Strengthen Your Willpower “Muscle”

“Bad habits are hard to break—and they’re impossible to break if we try to break them all at once.”

That’s the conclusion scientists have derived from years of study about willpower. If you’re like me, you’re probably saying to yourself, “They should’ve just asked me. I could’ve told them that and saved them years of work and thousands of dollars!”

An article about New Year’s resolutions in the Wall Street Journal, details some of the procedures used in various studies to test willpower. Though the procedures seem complicated, the knowledge scientists gained helped them formulate some simple theories; including the fact that the part of the brain that regulates willpower is also busy keeping us focused, handling short-term memory and solving abstract problems. Is that asking too much from a small area of brain power?

Well, yes and no. You can read the entire article, but I want to focus on one aspect of the findings: scientists found that willpower requires energy and that energy comes from your diet.  It makes sense… I’ve written before about the connection between what you eat and your ability to stay focused. If the part of the brain that regulates your ability to stay focused is the same as the area that regulates willpower, it stands to reason that your diet can have a big impact on your willpower.

That means skipping meals makes it harder to stay on task when you’re trying to lose weight. Seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Eat more to lose more. But that’s not exactly what it means. It means that not eating – or eating the wrong kinds of food – can alter your ability to remain focused and summon the willpower to stay on your diet. The Chris Powell Reshape the Nation program is based on eating 5 meals a day. It can sometimes seem like too much food, but in fact, this intake of healthy, well-balanced and well-proportioned meals ups your metabolism and burns fat. And now scientists have shown that it also strengthens your willpower. Sounds like a win-win outcome to me!

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