“I buried my mother and made an appointment for my first ever doctor’s visit on the way home from the cemetery.”

In Louisville, Kentucky, forty-five-year-old business organizations and municipal law attorney Jeremy Kirkham stands at his office desk while he talks on the phone with a client. He stands whenever he can. When his phone calls include only listening rather than talking, he briskly walks. As chair of Louisville Metro’s Code Enforcement Board, he acts as a Hearing Officer for any noncriminal violations of local ordinances that are appealed by citizens. Although his docket demands that he sit for hours at a time to hear cases, he stands whenever possible.

Unlike the offices of other high-profile professionals, Jeremy’s office doesn’t overlook any of Louisville’s landmarks, like Churchill Downs, the Ohio River, or PNC Tower. In fact, there’s not much outside his office window at all, save for some grass, a few leafless trees, and walking paths that wind through the development, and that is very much by design. Jeremy bought an office condo in a park-like development where cars cannot be parked right up against the building. “I purposefully wanted a boiler-room setup that encouraged me to get up and walk out of my office and into the community as much as possible,” he says. “When I’m working, I like to keep moving.”

Jeremy has been losing weight for a long time. When he was seven years old, his mother put him on his first diet. “From an early age, it was evident that my mother’s regard for me was conditioned on my weight,” he says. “Initially, I interpreted it the same way I would have any correction from my mother. ‘You are fat; you need to lose weight’ was on the same level as ‘Your shoes are untied; tie your shoes’ or ‘Your hair is messy; comb your hair.’ In all such instances, the identified deficiency was accompanied by Mother’s oversight and assistance.”

Over time, Jeremy noticed what was different about those other deficiencies. He could tie his shoes and the problem was solved. He could comb his hair and the problem was solved. “Losing weight was different because I never seemed to be able to do it and make it stick,” he says. “Eating half a grapefruit before every meal and doing the Jane Fonda workout tape every day didn’t work as planned, so constantly having cottage cheese and fruit and doing Richard Simmons workouts became the thing to do.” When those methods didn’t work, Jeremy was put on a calorie-restriction-during-the-week-and-splurge-on-the-weekends diet. Throughout Jeremy’s childhood, his mother put him on a number of different diets and exercise programs, often ones she found in magazines and on television.

With no results that would make his mother happy, his despair increased, along with his resistance. “She raised me alone, and my grandparents shared a significant portion of the burden of raising me,” he says. His mother would send him to his grandparents’ house with instructions about what he could and could not eat and gave him a list of exercises he was required to do. When she suspected he was not performing the tasks as assigned, she required him to carry a pedometer so she would know he was at least jogging and walking. “One day, after my grandfather took me for a walk in the woods, he treated me to a bowl of butter pecan ice cream. It was customary for Mother to inquire about what I ate when with my grandparents and, when she came to pick me up, I told her the truth. She angrily confronted my grandparents on the spot and threatened to put a stop to my visits if they failed to conform to her wishes concerning my diet.”

These experiences influenced the way Jeremy thought about eating. “After several diet and exercise evolutions, I felt that hunger was my enemy because that led to me wanting to eat,” he says. “And as a natural consequence of that belief and of the mental conditioning to which I had been exposed, I felt that I was a failure and a disappointment as a person and as a son because I couldn’t control my desire to eat.”

When Jeremy was eighteen and left home for college, he was five feet, eleven inches and 125 pounds. In college, free from his mother’s control and from the limitations of his family’s poverty, Jeremy rebelled against his mother by eating whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. By the time he graduated college, he weighed almost 220 pounds. His weight continued to balloon throughout his twenties and thirties, up to 280 pounds. “I fought to lose the weight at intervals,” he says. “My early training and discipline in diets and exercise helped me to rapidly lose weight, but I was never able to keep it off for more than a few months at a time.”

***

In the popular book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie writes that, to influence someone to do something, you need to create in that person an eager want. For someone to do something—move to another part of the country, buy a new car, or lose weight and keep it off—he or she must want to do it.

At first thought, that might sound obvious. Of course, you have to want to do something in order to do it. But there is more to it than that. Most of us want things, but we’re often not willing to do what it takes to acquire or achieve those things. So, we settle for less than what we really want, and somehow we’re okay with that. We accept that life is not always going to be the way we want. Wanting something isn’t enough; there must be something behind that want that makes you act to do it. And that something is called intention.

Habit 1 of successful weight losers is living with intention. Intention literally means the determination to act in a certain way and to be persistent in that action. If you don’t want to successfully lose weight to the point of changing your behavior, it isn’t going to happen; you’ll regain the weight you lost, and you’ll be in the never-ending cycle of lose weight, gain weight, lose weight, gain weight. Every creation happens twice: first in your head with the vision and intention you set, and second with your persistent actions that spread from that vision and intention. Persistent is the key word here, because any intention you set today must have consequential actions for the future. If you set an intention today to do something next week, how are you going to make sure that the thing you intend to do next week will get done? Responsibilities of life, as we all know, tend to get in the way. Suppose you intend today to drive from Brooklyn, New York, over the Brooklyn Bridge tomorrow to visit Manhattan, perhaps dine at Tavern on the Green in Central Park and see a Broadway show. Your intention today does not pass through time and control your action tomorrow. Tomorrow, you will have to set the same intention again to drive over the Brooklyn Bridge. So, why set an intention today about what to do tomorrow? Why not just cross your bridge when you come to it? The answer is persistence. Your intentions today can control your actions tomorrow if there is persistence in those intentions. The intentions you set must be impervious to time—even a New York minute—and to perceived obstacles. So, you don’t have to cross your bridge when you come to it; you can cross your bridge today by creating the intention in your head to physically cross it tomorrow.

One of the main reasons why intention matters to be a successful weight loser is because weight loss and maintenance don’t (and can’t) happen accidentally. Aside from being sick with an acute illness like the flu or a chronic illness like cancer, you don’t accidentally lose weight, and you certainly don’t accidentally keep the weight off. You must make the decision to be a successful weight loser, and then learn and employ the required habits, with the help of environmental cues. When you live with intention, you eliminate the random approach to weight-loss maintenance in favor of the systematic and methodical one that leads to results. Research from the NWCR has shown that, when intention is behind weight-loss maintenance (which is often defined by scientists as keeping off at least 10 percent of body weight for at least one year), 21 percent of overweight people are successful weight losers.25

The better weight losers are at nipping any weight regain in the bud, the better the chances of it not getting out of hand and them not returning to being overweight or obese. One of the NWCR studies, published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003, followed 2,258 members who regained weight to study who would reverse their weight regain and who would continue to gain weight.26 One year after entering the NWCR, 65.7 percent gained weight. Of those individuals, only 11 percent returned to their baseline weight or below it after two years. Of the individuals who gained 1 to 3 percent of their initial body weight after one year, only 17.5 percent were able to return to their baseline weight or below it after two years. Of the individuals who gained 3 to 5 percent of their initial body weight after one year, only 14.4 percent were at their baseline weight or below it after two years. Larger weight regains reduced the chances of recovery even more. Individuals who gained the most weight after one year were the least likely to re-lose weight the following year. Conversely, those who had recovered from their weight regain had gained significantly less weight after one year than those who failed to recover. Interestingly, losing weight after regaining it affected these individuals’ minds as well as their waistlines—they were less depressed compared to individuals who were unable to lose their regained weight. Although modest weight regain was common in this group (averaging 8.4 pounds) and recovery from even minor weight regain was rare, 96.4 percent of NWCR members who regained weight remained more than 10 percent below their maximum lifetime weight after two years, and they maintained an average 26.6 percent weight loss from their maximum weight.

The longer individuals have kept their weight off, the easier it is to maintain it and the less likely they are to regain the weight.27,28 The amount of time your weight is maintained can actually predict if you’ll gain weight or will continue to maintain your weight. NWCR members who have maintained their weight loss for at least two years at the time they enter the NWCR are at less risk of gaining weight one year later compared to those who have maintained their weight loss for fewer than two years. Specifically, maintaining one’s weight loss for at least two years decreases the risk of subsequent weight regain by 50 percent.29,30 If you’re able to maintain your weight loss for at least two years, you’ll be increasingly likely to continue maintaining it.

In one of the NWCR studies that examined this issue deeper, weight-loss durations and the habits associated with them were analyzed in 931 registry members (758 women and 173 men) who maintained an average weight loss of 62.3 pounds and had maintained at least a thirty-pound weight loss for an average of 6.8 years, with a range of two to sixty-seven years.31 The researchers found a significant relationship between the duration of weight maintenance and the total number of weight-loss strategies used in the past year, with increasing duration associated with use of fewer strategies. Members who had kept weight off for longer said that significantly less attention and effort were required to maintain their weight. For example, individuals who had kept their weight off for longer were less likely to keep a picture of themselves in a prominent place or keep records of how much food they consumed or how much exercise they did. The duration of weight maintenance was inversely related to the effort needed to maintain weight: the longer people kept their weight off, the fewer strategies they needed to continue keeping weight off. In other words, weight maintenance got easier. The longer you persist in your intention and behave in accord with that intention, the easier it is for that behavior to “stick” and turn into a habit.

What makes one individual persist at a specific behavior while another individual doesn’t? For starters, the persistent individual has a conscientious personality. One of the factors studied by the NWCR is the personality trait of conscientiousness. Conscientious individuals are efficient, organized, self-disciplined, self-controlled, goal-directed, task- and achievement-oriented, and responsible. In the most recent NWCR study, published in Health Psychology in 2020, conscientiousness was compared between 968 successful weight losers from the NWCR and 484 non-NWCR weight regainers.32 The successful weight losers were found to be more conscientious than the weight regainers and scored higher on measures of order, virtue, responsibility, and industriousness. The scientists suggest that being conscientious may help individuals maintain their weight loss by improving adherence to specific behaviors.

The likelihood of you engaging in a health behavior, such as exercising or eating more fruit, is correlated with the strength of your intention to engage in the behavior. This relationship is called the Theory of Planned Behavior.33 A behavioral intention represents your commitment to act and is itself the outcome of a combination of several variables. According to the Theory of Planned Behavior, the factors that directly influence your intention to engage in a particular behavior include your attitude toward that behavior (i.e., how favorable or unfavorable your appraisal of the behavior is), your perception of the social pressure to perform or not perform the behavior, and your perception of the amount of control you have over the behavior (i.e., how easy or difficult you perceive the behavior to be, which is strongly influenced by your past experience34). The more favorable your attitude toward and perception of the social pressure of the behavior and the greater your perceived behavioral control, the stronger your intention will be to perform the particular behavior. Research has shown that the factors of the Theory of Planned Behavior can actually predict health behaviors. In a review of fifty-six studies that contained fifty-eight health behavior applications of the Theory of Planned Behavior, researchers at Université Laval in Québec, Canada, and the University of Limburg in the Netherlands found that intention remained the most important predictor of health behavior, explaining 66 percent of the variance.35 In half of the reviewed studies, perceived behavioral control (believing that you have control over your behavior) significantly added to the prediction.

Persistence in behavior also comes from your belief about the result your effort will have. If you don’t think you’re going to be successful, why try at all? In 1964, psychologist Victor Vroom proposed that the strength of your tendency to act a certain way depends on the strength of your expectation of a given outcome and its attractiveness.36 Vroom’s expectancy theory is one of the most widely accepted explanations of motivation. You are motivated to exert a high level of effort when you believe (1) your effort will lead to a good performance, (2) the good performance will lead to a reward or outcome, and (3) the reward or outcome satisfies your personal goals. To adopt the habits in this book and become a successful weight loser, you must know what you believe.

All the factors of Vroom’s expectancy theory, as well as the Theory of Planned Behavior, are influenced by your beliefs. It is through one’s beliefs that we can learn about the unique factors that cause one person to engage in a specific behavior, yet cause another to follow a different path. In this regard, this book, and the habits contained in it, is about what you believe.

Intention not only must come from in you, it must come from the right place in you. For example, do you get pleasure and enjoyment from eating chocolate cake, or worry and guilt? Researchers in the Department of Psychology at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand wanted to find out how feelings about eating chocolate cake were related to differences in attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and intentions in relation to healthy eating and if those feelings were related to weight change.37 Interestingly, guilt about eating chocolate cake was not a motivator for eating healthy, nor did the guilt help individuals lose weight or maintain weight loss compared to those who associated chocolate cake with celebration. The scientists discovered that those who felt guilty perceived that they had less control over their eating behavior, were less successful at losing weight over three months, and were less successful at maintaining their weight over eighteen months compared to those associating chocolate cake with enjoyment and celebration. Guilt simply doesn’t work to change behavior, because it doesn’t positively impact your intentions. Enjoyment and celebration are more impactful.

How do you create an eager want? By creating the conditions that are likely to cause you to want it. A gardener can’t motivate a plant to grow. Rather, he seeks and implements the right combination of sunlight, nourishment, and water so that the plant “wants” to grow. How can you leverage your environment so that you want to act? If eating by yourself has created the habit of eating high-calorie, unhealthy meals, how about setting appointments to eat with others at healthy restaurants? Or calling on a friend who already eats healthy to show you how to eat healthy, too? If having a busy job prevents you from exercising, how about making a daily date with your spouse to go for an early-morning walk with you before you both leave the house for work? Find things or people who are in your current environment that support and encourage your wants. Be the gardener who makes your plant want to grow.

Becoming a successful weight loser isn’t just about slimming your waistline and thighs or getting rid of your jiggly arms. It’s not even about the confidence you gain from looking in the mirror. It’s about conceiving to do something and then doing it, to live with purpose and intention. When you live with intention, you eliminate the random, fad-diet approach to weight loss and maintenance in favor of the systematic and methodical one that gets results. When you believe that you can accomplish anything, that is true personal freedom. You are no longer timid or scared of pursuing something, because your intention has empowered you to be bolder.

Creating the Habit

To become a successful weight loser, it’s not enough to read a book about the habits of successful weight losers in hopes that you will adopt them. You must first live with the intention to form the habits of successful weight losers and then create the cues in your environment to make the habits automatic.

Habits stick when they operate outside of your consciousness. Although intentions are conscious and voluntary and habits are unconscious and automatic, they are, of course, related, as your intentions precede the practice of the actions that lead to habits. Similarly, to break your existing bad habits—which are also automatic—that thwart your weight maintenance goals, you need to remove the cues that have created those bad habits to bring your behavior under intentional control. Once you have intentional control over the bad habits, you can then set the intention to create a new, good habit. The process of intention-action-habit is a process that takes much longer than the time it takes to read this book. Living with intention is the first habit to develop, because the other behavioral actions and habits will flow from this first one.

To create the habit of living with intention, take a piece of paper and pencil and write down what you believe. Do you believe that you can lose weight and keep it off? Do you believe the effort required to do so will pay off? Will the outcome satisfy your goals? Do you believe that you must have access to a gym, a formal weight-loss program, or a personal trainer to get results? If so, how do you intend to acquire those things? Do you believe you can be a successful weight loser on your own? Do you believe that obstacles will get in your way? If so, what are those obstacles? Do you believe you have the intention and persistence to overcome those obstacles? If not, how do you think you can acquire or develop those intentions? Write all these things down on the paper. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Once you have written all the answers to the above questions, the next step to living with intention is to set goals. Goals direct your efforts, leading you to specific outcomes and achievements. When you set goals, you plant the initial seeds to set your intention—and then eventually change your behavior—in an effort to achieve them. You become more productive, focusing on the things that will get you there, and eliminating the things that won’t. Goals should include the following:

Process-Oriented: People who want to lose weight and keep it off almost always focus on the pounds on the scale. The number on the scale is an outcome, and outcomes can only be controlled by focusing on the process. Putting all the eggs in the scale-means-everything basket is a great way to be disappointed if it doesn’t work out. Although it’s hard to lose and maintain weight without expectations, you are more likely to be a successful weight loser if you focus on the process rather than on the outcome. If you want to lose fifty pounds and stay within five pounds of that weight loss, you can have that as the end-goal, but set smaller, process-oriented goals to achieve it. It sounds cliché, but you must focus on the overall journey and the process of that journey to obtain the outcome. If you feel you have failed at reaching your goal, don’t get discouraged; it likely means you didn’t focus on your journey and the process to the goal, only the goal itself. Focus on the process.

Specific: Your goal should be specific rather than general. The more specific, the better. “Do your best,” while a common goal used for everything from weight loss to good grades in school, is nonspecific. What does it mean to do one’s best? How do you know if you have done your best? Choose a specific goal that is meaningful to you.

Measurable: If a goal cannot be measured, how do you know if it’s achieved? You need to be able to measure it.

Attainable/Realistic: Your goals should be challenging, something you have to reach for, but within your reach.

Time-Bound: Goals should have a deadline to create a sense of urgency. A timeline keeps you on task.