Why weight control is hard and how to succeed in it

A common misconception I get whenever I tell that I’ve lost more than 50kg is that it was difficult for the whole six years it took.

While I won’t say it was easy, I also can’t say it was terribly difficult after some time.

After all, all I did was follow the age old principle of “calories in, calories out” meaning that if you eat less than you consume, you will lose weight.

But if it’s this simple, why do so many fail?

There has to be some trick to my weight loss or I just happen to have extraordinary willpower, right?

People fail despite the knowledge

Majority of people fail their diets even if they know what to do to succeed, which in its simplest boils down to tracking your meals accurately and staying within your calorie targets.

In other words, the reasons range from accidental to intentional sabotage, with a dash of discouragement with slow results and having difficulties mixing the new diet with life in general.

While knowing our mistakes is useful for fixing our problems, most people still fail despite knowing them. Why?

It’s not the simplicity of the diet, knowing what to do or what to avoid that is hard.

The hard part is adhering to the changes suggested by the diet for a long period.

People tend to try to keep going on a diet with just their willpower, which is a finite resource. A resource which is depleted during the day and there’s none left the moment you’d need to choose which recipe to cook instead of just ordering a food delivery.

What’s the longest you’ve gone with willpower? Some hours? Couple days? Maybe even a week?

I personally can’t go much more than couple days, if even that. Nor am I somehow better person than someone else that I’d eat “healthy” just for the sake of it. By nature, I’m as lazy as possible and want to do the minimum effort for the maximum result, so I can procrastinate by reading yet another isekai manga or light novel.

Yet I’ve lost more than 50kg of bodyweight. Willpower just doesn’t last for years. Neither does my nature dictate whether I can do it or not.

Instead, you need change your habits, so following a new diet becomes easy and you don’t need an ounce of willpower. You just change the way you are used to doing things. The new way becomes the way how you’ve always done it.

Common problems when changing habits around eating

Changing habits is difficult, and here are some common mistakes people (me included!) make when trying to do that.

1. Trying to change too many things at once

You got inspired by a motivational before’n’after picture of a friend, or maybe got ashamed of your body after Christmas holidays’ overeating festival.

You then make a plan to change everything about your eating habits including eating less, planning and mealprepping week’s foods every Sunday, and setting strict timetable when to eat.

Changing this many variables makes you extremely likely to fail to keep following all of the changes, because in the beginning all of them require additional effort. You have energy for that extra effort in the beginning, but then comes a shitty day. You really don’t feel like doing anything extra, much less decide what you wanna eat next week and cook week’s worth of food.

And that’s when all the plans fail and you revert to your old habits.

Instead of changing everything, you should start really small and change one aspect at a time. Then keep on doing it until those actions become a habit.

For example, instead of trying to incorporate tracking, lower the calorie target drastically and gym, start by adding only tracking. Focus first on weighing what you cook and eat with a kitchen scale and writing that down to MyFitnessPal or similar. No other changes to your diet, just track your food intake as closely as possible for a month.

Only after tracking is a habit, then change another aspect such as how much or what you eat. Changing the way you eat in the long term can be seen as multiple smaller skills that you need to learn. It’s a lot easier to take one step and learn one of them, than it is to rewrite your whole life.

2. Focusing on the dream physique, not on the consistent actions

We often get extremely excited about life-changing dreams, especially around the New Year.

But those dreams typically are abstract, fuzzy, really grand and hard to take action for. Whereas the actions needed to get where you want to be can be simply boring.

Spot the difference?

Instead of the dreams, you should focus on the actions needed. Dreams provide direction, but actions are required to make them happen. Our mind often uses our dreams to trick us into thinking that one needs to do something superhuman to succeed instead of tiny, repeatable, mundane actions.

So instead of focusing on the dream physique that you want to achieve, focus on doing the same small steps of tracking your intake and your weight daily, and making small adjustments only when needed.

3. your environment does not promote good eating habits and Encourages bad ones

Changing our habits is hard in itself, and you are basically asking for trouble by hoping to keep our motivation high until the habits are ingrained. so we should focus on making our environment support our efforts.

To change our habits, we should look at the feedback loop of habits: cues, craving, response, and reward. Different cues in our life and environment cause us to crave something. This craving then motivates us to respond to it with an action. For that action, we get a reward.

To promote good habits like tracking, we should make the actions needed more obvious with a cue, attractive enough to crave it, easy to do, and be satisfying when done. This way good habits are more likely to stick when they are pleasurable and rewarding to do. In contrast, negative habits should be made harder to do by making its cues invisible, reducing the craving by making it an unattractive option, difficult to do, and unsatisfying to finish. This increases the threshold to do it again.

I did not find a way to make tracking more attractive or satisfying, but even this much helped me make it stick over time.

It’s basically impossible to make pizza taste unsatisfying, so I didn’t even try. But even without that, I managed to cut my orders and dining out at lunch time drastically. And when I did eat out, I planned for it so the pizza fit my macros.

As you can see, you can’t often make the environment support or discourage every aspect, but the more your environment supports you, the easier it is to stick with a new positive habit or getting rid of a negative one.

4. Assuming small changes don’t add up and compound into large differences over a long term

The common misconception I seem to face is that losing 50kg was extremely difficult for the full six years.

True, initially it was because I lacked habits such as tracking and mealprepping to support the weight loss. But after they were in place, it was mostly a waiting game with only miniscule adjustments.

The typical caloric deficit adjustment to my daily target I did was only 100kcal, which is an extremely tiny difference. For reference, some things that contain roughly 100kcal: 1 apple, half a pint of beer, 2/3 tablespoon of olive oil, 10 pieces of chips, or 30g of uncooked pasta (which is 1/3 of typical suggested portion).

If given such small portions for beer or chips, you’d just get mad, right?

But looked other way, the changes you need at once to your eating are extremely small to control your weight. Of course you do multiple of those small 100kcal adjustments over your weight control whether as an increase or a decrease. But a single adjustment does not need to be drastic for there to be an effect.

Eating just a little less does compound into large differences in body weight when given enough time and consistency.

5. Not getting back to the habit after a setback

The holidays were amazing with loads of delicious food, alcohol, and friends and family. But that ruined your good tracking streak when you ate waaaay too much, so it feels like it’s not worth continuing anymore.

Your weight will most likely spike, but that is temporary. Holidays, travels and parties are a part of life and they will be even after you’ve lost weight. In the long term, a day or even couple of overeating are not important.

Instead, one of the worst mistake you can do is stop after you break a streak for whatever reason. It is crucial to get back to the actions you want to reinforce as a habit. In other words, it is more important that you get back to tracking accurately and eating according to your macros than how much over your targets you were during the holidays.

You should not shame yourself for failing or slipping up, because that will make continuing the weight control harder. Rather, acknowledge it happened and focus on continuing with small actions of tracking and eating according to your macros. The faster you get back on track, the more results you’ll achieve over months and years.

6. Not addressing Why we skip needed actions and our limiting beliefs

You’ve been following all the tips with habit building and there are still too many one-offs that throw off your tracking. It’s just so hard to decline from an invitation for a dinner and drinks, so you’re starting doubt what is wrong with you as a person.

While there often are reasons like “I needed to focus on my work / family / friends, thus eating out again is justified”, there often is also an aspect of what you value. So even if you say you value your body and losing weight, you more often give priority to eating out or indulging in cravings than to eating according to your targets.

Crucially, failing to give priority to actions of a new habit doesn’t make you a bad person. But if you notice consistently skipping over actions of tracking and hitting targets, then try asking yourself why.

Stopping to reflect on these can be painful, but can help you get enforce good habits and get rid of habits you don’t like. If you make an effort to understand yourself and process the negative thoughts and limiting beliefs, it will be a lot easier to change your eating habits when there is less shame, guilt and self-doubt related to the topic.

7. Not using external accountability

You’ve modified your environment to support building better habits, you’ve self-reflected on why it seems so hard and made improvements, and you’re focusing on the actions instead of just dreaming, but you still find it hard to keep it going. It just feels that you can’t make yourself accountable for the result. Is it finally time for willpower discussion?! No, it’s not.

You seem to improve and get some results, but you feel like you’re making half the progress you could with either the dream or building habits towards it.

At these times, outsourcing part of the accountability to someone else can help. Try hiring a professional nutrition coach to ensure your macro distributions work for your goals. Or even ask your friends to make an accountability group, where you push each other and ask how things are going on goals like weight control.

The most important is that whoever is the external accountability help has courage to call you out if you seem to avoid doing your actions.

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As you can see, there’s quite a few problems when it comes to long term weight control. But that’s why it is long term, because making mistakes along the way happens to everyone. It is mostly matter of improving the habits slightly consistently than whether you do things perfectly every day. If you focus on changing your actions and building habits, you will realize you’ve reached your dream physique faster than you imagined.