College students were recruited to participate in a food perception study.
The students were told to come to the lab a bit hungry and not eat at least 3 hours before.
They were led to a room which smelled of delicious freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.
In the room were two bowls:
- Chocolates + chocolate chip cookies
- A bunch of radishes
Which would you find more tempting?
Duh.
Half of the students were asked to eat 2-3 cookies and some chocolates, but no radishes.
The other half were asked to eat 2-3 radishes, but no cookies.
While the students ate, the researchers left the room, intending to tempt the students who ate the radishes with the yummy cookies and chocolates.
Despite the temptation, the radish eaters showed their willpower and didn’t sneak any cookies.
Oh and the students who were allowed to eat the cookies didn’t sneak any radishes.
Must’ve been tough. 😛
At this point, the students were told that this taste test study was over and they could leave.
But then, by design, another group of researchers entered the room and asked if they wanted to participate in another, supposedly unrelated study.
Many of the students agreed.
In this second study, the students were presented with puzzles that required them to trace a complicated geometric shape without retracing any lines or lifting their pencils. They were given multiple sheets to try over and over.
The thing is, the puzzles were designed so that they couldn’t be completed to frustrate the (poor) students to measure their persistence (aka willpower).
This is where it gets interesting…
The students who ate the cookies spent 19 minutes on the task and made 34 attempts.
However, the students that ate the radishes gave up after only 8 minutes and 19 attempts!
The radish eaters, who had earlier exhibited their willpower by not sneaking any cookies or chocolates, quit in less than half the time simply because they ran out of self-control, say the researchers.
And it’s not just this one study showing this phenomenon – many others have been done that show self-control is an exhaustible resource.
If you’ve ever experienced the frustration of having been on a diet, losing weight, then gaining it all back, you’ve just proved that self-control is in fact limited.
If it wasn’t, you would’ve kept the weight off because that’s what you really want and all that would’ve been required was a little bit of willpower to keep doing what you already know works.
It makes sense that willpower and self-control are limited resources.
They require energy and we all know that energy is a limited resource.
So if your goal is to lose fat and keep it off, what can you do?
Remove the requirement for willpower.
Got any strategies to do that?
I’ll share mine in the newsletter next week. Make sure you’re signed up because every Monday we’ll be talking nutrition.
Let me know in the comments below.
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