Understanding dieting willpower and motivation
A primer on food environment
Without stepping out of the boundaries of my competencies here, we are going to talk a little bit about psychology because it’s so important as, as we know the bottom of our nutritional pyramid is adherence and so we have to actually start understanding what helps people stick to certain plans and what stops people from sticking to certain plans so, within two blogs we’re also going to talk about mindless eating, food environment and how the environment that we set ourselves up in has such a huge impact, relatively subconsciously on our control over our diet that lots of us don’t even consider but to actually put that into context, first we need to understand a little bit about willpower hence today’s blog.
I’m sure lots of us have done stuff in the past where we’ve been highly motivated, however over time willpower starts to get lower and actually we just tend to give in to stuff. Sometimes some people have got absolutely iron willpower and other people have got relatively little or it seems like it breaks pretty easily so today we want to delve into it a little bit more.
When we look at the scientific literature it’s known as ego depletion so you can think of it as willpower depletion. This theorises that self-regulation (self-control) is governed by a limited resource that allows people to control impulses and desires.
Let's think about this, self-control is not endless, it’s a limited resource and so it allows people to control against impulses and desires to want to eat that piece of cake or an impulse to go and order takeaway or to have those extra cookies that are in the cupboard, however the thing that’s stopping you from doing that is limited so if the thing that’s controlling self-control is high then we’re going to be saying no to the extra crisps or the extra sweets etc, however, when it’s low we are going to be more compulsive, we’re going to be more open to eating foods that we shouldn’t.
From this we can take that willpower is a limited resource, it’s not endless.
Willpower can actually be depleted by tasks that require willpower so for example:
It’s like getting a muscle tired from exercise, if you’re asked to do a set of squats by your coach, then obviously doing that set of squats tires those muscles so if you were to continue doing sets of squats then eventually that muscle will tire and you’ll be less able to perform squats. Well, it’s the same when it comes to willpower.
If you are using willpower throughout the day on a number of tasks, for example by just not telling your boss that he’s an idiot, this would take some willpower and that then starts to lower and then over time we can actually deplete willpower so there’s none left.
An active effort to control behaviour will lower willpower in other areas and they basically don’t have to be related so tasks requiring self-control can have a hindering effect on subsequent self-control tasks even if they are seemingly unrelated, an example of this would be:
If you have a blazing argument with someone and you use all of your willpower not to go and shout at them and you hold it in, you say okay agree to disagree then you walk away. The task of exerting self-control there or willpower will deplete your willpower in other areas and I’m also going to show you some studies later on in this blog when it comes to food but just to get your head in the game now, if you are someone who throughout the entirety of the day is having to use your willpower all of the time, whether that be in tasks or whether that be in jobs, relationships etc then there’s a good chance that when it comes towards the end of the day that your willpower is going to be lowered and almost gone and that might be the time when we have those ‘F it moments’ where we say ‘F**K this’, I’m going to go and eat that food or have that wine etc.
When the energy for mental activity is low, self-control is typically impaired so once you’ve basically just “had enough”, willpower is kind of broken down which can be considered a state of ego depletion and like I said in real life that’s those ‘f this moments’ and leads you to think/say “I’m not on the diet anymore so give me that ice cream or give me that alcohol”.
This is a graphical representation of how your day could go.
8 am
So we have our full of willpower at the start of the morning and then we have to make that decision of -
“Oh should I have that croissant for breakfast or should I have my healthy yoghurt and fruit?”
“No, I’ll have the healthy yoghurt and fruit”. -
Exerting that willpower and then self-control lowers our willpower a little bit
12 pm
Should I have pudding with lunch?
“No okay I won’t’”
Exerting willpower again and then once again the willpower has gone down
3 pm
Cup of tea time.
“How about a couple of biscuits or that chocolate bar with my coffee?”
“Nope”
Again the willpower is depleting..
5 pm
Sally in the office offers you the last piece of cake before everyone goes home
”Should I eat that cake?”
”No I won’t”
Again depleting your willpower again.
7 pm
F it moment and you go off your diet
These are decisions all to do with food but as you can see as the day goes on, all of these little decisions can deplete self-control and it’s not always just to do with food either as other things can deplete it as well but in the context of this blog it is to do with food.
By the time that it gets to the evening we’ve depleted all of our willpower through making these decisions and exerting self-control throughout the day and so we have this ‘f this’ moment in which we then tend to reach for the chocolate etc.
Also if we think back to our very first adherence blog, we know that most people are most likely to break their diets in the evening and a large portion of this may well be down to this depletion of the ego, this kind of eroding of willpower throughout the day.
Just to highlight the power of this when it comes to diet we’re going to look through 2 studies together now.
The first study was a relatively small study where they took 24 chronic dieters and by that, we just mean, people who have dieted 4,5,6 times within their lives so they have dieted, then they stopped, then they dieted again, then they stopped etc.
They seated these people either next to or far away from a bowl of overflowing M&M’s, so think of this in your mind now and if you don’t like M&M’s then think of a food that you do really like and either place them right next to you where you could just grab a handful or across the room where you have to physically get up, go and walk to get them.
They found that the individuals that were sat close to the snacks were far more tempted and thought about the M&M’s far more and so they concluded this -
“The proximity of snacks influences levels of temptation and mental energy devoted to food”.
So let’s think about this, just because the same bowl of M&M’s we’re sat closer to those people, they were more tempted and they thought about it more, so we know that those people are going to constantly be going “the foods near me, I can’t have it” or ‘“they look really nice and I can’t eat them” or even “you’re on a diet so don’t look at them” and so this whole ongoing internal battle of wanting the food and not having it was all of this time lowering these individuals willpower, however, if we could place it far away it reduced the amount of temptation that they had and the amount that they thought about the M&M’s, therefore, keeping willpower higher. This is something really important to remember for when we move into our food environment blog as well.
The second study which was even more showing, took 36 chronic dieters and 64 non-dieters (because they wanted to get an idea of was it just the dieters or does it happen to everyone).
They had an array of snacks like a lovely table of Doritos, M&M’s and Skittles and these foods were placed either next to them or far away from the individuals and this was like phase one.
Half of the group were told to help yourself, so basically when you’re told to help yourself that means that you have to use your own willpower not to go over and eat all of those snacks because you could do as you’ve basically been told that you’re allowed to do this and told to go and eat those snacks, however, the others were told that the snacks were needed for an experiment so basically, the experimenters providing control because you’re not allowed to go and have them and realistically when most people are told “don’t touch that food, you’re not allowed” and especially within a scientific setting, they’re just not going to go over there and have it.
So we have two very different arms there. One was the “help yourself” group where they have to use their own willpower to not go and eat the food and then there’s the other group where actually they’re not really taxing their willpower too much as they’ve just been told, “you’re not allowed to eat it”.
After 10 minutes of that, they were taken through to some ice cream testing and they were told that it was a taste test. There were 3 different types of ice creams and they just wanted to get their idea on taste testing, however, what the scientists really wanted to know is how much ice cream they’d eat because they wanted to see if those that had used up their willpower when they were told to help yourself would eat more ice cream.
These are the results -
So as you can see that on the left-hand side, the group that was told “don’t touch the food”, well there was not much difference between the group that was sat close to the food or far away from the food in terms of how much ice cream they then went and ate because again willpower hadn’t been depleted, they hadn’t used willpower because the experimenters told them “don’t touch that food”, however when we look on the right-hand side we see that the black bar, the high temptation group that was told to help yourself ate far more ice cream than the other groups, so just to clarify, the group that got sat closest to the snacks and we’re told that they could help themselves whenever they wanted but a lot of them refrained and didn’t eat but, when they went to the ice cream tasting because they had lowered their willpower by controlling themselves in the initial task they overate the ice cream in the second task.
Let’s put this in context and think about it a little bit more in the real world.
If we are in our own home, in our own kitchen where nobody is telling you not to go and touch those snacks, it’s up to your own willpower and if you place yourself very close to some sweets there’s a good chance eventually you’re going to eat far more, so it’s this idea that tasks throughout the day and throughout time lower our willpower until it gets to a certain extent where it gets too low and we just get a bit more impulsive and more prone to overeat specific foods that aren’t particularly on our diet.
As you can see the help yourself condition which compelled dieters to use their own self-control significantly impacted their willpower to resist ice cream so they lowered their willpower and ended up eating more.
The takeaways from all of this:
Willpower is a limited resource and we can actually improve it as they’ve shown that some tasks where you use self-control such as checking how much money you’re saving each month and trying to save a little bit more can improve willpower in other areas but for day to day tasks it can be very much depleting and it’s limited.
Any task that requires willpower will deplete it, so if you have got a seriously stressful period of work well you might actually be one of those people who actually end up turning to food because at the end of the day you’ve used all of your decisions and you’ve used all of your willpower and you have no willpower left so you then end up going off track.
When we are low on willpower self-control is also impaired which can have negative results on our diet and lifestyle.
The temptation is where the food environment is going to be important. The temptation is a drain on our willpower, as such, we should look to methods to reduce temptation and ego depletion, keeping our willpower higher and this is where the food environment is going to come in.