

According to Seligman, there are two styles of explanatory script--optimistic and pessimistic. When something good happens, the optimist says, "I did that. I do that kind of thing in many ways. It's a permanent part of who I am." But when a bad thing happens, the optimist says, "It was the situation. And that situation was unique. Anyway, it'll be different next time."

Pessimists use the same scripts; but they blame themselves when things go wrong and refuse to give themselves credit when things go well.

Seligman, like many cognitive psychologists, believes you can change your script, and then your script will change you. To become an optimist, says Seligman, first become aware of your automatic script--catch yourself in the act and see what you're telling yourself. Then, write down what you would be saying say if you were an optimist.

Keep it up and someday, pal, you too will be an optimist. (Isn't that just what an optimist would say?)

Personally, I lean toward the Baumeister plan (the one about exercising the willpower muscle). Break the challenges you're facing into bite-sized pieces. Let's say it's late and you're sleepy, but you have a column on willpower to write. Instead of making yourself write the column, just make yourself go to your desk. Then, just make yourself sit down. And keep going like that, baby step by baby step. It works.

The proof? You're reading it.

Let me and Arbonne help you with your will power, with your resolution. Shop with me online at My Arbonne, for Figure 8 Weight Loss products, and accompanying immune system boosters for your weight loss health, and immune system.