Willpower Collapse - HELP!

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DivietoDiSosta
DivietoDiSosta Posts: 14 Member
in Motivation and Support
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?

Replies

  • Liftng4Lis
    Liftng4Lis Posts: 15,150 Member
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    Are you over restricting yourself? There is no reason you can't make cake fit into your allotment.
  • jgnatca
    jgnatca Posts: 14,464 Member
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    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.

    Willpower_300dpi-197x300.jpg

    Start over.
  • DivietoDiSosta
    DivietoDiSosta Posts: 14 Member
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    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
    jgnatca Posts: 14,464 Member
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    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.

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