Jason R. Karp - Lose It Forever

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Lose It

Forever

The 6 Habits of Successful Weight Losers from the National Weight Control Registry

Jason R. Karp, PhD

Coral Gables

Copyright 2020 by Jason R. Karp, PhD

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover Design: Jayoung Hong

Cover Photo: Adobe Stock/ Tatiana Plotnikova

Layout Design: Jayoung Hong

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Lose It Forever: The 6 Habits of Successful Weight Losers from the National

Weight Control Registry

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number has been requested

ISBN: (p) 978-1-64250-346-3 (e) 978-1-64250-347-0

BISAC category code HEA010000, HEALTH & FITNESS / Healthy Living

Printed in the United States of America

To my parents,

Muriel and Monroe,

for the habits they instilled in me

Table of Contents

I n a national television interview with Barbara Walters in 2014, Oprah Winfrey confessed that not being able to maintain her weight loss was her biggest regret. In that interview, Walters asked Winfrey to finish the sentence, Before I leave this Earth, I will not be satisfied until I

Until I make peace with the whole weight thing, Opra h replied.

Losing weight is hard; keeping it off is even harder. Dr. Albert Stunkard and Mavis McLaren-Hume of the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Nutrition Clinic of the New York Hospital may have been the first researchers to study just how hard it is. For their research, which was published in 1959 in the prestigious journal, Archives of Internal Medicine , they followed one hundred obese individuals in the Nutrition Clinic of the New York Hospital. Two years after treatment, they discovered that only 2 percent maintained a weight loss of at least twenty pounds. This finding was instrumental in creating the perception, which has been perpetuated in popular media and by celebrities well-documented yo-yo dieting and weight fluctuations, that hardly anyone succeeds in keeping the w eight off.

The field of medicine is often stuck on studying failures, focusing on people who fail and then concluding that the failures represent reality. Although success rates are low, keeping weight off is not as rare as Stunkard and Mavis report or Oprah Winfreys regrets have led people to believe. The difficulty in maintaining weight loss is due (mostly) to behavioral factorsspecifically, the difficulty in making permanent changes in your lifestyle.

How hard is it to change your behaviors? As Oprah and millions of other unsuccessful weight losers have shown, its pretty hard. Three-quarters of Americans say they have tried to lose weight at some point in their lives, and 20 percent of people who are obese have tried at least twenty times to lose weight.

Most of us have habits. Some of our habits may lead us to be effective and successful, and some of our habits may lead us to be ineffective and unsuccessful. Some of us may roll the toilet paper from the top and some from the bottom. Other habitsboth positive and negativehave much greater consequences. Changing those habits, or at least modifying them to achieve your goals, can be difficult, especially with age. The older you get, the more you you become. And so habits that led you to become overweight also lead you to remain overweight, especially as you age. As physicist Isaac Newton taught, a body in motion stays in motion, unless acted on by an unequal force. To change your motion, you need an uneq ual force.

Habits dont become habits overnight. When we get excited about doing something, its easy to jump in and, in the words of Nike, just do it. But that strategy often fails in the long term because just doing it doesnt always, or even usually, make a behavior stick. That takes persistence. To be persistent, you need to create the environment for the behaviors to become automatic and become habits. It often takes months or even years to make permanent changes. Many successful weight losers fail many times at keeping their weight off before finally succeeding. All those failed attempts are not really failures, because they created the opportunity for the successful attempt. It takes many tries at doing something over and over and over again before the actions become habitual. Think about the last time you drove your car. Did you have to consciously think about where to put your hands on the steering wheel? What about when to press on the brake or look in the rearview mirror? But you had to bring a certain consciousness to all those things when you first learned to drive a car as a teenager. Driving a car wasnt a habit back then. It took many attempts at driving a car for it to become a habit. Driving becomes such a habit that, oftentimes, we dont even know how we got to our de stination!

Seventy-five percent of Americans (and 81 percent of obese Americans) perceive lack of willpower as the biggest barrier to successful weight loss. Habits go beyond intention and willpower; they are automatic behaviors. Most people dont consciously set the intention to brush their teeth every day; they just do. Becoming a successful weight loser requires exactly the same approach: creating the habits to keep your weight off, so that your actions become automatic. Dr. Wood says that when we repeat an action over and over again in a given context and then get a reward for doing so, we are learning very slowly and incrementally to associate that context with that behavior. In other words, habits have a life of their own, because, once formed, they stop being conscious and become automatic.

Once you have formed a desirable habit, however, that doesnt mean it cant be undone. It can be undone, because the undesirable habit is never unlearned; it is just replaced by a new, desirable habit. In the face of the stimulus that caused the undesirable habit, its relatively easy for that undesirable habit to reemerge; old habits really do die hard. Therefore, desirable habits need to be constantly reinforced, while undesirable habits need to be constantly suppressed. Your chances of becoming a successful weight loser will be considerably improved by focusing on both the reinforcement of desirable habits and on the suppression of undesirab le habits.