Willpower

before you get tempted by the food at a party, you can prepare yourself with a plan like: If they serve chips, I will refuse them all. Or: If there is a buffet, I will eat only vegetables and lean meat. It’s a simple but surprisingly effective way to gain self-control. By making the decision to pass up the chips an automatic process, you can do it fairly effortlessly even late in the day, when your supply of willpower is low. And because it’s relatively effortless, you can pass up the chips and still have enough willpower to deal with the next temptation at the party.
    For a more radical form of precommitment, you could skip the party altogether and seek out gatherings with lower-calorie offerings—and thinner people. We’re not suggesting you dump your chubby friends, but there does seem to be a connection between what you weigh and whom you socialize with. Researchers who have analyzed social networks find that obese people tend to cluster together, as do thin people. Social distance seems to matter more than physical distance: Your chances of being obese increase more because your best friend gains weight than because your next-door neighbor gains weight. It’s difficult to disentangle cause and effect—no doubt people are seeking out others who share their habits and tastes. But it’s also true that people reinforce one another’s behavior and standards. One reason why members of Weight Watchers shed pounds (at least for a while) is that they’re spending more time with other people who care about losing weight. It’s the same phenomenon we noted earlier with smokers, who are more likely to quit if their friends and relatives also quit.
    Peer pressure helps explain why people in Europe weigh less than Americans: They follow different social norms, like eating only at mealtimes instead of snacking throughout the day. When European social scientists come to the United States to study eating habits in campus laboratories, they’re surprised to discover that they can run experiments whenever they want to because American college students are happy to eat food any time of the morning or afternoon. In France or Italy, it can be hard to find a restaurant open except at mealtimes. Those social norms produce habits that conserve willpower through automatic mental processes. Instead of consciously trying to decide whether to snack, instead of struggling with temptation, Europeans rely on the equivalent of an implementation plan: If it’s four P.M., then I won’t eat anything.

Let Me Count the Weighs (and the Calories)
    If you’re trying to lose weight, how often should you weigh yourself? The standard advice used to be to not get on the scale every day, because your weight naturally fluctuates and you’ll get discouraged on days it goes up for no apparent reason. If you want to keep up your motivation, the weight-loss experts said, you should weigh yourself just once a week. That advice seemed odd to Baumeister and other self-control researchers, because their work on other problems consistently showed that frequent monitoring improved self-control. Eventually, a careful long-term study tracked people who’d lost weight and were trying not to regain it. Some of these people weighed themselves daily; others didn’t. It turned out that the conventional wisdom was wrong.
    The people who weighed themselves every day were much more successful at keeping their weight from creeping back up. They were less likely to go on eating binges, and they didn’t show any signs of disillusion or other distress from their daily confrontation with the scale. For all the peculiar challenges to losing weight, one of the usual strategies is still effective: The more carefully and frequently you monitor yourself, the better you’ll control yourself. If it seems like too much of a chore to write down your weight every day, you can outsource some of the drudgery by using a scale that keeps an electronic record of your weight. Some models will transmit each day’s reading to your computer or smartphone, which can then produce a chart for your monitoring pleasure (or displeasure).
    Even a very simple form of monitoring can make a big difference, as researchers discovered when they investigated an odd little mystery: Why do prisoners put on weight? Clearly it’s not because of the irresistible prison cuisine. No gourmet chef is ever hired to cook when the clientele consists of customers who are literally captive. Yet men