Willpower

through the experience of not getting enough to eat, it reacts by fighting to keep all the pounds it has. When you diet, your body assumes there’s a famine and hangs on to every fat cell it can. The ability to lose weight through a drastic change in diet ought to be conserved as a precious, one-time capability. Perhaps you’ll need it late in life, when your health or your survival will depend on being able to lose weight.
    Instead of going for a quick weight loss today, you’re better off using your self-control to make gradual changes that will produce lasting effects, and you have to be especially careful in your strategies. You face peculiarly powerful challenges at every stage of the self-control process—from setting a goal to monitoring yourself to strengthening your willpower. When they wheel over the dessert cart, you’re not facing an ordinary challenge. It’s more like the perfect storm.
    The first step in self-control is to establish realistic goals. To lose weight, you could look in the mirror, weigh yourself, and then draw up a sensible plan to end up with a trimmer body. You could do that, but few do. People’s goals are so unrealistic that an English bookmaker, the William Hill agency, has a standing offer to bet against anyone who makes a plan to lose weight. The bookmaker, which offers odds of up to 50 to 1, lets the bettors set their own targets of how much weight to lose in how much time. It seems crazy for a bookie to let bettors not only set the terms of the wager but also control its outcome—it’s like letting a runner bet on beating a target time he sets himself. Yet despite these advantages, despite the incentive to collect payoffs that have exceeded seven thousand dollars, the bettors lose 80 percent of the time.
    Female bettors are especially likely to lose, which isn’t surprising considering the unrealistic goals set by so many women. They look in the mirror and dream the impossible dream: a “curvaceously thin” body, as it’s known to researchers who puzzle over these aspirations. The supposed ideal of a 36-24-36 figure translates to someone with size 4 hips, a size 2 waist, and a size 10 bust—someone, that is, with ample breasts but little body fat, who must be either a genetic anomaly or the product of plastic surgery.
    With this as the ideal, it’s no wonder that so many people set impossible goals. When you detest what you see in the mirror, you need self-control not to start a crash diet. You need to remind yourself that diets typically work at first but fail miserably in the long run. To understand why, let’s start with a strange phenomenon observed after the consumption of milkshakes in a laboratory.

The What-the-Hell Effect
    The people arrived at the lab in what researchers call a “food-deprived state,” which is more commonly known as “hungry.” They hadn’t eaten for several hours. Some were given a small milkshake to take the edge off; others drank two giant milkshakes with enough calories to leave a normal person feeling stuffed. Then both groups, along with other subjects who hadn’t been given any kind of milkshake, were asked to serve as food tasters.
    That was a ruse. If research subjects know their food intake is being monitored by someone studying overeating, they suddenly lose their appetite and come across as pillars of virtuous restraint. So the researchers, pretending to be interested only in their opinions about the taste of different snacks, sat each one in a private cubicle with several bowls of crackers and cookies and a rating form. As the people recorded their ratings, they could eat as many from each bowl as they wanted—and if they finished them all, they could always tell themselves they were just trying to do a good, thorough job of rating the crackers and cookies. They didn’t realize that the ratings didn’t matter, and that the researchers were just interested in how many cookies and crackers they ate, how the milkshakes affected them, and how the dieters in the group compared with the people who weren’t on a diet.
    The nondieters reacted predictably enough. Those who had just drunk the two giant milkshakes nibbled at the crackers and quickly filled out their ratings. Those who had drunk the one modest milkshake ate more crackers. And those who were still hungry after not eating for hours went on to chomp through the better part of the cookies and crackers. All perfectly understandable.
    But the dieters reacted in the