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More Success… Less Willpower!

LenDentonThrive Letter #51

Hey Brothers!

Welcome to the LenDentonThrive Letter!

I’m on a mission to help guys over the age of 50 lose weight, get fit, get stronger, and live longer. We do that by building thriving, healthy, and sustainable lifestyles. I call it the ThriveLife!

This week, we’re talking about willpower! More specifically, we’re discussing how to build more success into our health and fitness efforts, while relying less on willpower.

This is something that every Over-50 Guy can use, so let’s jump in!

Willpower and our Fitness

How often have you heard someone say, “I just can’t get motivated to work out.” Or, “I just don’t have the willpower to stay on that diet?” Maybe you’ve heard someone say that one of their buddies, “just didn’t want it bad enough!”

Maybe that’s happened to you!

When it comes to health and fitness, willpower is important! But, it’s also overrated!

We tend to over-rely on willpower as a way to overcome a poorly designed plan to achieve our health and fitness goals. We’ve been conditioned to think that when our plan isn’t working, we just need to amp up the willpower. And, when the plan fails, we just didn’t want it bad enough!

When it comes to our fitness, there are limits to the value of willpower. Yes, its useful and there are times where we must summon our willpower to choose the get up early to work out instead of sleeping in.

But, your willpower is limited! And, constantly needing to rely on that limited supply of willpower to get you to and through your workout indicates that there’s a problem.

You can ignore the problem and try to tough it out. But, that’s the path to failure.

Excessive reliance on willpower is the sign that the fitness strategy you’re following isn’t working for you. It means that you are constantly fighting with your brain. The better way is to work with your brain, or at least work to avoid your brain’s built-in defense mechanisms.

Our Brains and Fitness

We know that the key to health and fitness is an effective combination of smart food choices and exercise. This enables us to develop a calorie deficit that burns excess body fat while strengthening and increasing our muscle mass.

The challenge is to do this in a way that doesn’t trigger the defense mechanisms in our brain. When it comes to our health and fitness activities, our brains hate three things:

Deprivation - primarily in the form of hunger. The autonomous parts of our brains aren’t connected to our outer senses like sight and smell. The autonomous brain is connected to our inner senses - things like hormone levels. When our hormone levels change as a result of changes in our food intake (such as when we go on a calorie-restrictive diet), our autonomous brain interprets that as a signal that we are starving. In response, our brain takes action by modifying our metabolism to adjust to the reduced calorie intake. In a very real way, our brains actively attempt to sabotage our diet changes to protect the body. The only way to convince the autonomous brain that everything is okay is to maintain caloric intake within acceptable limits.

Pain - our brains are designed to protect us from pain. Pain is always interpretted as danger, so our brains work hard to prevent it. There are typically two ways our brains react to pain. It tries to force us to stop doing painful activities or to move away from the pain-inducing danger.

Boredom - our modern brains are over-stimulated by media, and the constant attempts to grab and monetize our attention. This stimulation generates all kinds of brain chemicals that keep our brains buzzing. These brain chemicals are also addicitve. Whenever our brains aren’t buzzing, we tend to look for ways to stimulate ourselves to get the buzz going again.

Today’s popular fitness culture celebrates willpower because most of their strategies are built on these three things that our brains hate (deprivation, pain and boredom). The built-in assumption is that you’ll deploy willpower to overcome these things our brains hate.

Systems Over Willpower

I think there’s a better way for Over-50 Guys to achieve health and fitness. Let’s minimize or avoid hunger, pain and boredom. Let’s keep our brains’ defense mechanisms from activating.

The key to having more success with less willpower is to develop a system of daily practices that generate the healthy outcomes we desire while working with the body’s internal constraints and defense mechanisms. This allows us to work with our bodies instead of against them. Here are five recommendations to help you develop healthy daily practices:

1. Eat More Energy-Dense Foods - the best way to prevent to our brains from affecting our metabolism is to keep the caloric input up, while reducing the fat-causing foods we eat. To do this, we maximize good healthy calories by eating whole foods like lean meats, fish and vegetables; while we eliminate foods with high sugar content that are quickly digested and stored as fat. This means more good foods, less bad foods and no hunger! I call this approach to healthier eating Eating Smarter.

2. Move More - Build more movement (walking, running, swimming, biking, etc.) into your daily routine. For most Over-50 Guys, I suggest that you start a plan to walk or run at least 5,000 steps every day to increase your exercise levels. Take more walks. Park further away from your destination. Walk a couple of hundred steps every hour. More motion of this type revs up your basal metabolic rate (BMR), which is the biggest source of calorie burn in your body. I call this Moving Smarter.

3. Enjoy Your Workouts - Avoid painful or drudgerous exercises. Find something you enjoy doing, and do it frequently. You’re more likely to do exercises you enjoy, so find something that is both physically stimulating and enjoyable. My chosen strategy is brisk walking (Zone 2 Cardio). Yours might be different. To help you decide on the best exercise for your specific lifestyle, check out my 4PM approach.

4. Systematize the Process - Whatever you choose, make it trackabe. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Keep a fitness journal. Buy a fitness tracker. Track your daily weigh-ins. The goal is to create an automatic daily system. I think of these daily practices as my Daily Rituals. For 10 years, these have been wired into my daily routine. Watching the trendlines causes my brain to help me make decisions that move those lines in the right direction! (because…science!)

5. Bonus - Get More Sleep - Sleep is the unspoken superhero of health and fitness, especially for Over-50 Guys. We need 7-9 hours of quality sleep every night. Otherwise, we’re operating with a sleep deficit, which is sub-optimal for a healthy lifestyle. Better sleep translates to better cognition, better weightloss, less stress and reduced risk of nasty neuro-degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s Disease. Check out my post about sleep here.

Follow these five recommendations to build a system of daily practices that are custom-tuned to your needs and personal preferences.

In Closing

Less willpower…more success!

A few smart changes will allow you to develop the plan that’s right for you. A plan that works with your body’s internal defenses instead of against them. A system of daily practices that translate to a sustainable healthy, lifestyle that delivers results for years to come.

I call this the ThriveLife.

You need one, too!

Smarter, not harder!

Thanks for reading this week.

I write this newsletter to make a positive impact on the lives of Over-50 Guys and and their families. If you found this information useful, please consider subscribing to receive new editions each week.

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