Q&A 5 – I can only ever stay on a diet for 3 days. What’s wrong with me?

Why are diets so hard to stick to? Why do we fail more often than we succeed?The answer comes down to the brilliant way we are designed and when we work with this design, instead of against it, that’s when our unwanted habits begin to fall away.Transcript of episodeHello explorers! Welcome to this Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. Today I have a question for you. First I want to say to please let me know if you have questions about letting go of unwanted habits. You can do that at alexandraamor.com/question and I’ll answer your question on an upcoming Q&A episode. I’ll be happy to do that. Today’s question is, again, from me, back when I was really struggling with an unwanted over eating habit. I can only ever stay on a diet for three days. What’s wrong with me? This was something that I really struggled with, and you might as well, which is why I’m posing it. This question of willpower, and how we’re supposed to be able to have the kind of willpower that enables us to circumvent, I guess, I would say, an overeating habit. Get over it, get under it, get around it. We live in a culture that’s very willpower oriented, I’ve noticed, in the diet and weight loss and letting go of unwanted habits industry. The other thing I noticed was that a lot of places or people that want to support us to let go of an unwanted overeating habit, at least my experience was, that what they were doing was giving me alternative ways to have willpower. What I mean by that is the things that we try, for example, counting food points, having a maximum number of points that you’re supposed to be eating every day, and then assigning each food a number of points and adding those up. Or restricting the kind of food that we eat. So only eating certain things, not eating other things. All those kinds of examples are, to me now looking back, it looks like ways of bolstering our ability to have willpower, and we’re trying to strengthen our willpower. In fact, one of the healing-your-overeating-habit programs that I tried was one where it was all around the science of willpower. And getting ahead of how much willpower we have every day. The person who created this, felt that or saw in the psychology and science literature, that we have a limited amount of willpower every day. It’s like a gas tank. And when we run out, according to this theory, that’s when we fall back on over eating habits. And so the idea was that you did a bunch of stuff to make sure that your willpower tank didn’t get that empty. I remember reading that book on an airplane going to Ontario to visit my family many years ago, probably in 2015 or 2016. And thinking, oh, yeah, this is it. This really makes a lot of sense, which it did. Innocently, I grasped onto it and gave it a try. And maybe like you I lasted three days, and then it all fell apart. Maybe a week at the most. So here’s my answer to why that happens. And the first thing I want to say is that you’re not a failure, if that’s happened to you. And this isn’t about a lack of moral character on your part or even a lack of willpower. It’s really not about that. It can look that way. And of course it does and the diet industry really tells us that there’s a lot going on in that willpower area. But what I’ve discovered through the exploration of this inside-out understanding is that the answer doesn’t lie there at all. When we’re trying to apply willpower to overcoming an overeating habit, or any other habit, we’re trying to circumvent the way that we’re built, the innate and divine engineering that’s within all of us. In a way, the reason we aren’t able to do that, the reason we fail very often at these things, is because you can’t do that.