Willpower Collapse - HELP!

DivietoDiSosta

I've been doing pretty good for the last 3 weeks. Losing weight slowly but steadily.

Today, I'm like a different person. I spent two hours thinking obsessively about the birthday cake for one of my coworkers that I successfully resisted yesterday and was still sitting in the kitchen. Then I gave in and ate it.

I washed it down with a handful of tootsie rolls.

Any advice for stopping this freefall before it gets worse?

Please?

Liftng4Lis

Are you over restricting yourself? There is no reason you can't make cake fit into your allotment.

jgnatca

Willpower is a muscle. It is possible to wear it out with over-use. Look at it this way. You exercised your willpower for a full eighteen hours before it gave out. That's almost an olympic record! You can successfully step away from the tootsie rolls by refusing to give in to all-or-nothing thinking. You as a human being are not EITHER an ultra-successful dieter OR a complete nincompoop. You fall in the spectrum somewhere.

Drink a glass of water.

Give yourself a prize for eighteen hours of willpower.



Start over.

DivietoDiSosta

jgnatca wrote: »

Willpower is a muscle. It is possible to wear it out with over-use.

I never realized that. Thank you for the reading recommendation.

jgnatca

Not literally a muscle of course.

“Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.”
― Charles Duhigg, The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business

Baumeister, R. F. (2002). Ego depletion and self-control failure: an energy model of the self’s executive function. Psychology Press.