The major conclusion of the NWCR is that successful weight losers adopt and persist with specific habits to totally restructure their eating and exercise behaviors. How they do it is not so much of a mystery. They live with intention and control themselves. The number of calories they eat, the amount of carbohydrate, fat, and protein they consume, how much they exercise, even how much television they watch, all extend from the first two habits of living with intention and controlling themselves.
When I started writing this book, I thought I was going to report the data from the NWCR that are hidden from public view in scientific journals, and let that be enough. “Here’s what successful weight losers do,” I was going to say, “now you figure out how to do it.” But that’s not enough. It’s hard for data alone to inspire. They’re just data.
The seven NWCR members featured in this book hope to personify the data and inspire you to make lasting change. Each of these people, and the thousands more who accompany them in the NWCR, have been able to convert the habits that made them overweight into habits that made them successful weight losers. That’s not an easy thing to do.
To be a successful weight loser, you must reject all the popular media nonsense about weight loss and diets and accept that losing weight and keeping it off is hard work. Perhaps harder than anything else you have done in your life. That’s okay. Life is hard. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it or that you should give up after failing once or twice, or even after failing ten times. Anything in life worth pursuing is hard. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be as fulfilling when you accomplish it. Despite the chance of failing, people take risks because the chance of failing makes success taste even sweeter. It is precisely in working through the difficulty that you reap the benefits that count the most.
There’s more to becoming a successful weight loser than just becoming slimmer, although that alone would be enough for most people. When you dig deeper, there is something even more valuable than weighing less and looking better in the mirror. You learn about yourself. You learn what it means to do more, to be more, to do better, to be better.
When you set out to be a successful weight loser, clear of the doubts that hold you back, the payoff is extraordinary, no matter what the scale in your bathroom reads. But if you create and stick to the habits in this book, that scale will forever read lighter and, even more importantly, your life will change for the better. Just ask the successful weight losers of the National Weight Control Registry.