Transcript of a conversation between Eric Edmeades and Vishen Lakhiani about dieting myths and behavior change. Edmeades argues that willpower is a short-term skill, true freedom with food means being able to both eat and refuse foods you don't want, and that calorie counting is an unreliable model because calories are theoretical and metabolic responses matter. He uses a client story (Fred/Frederick) and examples contrasting types of calories to illustrate WildFit principles.
Chapters
Willpower is such a funny thing. You know, there's this idea. Well, first of all, diets are built on the idea of willpower. Do this, don't do that for this period of time. It's like force resist. Yeah, it's resist. It's like caging and controlling and restricting. The thing about willpower is a lot of people tell you willpower doesn't work. And I would say it absolutely does work. Willpower absolutely does work. But it's a short term skill. Willpower is meant to help you do something for a short period of time in order to create a change. You're not supposed to live your whole life on willpower. In fact, the truth is, willpower is not something you either have or don't have. It's almost like, it's like, which side of your mind is it on? Say you've got the food angel and the food devil, right? Well, you want the willpower to be with the food angel. The food angel says, we will not have that. We won't eat it, we won't have it. And the devil's going, oh, come on, please, can't we, can't we, can't we? All that happens eventually is the devil just crawls around the back of your head, bonks the angel on the head and grabs the willpower and moves over. And then you can't not eat it because you have incredibly powerful willpower. So willpower is a skill that we. It's not a matter of whether we have it or don't, it's a matter of what side it's on.
And studies show that willpower is actually an energy that you use up. So you can have great willpower in the morning, but you're going to burn that out by the time it comes to evening.
Yeah, exactly. And so what we want to use willpower for is to make short term changes, short term lessons, so that we can really develop a sense of consciousness. The difference between somebody going, I won't eat it, I won't eat it, I won't eat it, I won't eat it. That takes a huge amount of energy. That's so different than I don't want it.
So tell us about the pizza story.
Perfect example. Frederick comes to me, a client of mine, and he comes along, a consulting client in a totally different field, and he comes to me one day and he says, I love the idea of wild food, but I can't do it. Why not? Do you not have Internet? What do you mean you can't do it? And he Says, no, no, no. He says, one of my highest values is freedom. I just love freedom around food. And so I can't do your program. I just can't do diets. I just value freedom too much. And I said, well, define freedom for me. And he says, okay. This is his definition of freedom. Freedom is the ability to eat what you want, when you want, as much as you want, however you want. I said, frederick, that's a fantastic definition of freedom. There it is. And I said, but can you not eat what you don't want to eat? And he's like, what do you mean? And I said, well, we just had lunch, and I happen to know you like pizza. So if I were to go order a pizza and it showed up here, would you eat it? And he goes, of course I would, but we just had lunch. You're full. And he goes, yeah, but it's pizza. In other words, you have no freedom when it comes to pizza. And the penny dropped. He got it. The food industry had fooled him into believing that freedom was to eat whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. Real freedom is to eat what you want, when you want, and to not eat what you don't want to eat. And that's the difference we have to make.
That's a powerful lesson. So we completely misconstrue this feeling of freedom. And what about Fred?
Fred jumped in. He did the program. He lost 40 to 45 kilos. Like, I mean, we're talking about a whole series. Tall guy, 40 to 45 kilograms.
That's about 90 pounds.
His entire face changed, his entire body changed, his entire quality of life changed. But here's the kicker. What he had completely was freedom.
Now, the third concept here, and this is something that I can't understand how people still buy this calories, measurements and calorie counting.
You remember we talked about how a word can be used for a spectrum? Well, are there good calories and are there bad calories? Absolutely. But the bigger issue is that we're applying basic accounting to calorie counting. So I suppose in the strictest sense, if you burn more calories than you eat, you should end up with a net weight loss. But we don't even know. Calories are largely theoretical. We don't even know how many calories it really takes to run our body. Has anybody ever measured the calories they're peeing and pooping out? That's got to be part of the accounting table. And I mean that sincerely, because what's happening for a lot of us is as long as we believe that calories in, calories out is a useful system, then what we do is we starve ourselves, end up malnourished, then we over exercise burning the empty calories that we've been putting in in order to create weight loss. When really what's going on is we're stressing our body, we're telling our body that calories are incredibly rare in nature right now and making sure that our bodies wouldn't want to release calorie one.
Consider this, right? The US Government assumed many years ago, decades ago, that the average adult male needed 2,250 calories. They never even bothered to measure the requirement for women. And then they decided to simplify the model and say, let's just round it up to 2000. That itself is inexact. Furthermore, US government labeling allows any company, if they're putting calories on a can of food or an ingredient, to be 20% off top or bottom. Right. So what you think is 80 calories could be 100, it could be 60. The point is, don't even bother with calories. Now, in wildfit, what's the approach to calories?
One of the very simple things to consider is the more calories you eat, the right kind of calories, the more your body feels that there's an abundant supply of calories in nature, the less your body feels the inclination or need to store calories. In other words, if you starve yourself, you do the opposite. Okay, let's go at it from two perspectives. First of all, 200 calories worth of broccoli and 200 calories worth of Coca Cola. I mean, why are we comparing them in the same way at all? One is absolutely not good for you, and the other one is irrespective of the calories. So that's the first problem. But the second problem is that anybody measuring calories has a fundamental lack of understanding of the metabolism or let's say evolutionary biology. If you are eating a phenomenal amount of calories, the right kind of calories, right? We're not talking about those ones. We're talking about the broccoli and good quality calories, then your body says, oh my gosh, nature is full of abundance. There's lots of calories available right now. And so your body does not feel the need to store calories. Your body only starts to feel the need to store calories when it feels that calories are rare. And there are some specific things that we eat that tell our bodies that calories might be rare soon or are currently rare. And so when somebody goes on a diet, calorie restriction, their body internally goes, there's a lack of calories in nature. I better hold on to the ones I've got. And then weight loss becomes incredibly difficult.
