Conserve your willpower

In 2009 in a controversial cover story TIME magazine declared that exercise won't help weight loss. They proposed that a person has a limited pool of willpower and if you spend this on exercise you won't have any left to control yourself at the table.


Does it apply for everyone? Probably not. Some people can indeed run 20 miles and refuel with a smoothie. Those of us who are weak on the other hand, are already dreaming of philly cheesesteaks at mile 4.

What is not debatable though is that we can all use more willpower. The following paper recently published in PNAS suggests a way to achieve this:

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/27/9786.long

The trick seems to be reframing the outcomes of your choices. They use a money based scheme in the paper, but I will translate it to runner terms.

So, let's say your alarm went off at 6 on a Sunday morning. Instead of thinking "I can turn it off and go on sleeping or I can do my long run and hit my 3:30 marathon target", you should be thinking "I can turn it off, go on sleeping and suffer for the last 15 miles of my upcoming marathon, finishing far off my target or I can stop sleeping, do my long run and hit my 3:30 marathon target".

In other words, you state the negatives for both choices, which is supposed to help you pick the right one without using your precious willpower. (That would be the one where you do the long run, in case there is doubt)

I am going to give it a try. I'll let you know how it goes.