sogood wrote:twizzle wrote:Then stop bringing up war/famine as a comparison.
I'd be willing to bet your willpower is just as weak as everyone elses. And if you refute this, how about you prove it by going without food for the next seven days and report back when you succeed.
War and famine are the hard evidence that weight loss can be achieved, irrespective of genetic and other biological factors. Ignore that and we can get back to the big buck diet business.
I have never promoted mine or anyone else's will power, but simply pointing out that will power will determine the outcome. If the attempt is half hearted with lots of excuses, then there will be no weight loss.
There is no way it is as simple as will power. The hard cold reality is that obese peoples brains work differently to normal weight peoples brains.
http://technorati.com/lifestyle/article ... -a-recent/
The part of the article I liked best is this: "if ONE IS CONSCIOUS that he or she has that malfunction in the prefrontal cortex. One can perhaps retrain or rewire himself/herself, creating new pathways of behavior and reaction". This implies that a person must become self-aware if they want to lose weight and keep it off.
This is what it took for me to go from an obese adult to a normal weight adult, a process that took many years:
1. recognition that I was obese and needed to do something about it
2. becoming aware that I felt stressed when eating and training myself to calm down and relax when eating
3. realising that I ate way too fast and training myself to slow down, chew my food and actually enjoy the flavours of my food. This was
my hardest habit to break and took a lot of practice.
4. reducing my portion sizes because they were too big, initially by reducing the size of dinner plate I used and later by crude measurement (because I refuse to calorie count or weigh my food)
5. learning to stop eating when I felt full instead of overeating. Considering I had overeaten for my entire life, this was not easy to do
6. before eating anything to be more aware of if I was actually hungry or eating out of habit, boredom, stress, because I was thirsty or eating out of habit
7. switching from high sugar foods (like flavoured yoghurt) to no sugar alternatives (like plain greek yoghurt)
8. switching to whole food based snacks like apples, cheese and nuts instead of processed foods. This required planning ahead and buying these foods in advance. I found that if I had ready access to healthy alternatives I wasn't tempted to snack on processed foods.
9. switching meals to whole food based meals like salads and home made curries instead of processed foods. This required planning ahead, buying food in advance and preparing it in advance.
10. switching to water instead of calorie laden drinks like soft drinks, flavoured milks and fruit juice
Of course this hasn't been easy and you will notice that 1-6 are behavioural/cognitive and nothing to do with what I was eating. The behavioural/cognitive skills were the hardest to master and took the most effort. The actual food related steps 7-10 were easy and take virtually no will power at all although preparing meals in advance does take some effort.
I wouldn't say that obese people lack will power. I would say they lack self-awareness and have bad eating habits along with making food choices that perpetuate their obesity.
Some light reading:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162- ... 91704.html
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/be ... -willpower
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-khan ... 25514.html