IF YOU HAVE WEIGHT TO LOSE, I assume you’ve made multiple attempts to lose it. You’ve tried at least one or two structured diets, but most often your goal was simply to eat less while exercising more. Each attempt, though, was tripped up by the fact you got too hungry to remain on the diet. Your body demanded more food. Appetite is the steroid-enhanced bully of physiological functions. It’s the New York Yankees, Manchester United, GE, and Apple all rolled into one. No amount of self-control can keep hunger at bay forever. It wins almost every time.
Eating is what social-science researchers call an “automatic behavior.” You can choose not to smoke or hang out in meth labs, but you can’t choose not to eat. Almost all the eating we do is habitual, a product of both routine and necessity. Some of us are better or worse at forming new habits and routines, or at breaking the old ones. But for anybody, breaking one habit to establish another is a stressful process, and each of us has a limit to the amount of stress we can tolerate.
It’s one thing if the habit is as simple as exchanging one breakfast cereal for another that has less sugar and more fiber, especially if it’s an even swap in terms of calories or satiety. Making the change involves nothing more taxing than getting rid of the old one and remembering to buy the new one instead.
Dieting is something else entirely. The goal is to eat fewer calories, which is tremendously stressful all by itself, especially as the calorie deficits accumulate and your body responds by adjusting your metabolism. On top of that, you’re simultaneously changing a series of eating behaviors: more meals, less food at each meal, different food, more prep time. You can’t just eat anymore. You have to stop, think, plan, prepare.
At the same time, you’re probably changing your workout routine—another form of stress. I try to be as clear as possible about how challenging Alwyn’s routines are. That’s by design. These are training programs. The entire point is to get your body to do something it doesn’t currently do, or do something better, or at minimum do something differently. If it’s a singular stress, something you impose on yourself three times a week with plenty of time to recover in between, I predict you’ll be happy with the results. If the workouts are part of a series of stressful changes to your normal routine, you may not last long enough to see the payoff for all your work.
Which bring us to the next two rules.
NEW RULE #21 • Self-control, like muscle strength, can improve with training.
That’s the good news. Unfortunately…
NEW RULE #22 • Weight management has little to do with self-control.
That’s the surprise finding of a 2011 research review in Personality and Social Psychology Review. One of the coauthors is Roy F. Baumeister, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Florida State University, whose groundbreaking studies into self-control have shown just how important it is. People with the best self-control, the review notes, enjoy life the most, and have the most successful lives. Flipping it around, the people with the least self-control have the most problems. They’re more prone to drink, smoke, commit fraud, drive without using a seat belt, and go online to post negative reviews of books they haven’t read. (I just made up the last one. I’m sure it’s true, but I can’t back it up with data.)
So, given all these commonsensical implications of having versus not having command over your thoughts and behaviors, you’d assume that there’s a strong correlation between self-control and weight management. There isn’t. The correlation is just 17 percent. That’s still something, but it’s not close to what most of us expect. By contrast, there’s a 36 percent correlation with success in school and work, and a 33 percent correlation with personal well-being. This appears to be the bottom line: People with high self-control are more likely to do well in school, have successful careers, and feel good about their place in the world than people who lack self-control. But those successful people have the same struggles with their weight as everyone else.
Why? Because eating, again, is an automatic behavior most of the time. We get hungry at predictable times, and the less attention we can pay to what and how we eat, the more we can focus on the parts of life that bring us the biggest rewards. Are you going to jeopardize your job performance so you can spend more time shopping for and preparing food? Are you going to compromise your most important relationships? Or, if you’re financially stressed, are you going to spend limited funds on wild salmon when you could get hamburger for a fraction of the cost?
Of course the choices aren’t so dire for most of us. One of the benefits of reaching middle age is gaining some stability in work and relationships. You’ve put in the long hours at the office. You’ve survived turbulence at home. And let’s say you’re now ready for another go at a serious weight-loss plan. You understand that your only shot at long-term success is to make permanent changes to your automatic eating behaviors, and you’re willing to do that. What now?
NEW RULE #23 • A weight-loss plan is good for six months, max.
Through many years of reading and puzzling over weight-loss research, one trend shows up in all the long-term studies I can recall. The best results occur in the first six months. After that, study subjects inevitably start to regain their weight. It’s not because they aren’t trying hard enough. They’re just hungry. Or they’re sick of whatever the diet forces them to eat. Or they want their old life back. Or some combination.
Six months is also long enough for adaptive thermogenesis to kick in. This is a well-known physiological mechanism that I’ve described several times without naming. Your metabolism, in response to a prolonged calorie deficit, slows down. Your body uses less energy throughout the day. Exercise becomes more efficient, meaning your muscles use fewer calories to accomplish the same thing. Everything is primed to prevent further weight loss and to regain what you’ve already shed. If you’ve lost a significant amount—10 percent of your initial body weight—your metabolism has probably declined 15 percent.
It may not even take six months. Here are two more signs that you’ve gone as far as you can with a diet:
Any or all of these signs tell you it’s time to shift your focus from weight loss to weight maintenance. After all, what was the point of losing it if it doesn’t stay lost?
NEW RULE #24 • Weight maintenance requires new strategies and a different skill set.
Weight loss is an outcome goal. You go out of your comfort zone and willingly sacrifice comfort for a specific result. For some, it’s easier to cut calories and begin exercising at the same time, as one set of outcome-focused behaviors will reinforce the other. The exercise itself, as noted in previous chapters, doesn’t contribute substantially to weight loss. That’s almost all diet. Exercise works because you feel good about what you’re doing, and by extension you feel good about yourself.
But if you went into your weight-loss program with an all-out focus on the outcome—measured in pounds, inches, and/or sizes—you may be tempted to quit training just as your body has recalibrated itself to regain all of it, plus some. You couldn’t possibly make a bigger mistake.
Exercise becomes the main event when a diet ends and you start eating in a more normal, sustainable way. It shows up in every study as a bulwark against regaining lost weight. Workouts like Alwyn’s override the metabolic efficiency of your new, lighter body. Intense weight workouts, combined with a higher-calorie diet, allow you to gain strength and increase muscle tissue. This is exactly what you want to happen.
Weight maintenance involves process goals, rather than outcome goals. You may, for example, set a goal of twenty workouts per month, which is one of Alwyn’s favorite tactics. Twelve would be strength workouts, and eight would be something else—Spinning classes, hiking, yoga, sports. Whatever your process goal is, focus on hitting that number of workouts without fail.
The following process goals linked to successful weight-loss maintenance have shown up in research from Penn State Hershey Medical Center, as well as the National Weight Control Registry: