Willpower

temptation. Clearly, if you’re a dieter who doesn’t want to lose self-control, you shouldn’t spend a lot of time sitting right next to a bowl of M&M’s. Even if you resist those obvious temptations, you’ll deplete your willpower and be prone to overeating other foods later.
    But there’s also another way to avoid this problem, as illustrated in a third experiment involving young women and food. This time Vohs and Heatherton tested nondieters in addition to dieters, and a clear distinction emerged. It turned out that the nondieters could sit next to an array of snacks—Doritos, Skittles, M&M’s, salted peanuts—without using up willpower. Some ate the snacks and some didn’t, but either way, they weren’t struggling to restrain themselves, so they remained relatively fresh for other tasks. The dieters, meanwhile, gradually depleted their willpower as they fought the urge to break their diet. They went through the same struggle that you see played out at social events when dieters are confronted with fattening food. The dieters can resist for a while, but each act of resistance further lowers their willpower.
    Then, as they’re weakening, they face yet another of the peculiarly maddening challenges of controlling eating. To continue resisting temptation, they need to replenish the willpower they’ve lost. But to resupply that energy, they need to give the body glucose. They’re trapped in a nutritional catch-22:
    1. In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower.
    2. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.
    Faced with this dilemma of whether to eat or not, a dieter might try telling herself that the best option is to slightly relax the diet. She might reason that it’s best to consume a little food and try to salve her conscience: Look, I had to break the diet in order to save it. But once she strays from the diet, we know what she’s liable to tell herself: What the hell. And then: Let the binge begin.
    Sweet food becomes especially hard to resist because, as we’ve already seen, self-control depletes the glucose in the bloodstream. If you’ve ever been on a diet and found yourself unable to shake those intrusive cravings for chocolate or ice cream, this is more than a matter of repressed desires coming back to haunt you. There is a sound physiological basis. The body “knows” that it has depleted the glucose in its bloodstream by exerting self-control, and it also seems to know that sweet-tasting foods are typically the fastest way to get an infusion of energy-rich glucose. In recent lab studies, college students who performed self-control tasks that had nothing to do with food or dieting found themselves having higher desires for sweet foods. When allowed to snack during the next task, those who had previously exerted self-control ate more sweet snacks, but not other (salty) snacks.
    If these yearnings seem overpowering, we can suggest a couple of defensive strategies. The first is to use the postponed-pleasure ploy: Tell yourself that you can have a small sweet dessert later if you still want it. (We’ll discuss this ploy later, too.) Meanwhile, eat something else. Remember, your body is craving energy because it has used up some of its supply with self-control. The body feels a desire for sweet foods, but that is only because that is a familiar and effective way to restore energy. Healthy foods will also provide the energy it needs. It’s not what’s on your mind, but it should do the trick.
    Remember, too, that the depleted state makes you feel everything more intensely than usual. Desires and cravings are exceptionally intense to the depleted person. Dieting is a frequent drain on your willpower, and so the dieter will frequently be in a depleted state. That will, in effect, turn up the volume on many good and bad things that happen throughout the day. It will also make longings—yes, unfortunately, even the longings for food, which are already there—seem especially intense. This may help explain why, eventually, many dieters seem to cultivate a numbness to their body’s wants and feelings about food.
    There is no magical solution to the dieter’s catch-22. No matter how much willpower you start off with, if you’re a dieter and spend enough time sitting near the dessert buffet telling yourself no , eventually no will probably change to yes. You need to avoid the dessert cart—or, better yet, avoid going on a diet in the first place. Instead of squandering your