Often people who are overweight are thought as lacking the willpower and discipline to lose weight. From my own experience, I know that is not the case, and there are ways to enhance one’s willpower and discipline simply through better planning. In an August 17, 2011 article by John Tierney, published in the New York Times, entitled “Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?”, Mr. Tierney discusses how decision fatigue (to me, indecision) wastes energy, and makes it harder to have the mental energy for continued self-control, willpower, and discipline.

The article refers to experiments by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, who studied mental discipline, and whose studies showed that each person has a finite amount of mental energy for exerting self-control, and when a person is fatigued, it makes it more difficult to sustain one’s self-control, willpower, and discipline. The studies pointed to boosting one’s mental energy through increased energy input (like through sugar intake), but also pointed to making one’s mental energy last longer by lessening the amount used on each decision, with the idea that each decision uses a certain amount of a finite amount of mental energy, so lessening the amount used for each decision makes that energy go further. Let’s call it mental efficiency.

For me, improving one’s mental efficiency has worked best (because, e.g., increased sugar intake which can increase your weight), and that matches what I have experience in my business dealings. In my experience, the hardest thing for a business to deal with is indecision. If something is negative, you can come up with a course of action to fix it, and if things are going well, one can look to do the same thing, or look what improvements can be made; however, if one does not know what to do, that is the most stressful position to be in, which causes the most stress for a business.

So how can better planning help one’s willpower? Easy – if each decision one makes takes up a certain amount of their mental energy, one can lessen the amount of cumulative mental energy used by making many decisions easier, thereby using less energy for those decisions. In practice, what that means is that you decide ahead of time what you are going to do, what you are going to eat, how long one is going to exercise, etc.

What I have done, and continue to do, for example, is decide on the weekend what I will eating for dinner each night, and then go about preparing and planning my evening meals for the upcoming week on the weekend, including preparing the food for each night’s meal in advance so dinner will be ready in 30 minutes once I get home from work. Also, when I travel, I always pick a hotel that has a gym with the exercise equipment I use, so I know in advance that I will be exercising when I travel, and am comfortable in the equipment that will be used. I also make it a point to travel with a scale, so every day I understand if I am gaining weight, losing weight, or have staying the same. The whole point of these types of action is that I have shifted these decisions to a time when I have more mental energy use on these decisions, so that during the week, when I am confronted with many more decisions, I do not waste energy on those decisions, which gives me greater mental energy to maintain my self-control and discipline for other matters that come up doing the day. Call it mental energy shifting. So start planning ahead, making those lists, and filling up that calendar, and you too should find that extra mental energy to enhance your self-control, discipline, and willpower.