How many times have you attempted to lose weight and keep it off, but you failed?
How many times have you had to suffer pain, shame and disappointment of desperately wanting to achieve a weight loss goal, but never being able to follow through to get there?
And how many times have you concluded that the primary reason you failed is because you lack the required willpower to succeed?
I Have Good News…And Bad News
Well, I have good news and bad news for you.
First, the bad news. If you are overweight right now, you will never reduce your weight (or make any other lasting behavior change) without willpower. Sorry, it just won’t happen without this critical ingredient.
Now for the good news. You have all the power you need to create a weight loss goal and achieve it. You even have enough power to maintain your lowered weight for the rest of your life.
Maybe this might sound like “bad news” to some of you, especially if you believe that you somehow lost the genetic lottery and therefore did not receive the standard amount of willpower that others appear to have gotten.
But despite this negative self-talk, you do have an awesome reservoir of power within you.
Maybe you haven’t fully experienced it yet. But it’s there…deep inside you…just waiting for the right time and conditions to come bursting out.
Willpower Is Not The Problem
If you’ve been struggling to lose weight and keep it off, willpower is not your problem. Neither is anything else, like motivation, intelligence, discipline, desire, creativity, metabolic rate, or determination—anything you imagine thin people have but you lack.
There is no such thing as willpower anyway. What I mean by this is there is no mysterious force or superpower like “willpower” that people either have or don’t have. There is only human power, which all of us have in abundance.
What Type Of Power Does It Really Take?
When it comes to losing weight, it turns out that the main type of human power we need to draw upon is “won’t power” not “willpower.” Examples include:
“I won’t let anything keep me from following my exercise plan for today.”
“I won’t let other people sabotage my eating plan.”
“I won’t buy into convenient excuses for why I can’t control my eating like ‘it’s not fair to deprive my kids’ or ‘I’m way too busy to pay attention to what I eat.’”
Yes, You Can Succeed
We all have the power to make specific short-term promises each and every day, and then keep them no matter what happens. This means we can make and keep our daily promises—about what we will eat and how much we will exercise—no matter what type of thoughts, feelings, excuses or life circumstances (within reason) transpire. The ability to do this is not something you lack. It’s not even something you could lack…even if you wanted to.
You can believe you don’t have this awesome human power inside you…but you do. This is true regardless of your prior track record.
Of course, we can continue to delude ourselves, over and over again, that we don’t really have enough willpower to keep our daily promises and achieve our long-term goals. Or, we can go out and strengthen our muscle of “won’t power” which everybody has.
So don’t sell yourself short if you’ve tried to lose weight in the past but you’ve always failed. No matter how many times this has happened, you still have the power within you to eventually succeed.
Unfortunately, most of the popular diet plans and weight loss programs available today don’t help you unleash this awesome human power within you. And this is why, in my opinion, they have such an extremely high failure rate.
The problem isn’t really YOU. The problem is that most available weight loss programs are not designed to help you rebuild and strengthen the most important skill you need for both short-term and long-term success.
I have found that when you are helped to focus on this very important skill, you can produce amazing and long-lasting results that you were previously unable to achieve.
So, in summary, you can lose weight and keep it off permanently even if you have no willpower at all. You just have to learn how to use a different type of human power, which you already have in abundance.
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