How To Change Your Diet By Avoiding The Willpower Myth | Eric Edmeades

Let's talk about the willpower myth. The myth is that some people have willpower and some people don't. That's not true at all. Everybody has willpower. I'd like you to think about it a little bit differently. Imagine for a minute that you have a food angel and a food devil. Alright? You have a food angel and a food devil. The food angel wants you to eat the right things and doesn't want you to eat some of the other things. The food devil has different plans. The way willpower works is, is that it's in the possession of one or the other. Think of it like, you know, the talking stick. So what happens for a lot of people in late December is they start thinking, this is the year that I'm going to make the changes. This is the year that I'm going to really change things. And so they hand the willpower stick over to the food angel. And the food angel makes the decisions from then on. And the food angel stands there proudly and says, no, we're not eating that right now. No, we're having a holiday from that right now. No, we've made New Year's resolutions. And that lasts for somewhere between minutes, hours, days, maybe weeks, and occasionally for some people, months. But at some point, what's going to happen is that the food devil is going to do something to distract the angel. It might happen on a rainy day, it might happen on a hard day at work, it might happen on a fun day at work. It might happen because somebody's dog died. It might happen because they got a promotion. Whatever happens, some life event is going to happen, and then the food devil is going to come up and bonk the food angel on the head and take the stick and move it over. And then the decisions are going to change. The decisions are going to change at that point, right? Because the willpowers moved. It's not a question of whether or not people have willpower. It's a question of where the willpower is. Now, here's the distinction I want to offer you. What we need to do is to help you to get to a place where the food angel and the food devil are on the same side. I want you to imagine for a moment that you can have a conversation with yourself that works like this. You look over at some food that you once used to have no power over. You look over at the food, and your food devil goes, hey, look, there's some donuts, pizza, ice cream, cookies, whatever the case might be. In the old days, the devil would point out that food. And the angel would say, I don't really think we should have that. But now what happens is the devil points it out like this. Hey food angel, check it out. There's donuts and cookies and pizza and ice cream over there. Remember back when we used to want that stuff? And the food angel and the food devil put their arms around each other and walk off into the sunset. Now I know that might sound like an impossibility, but. But it absolutely is not. And I want to give you a clue about how you can start to move in that direction. It works like this. The problem is, is that the food angel is looking into the future and the food devil is looking only at the right now. So if you can get the food devil to also look into the future, things will change. And not that far. I want to ask you if you think about a food like pizza. Maybe you don't eat pizza anymore, maybe you still do. You. It doesn't really matter. There are foods out there like pizza that in the moment of ordering them, we feel so happy and we feel like we're rewarding ourselves and we have such freedom and so we have these positive feelings that come up in us and then we eat it and we have more positive feelings and everything is fantastic. But how do we feel half an hour later or an hour later? How do we feel the next morning? One of my favorite ways of demonstrating this when I'm speaking, speaking in front of thousands of people, it's so much fun. I'll say to everybody, everybody together on the count of three, we're gonna make the sound that people make when they're ready to order a pizza or order ice cream or something like that. And I go, 1, 2, 3. And everybody's like, yay, woohoo. They're all excited and they're so happy. And then I go now on account of three, I want you to make the sound that represents the way your body feels. An hour later they know you know I know that food makes us feel nice in the short term. And very often non functional foods make us feel terrible later. If you can simply help the food devil to see that time in the future, one hour out. You might find over time, slowly but surely the food angel and the food devil will start to agree with each other. And then things will change dramatically. It.