Willpower

celebratory cover. This time her magazine’s cover showed the old picture of herself, at 160 pounds, next to her current 200-pound self. “I’m mad at myself,” Winfrey told readers. “I’m embarrassed. I can’t believe that after all these years, all the things I know how to do, I’m still talking about my weight. I look at my thinner self and think, ‘How did I let this happen again?’” She explained it as a combination of overwork and medical problems, both of which could have depleted her willpower, but even then, Oprah Winfrey was obviously someone with self-discipline. She couldn’t have kept the rest of her life going so successfully without self-control. She had extraordinary personal willpower, access to the world’s finest professional advice, a cadre of dedicated monitors, plus the external pressure of having to appear every day in front of millions of people watching for any sign of weight gain. Yet despite all her strength and motivation and resources, she couldn’t keep the pounds off.
    That’s what we call the Oprah Paradox: Even people with excellent self-control can have a hard time consistently controlling their weight. They can use their willpower to thrive in many ways—at school and work, in personal relationships, in their inner emotional lives—but they’re not that much more successful than other people at staying slim. When Baumeister and his colleagues in the Netherlands analyzed dozens of studies of people with high self-control, they found that these self-disciplined people did slightly better than average at controlling their weight, but the difference wasn’t as marked as in other areas of their lives. This pattern showed up clearly among the overweight college students in a weight-loss program who were studied by Baumeister along with Joyce Ehrlinger, Will Crescioni, and colleagues at Florida State University. At the outset of the program, the students who scored higher on personality tests of self-control had a slight advantage—they started out weighing a little less and having better exercise habits than the people with lower self-control—and their advantage increased over the course of the twelve-week program because they were better at following the rules to restrict eating and increase exercising. But while their self-discipline helped them control their weight, it didn’t seem to make a huge difference either before or during the study. High self-control was better than low self-control, but not by much.
    And if the researchers had tracked the students after the weight-loss program ended, no doubt many of them would have put the pounds right back on, just as Oprah Winfrey and so many other dieters have done. Their self-control would have been useful in helping them keep up the exercise routine, but exercising isn’t enough to guarantee weight loss. Even though it seems logical that burning more calories would get rid of pounds, researchers have found that the body responds by craving more food, so increased exercise doesn’t necessarily lead to long-term weight loss. (But it’s still worthwhile for lots of other reasons.) Whether or not you have good self-control, whether or not you exercise, if you go on a diet, the odds are that you won’t permanently lose weight.
    One reason is basic biology. When you use self-control to go through your in-box or write a report or go jogging, your body doesn’t react viscerally. It’s not physically threatened by your decision to pay bills instead of watch television. It doesn’t care whether you’re writing a report or surfing the Web. The body might send you pain signals when you exercise too strenuously, but it doesn’t treat jogging as an existential threat. Dieting is different. As the young Oprah Winfrey discovered, the body will go along with a diet once or twice—but then it starts fighting back. When fat lab rats are put on a controlled diet for the first time, they’ll lose weight. But if they’re then allowed to eat freely again, they’ll gradually fatten up, and if they’re put on another diet it will take them longer to lose the weight this time. Then, when they once again go off the diet, they’ll regain the weight more quickly than the last time. By the third or fourth time they go through this boom-and-bust cycle, the dieting ceases to work; the extra weight stays on even though they’re consuming fewer calories.
    Evolution favored people who could survive famines, so once a body has gone