Weight loss is a war of attrition, willpower is just another drug

If you’ve spoken to me for more than 15 minutes, you’ll learn two things:

1. I was in the Peace Corps.
2. In about a year, I lost 105 lbs.

The abridged story (slightly longer at the link above) is that I followed the Hacker’s Diet, and by eating less and exercising more, and keeping track of it all in a spreadsheet, I went from humpback to humpable in record time.

A recent post on Zen Habits, Living Life Overweight: 10 Reasons Why You’re Not To Blame, however, has really got me going, as the intent of the article has been completely missed by 99% of the commenters.

Alex Shalman is not saying that society is completely to blame for a person’s weight, he’s merely listing some of the many, many factors, both physical and mental, that affect a person’s weight.

The main argument against the post is that a person’s weight is solely (or nearly so) determined by their willpower, or relative lack thereof. Nothing else matters. If you’re skinny, it’s because you have willpower, if you’re fat, it’s because you don’t.

I’ve been commenting back all day, so I thought I’d resummarize some of my thoughts here, in case ZH ever goes the way of the dodo:

The Big Misunderstanding:

The biggest misunderstanding, I think, is between the people who are naturally skinny, and have at most lost 10 lbs. in a short time frame for vanity purposes, and their belief that since it was easy for them, it must be from their amazing willpower, and that anyone who is severely overweight must be lazy.

Just because losing 10 lbs. in 2 weeks is easy, doesn’t mean that following the same regimen you’ll lose 100 lbs. in 20. It’s not a linear relationship, and it’s not ruled all by willpower.

Daily Water Variance:

First, everyone understands that at the most basic level, to lose weight all you have to do is burn more calories than you consume.

But you see, a person’s weight can vary by as much as 13 lbs. from day to day, due to the stuff that goes in and out of us: air, a pound or so of food, and pounds and pounds of water. We sweat away pounds as we sleep. Try drinking a glass of water before and after your next weigh-in, wow, you gained a pound right?

So for what I call “vanity weight loss”, where one loses 0-10 lbs. in less than 2 weeks, willpower has nothing really to do with it. I can starve myself for a couple days, and voila, I’m 10 lbs. lighter. Or, stretch it out and only “watch what I eat”, of take a dehydrating fad diet, and I’ll have magically lost that weight.

But it’s just water. Weight loss does not always mean fat loss.

Large Quantity Fat Loss:

But real, large quantity fat loss takes a long time. First, there’s a honeymoon stage, where the weight drops off fast (say 5 lbs./week), then there’s a long arduous burn (as little as 0.25 lbs./week), with lots of plateaus in between. By plateaus, I mean that our body as weights that it settles at naturally, and that unless we kick start our regimen, we can hang around certain weights almost indefinitely.

People Have Different Metabolisms:

It’s a simple fact that people have different metabolisms and different urges, so my numbers won’t match up with yours. Your honeymoon might be longer or shorter, your plateaus as well, but the point is that it’s not linear, and that vanity loss and real fat loss run on different schedules and aren’t easily related.

In addition, I’m against the arguments that make exceptions only for those with medical conditions that affect metabolism, like diabetes, etc. You don’t need a “medical condition” to qualify for a metabolism that justifies your weight. You can’t group people into two separate and all encompassing groups: one with a “standard” metabolism whose weight is a function of will, and the other with a “special” metabolism due to disease that overrides their will for weight-management.

Willpower Is The American Drug:

Personal responsibility, like individualism, is the American drug of choice.

No matter how complicated the circumstances truly are, we’ve got personal responsibility so wrapped up in us that we’re high on it, so convinced that everything in the universe comes down to the magical will of an individual.

No naturally skinny person with a high metabolism wants to admit that that’s the reason for their shape, it’s much sexier to say that their “will” is responsible. In a society that idealizes skinny, it’s far more impressive to say that your will keeps your body at the ideal, look how much willpower I have, aren’t I attractive, eh?

You’d get laughed out of a room for bragging that your strong will powers your height, but for some reason we take it as a perfectly valid reason for our weight.

Flipping Everything Topsy Turvy:

If our society favored fat, then the naturally fat people would be saying the same thing, that it’s because of their impressive will that they were fat. And the naturally skinny people would be mocked at for having less fat, and then obviously less will. I’ve lived in countries where fat was in, and being skinny was shameful.

But ask yourself, naturally skinny people, if it’s all about will power, could you pack on the pounds? Could you chow down twice what maintains you, every day, for the year it would take to gain 100 lbs. and be obese? To keep eating after your skinny-wanting body said you’d had enough? To override your lack of hunger, and just splurge, every day?

If you’re anorexic, could you muscle down more carbs than your body needed, every day for months on end until you were obese?

You could, if you made it a habit. Just like a fat person can make losing weight a habit, a skinny person can make gaining weight a habit.

Habitual Health:

The trick toward any weight regimen, is making it habitual. If you have to will yourself to do it, you won’t. The skill of weight management is a skilled unawareness. You have to make it second nature, or the manifold influences will punch you up and down. Because it takes so long, you have to make it routine, otherwise, you’ll be at it only at inopportune moments, which doesn’t really work. I never floss, but desperately try to make up for lost time before going to the dentist, which of course, never fools him.

The Many Factors:

What’s important to realize, is that every single person has their own set of factors, both internal and external, that affect their weight.

The multitude of factors that influence a person’s weight is so staggering, that we couldn’t list them all. And even if we could, how can we generalize which ones have the most/least pull for any given individual?

Just because I can think of ten things off the top of my head that I think most influenced my dramatic weight loss, doesn’t mean that I’m right, or that my list will work for everyone else. And how could I even begin to rank which ones were the most influential?

The best any of us can do is list off the things that we know of that influence weight (like Alex did in his post), and then let each individual use that list of ingredients to makes their own weight control recipe.

Claiming that any one list is definitive is a laugh, and claiming any one is the absolute most important (like willpower) is arrogant, because it presumes that you know all of the factors, that all people are influenced by them equally, and that you so well understand the relationship between them that you can clearly identify the single overriding factor.

My Weightloss Recipe:

For what it’s worth, here’s my recipe (with unknown proportions) off the top of my head, incomplete, yet unabridged, of what made me lose weight:

• Unhealthy, fattening diet, basically eggs, bread, steak and french fries (deep fried)
• But only two small meals a day, no snacks
• Lots and lots of water
• Statistics to filter out daily weight variation noise (spreadsheet)
• Writing down my weight every day (spreadsheet)
• Rode bike to work, no hills, 15 minutes each way
• Fear of the family history of heart attack, cancer, diabetes, obesity
• Frustrations with mobility issues (chaffing legs, out of breath, sweating constantly, B.O.)
• Shame for those above (B.O., sweating)
• Making my intentions public, to make myself accountable to others ie. bragging that I was going to do it, blogging my progress, then having to live up to my boasts
• Instinctual desire to look more “attractive” ie. get laid (or at least have an “axe” commercial moment)
• Living for an extended period in a place that favored being overweight, where people constantly point out your weight, even if it was meant as a compliment
• Outliving 10 childhood years of being “sickly”, on a constant supply of asthma meds just to keep me breathing, never want to be a “victim” of my health ever again
• Feeling empowered that as I lost weight, made me want to lose more
• My sexy willpower

I guess if you can group together living up to my boasts, following my instincts to attract women, being scared of inheriting my family’s health, being ashamed of my fat body and sickly past, and eating deliciously unhealthy food, and making all that a daily habit that festered in my subconscious for a year, as “just willpower”, and that makes you feel better about yourself, then go for it. You’ll have plenty of people to agree with you.

War Over Willpower:

One final note to address the commenters on that post who made the connection to “personal choice”, and compared the choice to lose weight to the choice to commit murder. Bad analogy.

Murder is a discrete act, whereas real weight loss takes habits and time. I can physically go right now and kill someone, just as easily as I could physically starve myself for a couple days to lose 10lbs. of vanity weight. The decision is a one shot deal, and the action takes place in a short period of time.

But fat loss takes way longer than any one discrete decision can handle.

Losing 100 lbs. is like fighting a war of attrition.

It’s not about having an iron will, it’s about making loss routine, and dragging it out until in your conscious life you all but forget that it’s happening. Real wars last for years when it’s only in the back of our minds, when we don’t confront it face to face every day.

If you make healthy living into a habit, then it runs on its own steam.

To sum up: it’s not entirely society’s fault, nor entirely your own, like everything else in this messy world, it’s a mix of both. Weight loss doesn’t come from one night of hard concentrating and willpower, but from being habitually, unconsciously healthy in your habits. Just as gaining the weight didn’t come from a one day binging of 50+ pounds of food, but from being habitually, unconsciously, unhealthy in your habits. Willpower may be a factor, but it’d be presumptuous to call it the sole one.

Walk the middle path and be happy!

Note: This post may seem haphazardly organized, because it’s mostly cuts and pastes from my comments on the original post, with some minor continuity editing, and because after hours at it, I got tired, and just posted it as-is.