Willpower

Losing weight is the most popular New Year’s resolution year after year, diet after forsaken diet. In the long run, the vast majority of dieters fail. Therefore, we are not going to guarantee you an eternally svelte body. But we can tell you which techniques are more likely to help you lose weight, and we’ll start with the good news. If you’re serious about controlling your weight, you need the discipline to follow these three rules:
    1. Never go on a diet.
    2. Never vow to give up chocolate or any other food.
    3. Whether you’re judging yourself or judging others, never equate being overweight with having weak willpower.
    You may not have kept your resolution to lose ten pounds this year, but that doesn’t mean you should take up a diet or swear off sweets. And you certainly shouldn’t lose faith in your ability to accomplish other feats, because being overweight is not a telltale sign of weak willpower, even if most people think so. Ask a few modern Americans what they use self-control for, and dieting is likely to be the first answer. Most experts have made the same assumption for decades. At professional conferences and in scientific journal articles, when researchers have to give an example to illustrate some problem of self-control, they tend to pick dieting more often than any other sort of example.
    Recently, though, researchers have found that the relationship between self-control and weight loss is much less direct than everyone thought. They’ve discovered something we’ll call the Oprah Paradox, in honor of the world’s most famous dieter. Early in her career, when she was working as a newscaster, Oprah Winfrey’s weight rose from 125 to 140 pounds, so she went to a diet doctor and was put on a twelve-hundred-calories-per-day plan. She followed it, lost 7 pounds the first week, and within a month was back down to 125. But then she gradually put it back on. When she hit 212 pounds, she gave up solid food for four months, subsisting on liquid diet supplements, and got back down to 145 pounds. But within a few years she was heavier than ever, at 237 pounds, and her journal was filled with prayers to lose weight. When she was nominated for an Emmy Award, she prayed for her rival talk-show host Phil Donahue to win. That way, as she later recalled, “I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself by rolling my fat butt out of my seat and walking down the aisle to the stage.” She had just about lost hope when she met Bob Greene, a personal trainer, whereupon the two of them transformed each other’s lives.
    He became a bestselling author of training regimens and recipes he used with Winfrey, and began selling his own line of Best Life food. Guided by Greene and her personal chef (who wrote his own bestseller), and by the nutritionists and doctors and other experts on her show, Winfrey changed what she ate, how she exercised, how she lived. She established weekly calendars of all her meals, specifying precisely when she would eat tuna, when salmon, when salad. Her assistants built her schedule around the meals and the workouts. She received emotional counsel from friends like Marianne Williamson, the spiritual writer, who discussed with her the relationship between weight and love.
    The result was displayed on the cover of Winfrey’s magazine in 2005: a radiant, sleek woman weighing 160 pounds. (Note, though, that this triumph still put her 20 pounds above what she weighed at the start of her first diet.) Winfrey’s success story was an inspiration both to her fans and to an anthropologist at Emory University, George Armelagos. He used it to illustrate a historic shift that he dubbed the King Henry VIII and Oprah Winfrey Effect. In Tudor England, it wasn’t easy keeping anyone as fat as Henry VIII. His diet required resources and labor from hundreds of farmers, gardeners, fishermen, hunters, butchers, cooks, and other servants. But today even commoners can get as fat as King Henry VIII—in fact, poor people tend to be fatter than the ruling classes. Thinness has become a status symbol because it’s so difficult for ordinary people to achieve unless they’re genetically lucky. To remain thin, it takes the resources of Oprah Winfrey and a new array of vassals: personal trainer, chef, nutritionist, counselor, assorted assistants.
    Yet even that kingdom is no guarantee, as viewers of Oprah started to notice, and as Winfrey herself acknowledged in a refreshingly frank article four years after the