Smart Willpower Strategy

Willpower comes in many forms and has many names.

To make yourself go for a run when you don’t want to, you’ll need “self-discipline.”

If you need to overcome procrastination and start a project, you’ll need “work ethic.”

To keep going when you’re exhausted, you’ll need “determination.”

If you’d rather watch a movie than do your chores, you’ll need to exercise “delayed gratification.”

To resist the temptation of eating dessert at a dinner party, you’ll need “self-control.”

If you need to bite your tongue to avoid impulsively saying something rude, you’ll need “self-restraint.”

I know these alternate names for willpower are not exactly the same thing, but, for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to lump all these things together under the single moniker “willpower.” And I do believe that there is a fundamental truth behind this simplification: Doing what needs to be done and resisting unhealthy temptations are really two sides of the same coin.

Here’s my definition of willpower:

Willpower is the ability to do what’s best for you when you don’t feel like it.

The Importance of Willpower

No matter what your goals are in life, willpower is of paramount importance. Here’s Stanford’s Kelly McGonigal, author of The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It, summarizing the empirically demonstrated benefits of willpower:

“People who have better control of their attention, emotions, and actions are better off almost any way you look at it. They are happier and healthier. Their relationships are more satisfying and last longer. They make more money and go further in their careers. They are better able to manage stress, deal with conflict, and overcome adversity. They even live longer. When pit against other virtues, willpower comes out on top. Self-control is a better predictor of academic success than intelligence (take that, SATs), a stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma (sorry, Tony Robbins), and more important for marital bliss than empathy (yes, the secret to lasting marriage may be learning how to keep your mouth shut). If we want to improve our lives, willpower is not a bad place to start.”¹

Willpower is also of critical importance for behavioral change. Whether you’re quitting a bad habit, trying to get in shape, or struggling with procrastination, you’ll need willpower. Of course, I’m all about using strategies to reduce our dependence on willpower, but you cannot eliminate the need for willpower entirely.

A steady, disciplined use of willpower might seem like a restriction of personal freedom, but it is not. If insufficient willpower leaves you a slave to bad habits and addictions then you’re not really free. If you can’t muster the willpower to overcome procrastination and earn a better life for yourself, then you’re not really free. To cultivate true freedom, you’ll need willpower.

“The man without self-reliance and an iron will is the plaything of chance, the puppet of his environment, the slave of circumstances.” –Orison Swett Marden²

Importantly, research has shown that self-control is learnable. When researchers teach people will poor self-control the strategies used by those with high self-control, the poor self-control subjects improve.³ Willpower is not a fixed trait; it can be developed through strategy and practice.

People who learn to master willpower become active agents in life, and discover that they are response-able in every situation. And this applies to their behaviors as well as their emotions. Walter Mischel,* described self-control as “the ‘master aptitude’ underlying emotional intelligence, essential for constructing a fulfilling life.”³

It’s hard to find anyone who says that willpower doesn’t matter. Yet, despite the widespread agreement about how important willpower is, there is very little agreement in the scientific community about how willpower actually works.

*Walter Mischel is the man behind the now-famous “marshmallow test” and the author of a book by the same name. His research appeared to show that young children with high self-control wind up doing better as high schoolers and adults, but more recent research has refuted this finding, showing that the willpower levels of young children are not a good predictor of later success. This makes sense because the prefrontal cortex – the area of the brain responsible for willpower – is poorly developed in young children and doesn’t finish developing until early adulthood. Mischel’s findings about effective self-control strategies are still valid. Here’s a deeper look at the implications of this “debunking” of the marshmallow test.

The Great Willpower Debate

For a long time, psychologists agreed with the findings of Roy Baumeister, whose research showed that willpower was a finite resource that could easily be depleted through use. His book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, has long been seen as the quintessential handbook on this subject. Plus, hundreds of experiments showed that when people had to complete two back-to-back tasks which both required willpower, they would demonstrate less willpower on the second task.⁴

From this research, willpower came to be understood as a ‘brain muscle’ that would grow more tired the longer you used it.⁴ With adequate rest and recovery, the muscle’s energy would be restored, and willpower levels would return to normal.⁴ This made sense and even opened the door for an optimistic long-term approach to willpower: You could improve your willpower by using it regularly, just as you can strengthen a muscle through exercise.⁴

However, just because an idea sounds good doesn’t mean it’s true. Later research failed to find Baumeister’s willpower depletion effect.⁵ And other research even showed that willpower fatigue can be reversed if you have a positive belief about what hard work does for you.⁶ If you believe using willpower is draining, you’ll experience it as draining, but if you believe it energizes you, you’ll be energized.³ In other words, what you believe about willpower might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The trouble is that studying a psychological trait like willpower in the lab is very difficult. Willpower experiments greatly oversimplify the human experience and don’t reflect how willpower is used in the real world. Sample sizes are usually small because of limited funding, and it’s difficult to find diverse subjects. It almost certainly matters how meaningful the willpower-requiring task is to the person doing it, and laboratory experiments generally don’t ask participants to perform meaningful tasks.

Furthermore, there are a great many factors that can affect how much willpower an individual has.  Willpower levels change from moment-to-moment and day-to-day. Someone who has excellent willpower in one situation might have terrible willpower in another. You might have high self-control one day and low self-control another.

So we just don’t know how willpower really works, and we might never know. People may or may not have a limited amount of willpower. Believing you have unlimited willpower might help you work harder than you otherwise would, or it might lead to overconfidence.

So what are we to do?

Should we assume willpower is limited and act accordingly? Or should we assume willpower is limitless and hope that our positive belief will be a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I have a few answers to these questions. My first answer is, it depends.

If you believe that you can change everything about your life all at once, then you’re almost certainly wrong. To do so would require far more willpower than you actually have. And you’d be making the same mistake millions of people make every year when they list half a dozen New Year’s Resolutions.

On the other hand, if you believe that you just don’t have enough willpower to overcome your procrastination habit or your drug addiction or your junk-food binging, then you’re wrong. You do have the willpower. It will be easier than you think.

My second answer is to play it safe.

Reflecting back on my own life, I can see that it has been much more common for me to be overconfident about how much willpower I have. Here’s a typical pattern:

I think to myself, Tomorrow I’m going to get up early and write for two hours. Then I’ll dust, vacuum, and clean the bathroom. Then I’ll go grocery shopping and cook a big meal to have leftovers for days. Then I’m going to read that book I’ve been neglecting. Tomorrow comes and very little of this actually happens. I predicted that I would have an enormous amount of willpower, but I was wrong.

Because of experiences like this, I believe that it’s wiser to view willpower as limited. This means designing your days to include reasonable amounts of willpower-demanding work and several opportunities for willpower-restoring rest.

This also means doing the hardest things first when your willpower reserves are highest. Most people find it harder to do the things they “should” do than the things they have to do, so I recommend doing your shoulds before your have-to’s. If Baumeister is right about willpower depletion, then this is a wise choice. And if he’s wrong – if willpower doesn’t get depleted – then the order in which you do your work doesn’t matter, no harm done.

My third answer to the “So what are we to do?” question is realistic optimism. This could be viewed as the middle ground between the two approaches. Yes, willpower is limited, but you might have more than you think. And yes, willpower is like a muscle, so you can grow it over time. Your willpower may not be unlimited today, but it does have the capacity for nearly unlimited growth. And, most importantly, if you’re strategic about willpower, you can reduce your dependence on it and get more out of the willpower you already have.

Strategically Reducing Your Dependence On Willpower

One of the most classic blunders people make when pursuing behavioral change or increased productivity is relying too much on willpower, and failing to employ strategies that cut down on your willpower expenditures.

Don’t buy junk food.

I am a notoriously healthy eater. I don’t eat chips or cookies or candy, and I don’t drink soda. Does this require willpower? Sure, but only when I’m at the grocery store. Most people keep some kind of junk food in their homes, and they struggle to resist consuming it on a daily basis. I just don’t buy junk food. It never comes home with me from the grocery store. This makes resisting junk food while I’m at home very easy; it’s not even there.

Does it take willpower to resist buying sugary treats and chips? Of course. But this is a one-time expenditure of willpower that prevents dozens of future expenditures. And it’s made easier by employing the following classic strategy: Don’t shop hungry.

I don’t even walk down the aisles of the store that have junk food, so I’m not tempted by it. Not that you can avoid it entirely. Stores are very clever about this. But all you have to do is make it out the door and back to your car. It’ll be smooth sailing from there.

Employ the 20-Second Rule.

This strategy is so simple, I’m amazed by how well it works. If you make an unhealthy behavior just 20 seconds more difficult to do, you’ll be much less likely to do it, and if you make a healthy behavior 20 seconds easier to do, you’ll be much more likely to do it.⁷ Or you can do both. For example, you can leave a book on the couch and hide the TV remote in a closet. Now reading is the path of least resistance.

It sounds stupid, but it really helps. One of Baumeister’s experiments found that “office workers ate a third less candy when it was kept inside a drawer rather than on top of their desks.”⁴ If nothing else, keeping temptations out of sight helps keep them out mind (and out of our mouths).

Here’s another idea from Baumeister:

“A simple commitment strategy for avoiding late-night snacking is to brush your teeth early in the evening, while you’re still full from dinner and before the late-night-snacking temptation sets in. Although it won’t physically prevent you from eating, brushing your teeth is such an ingrained pre-bedtime habit that it unconsciously cues you not to eat anymore. On a conscious level, moreover, it makes snacking seem less attractive: You have to balance your greedy impulse for sugar against your lazy impulse to avoid having to brush your teeth again.”⁴

You can take this further and follow Dan Millman’s advice:

“Make any positive behavior as convenient as possible. … [and] Make any negative behavior as inconvenient as possible.”⁸

That’s really what my grocery store strategy is all about. If I really want junk food, I have to leave my home, drive to a store, buy it, and drive home. This would be such a hassle that the mere prospect of it prevents me from eating poorly.

For a deeper look at this strategy, check out “The Surprising Power of 20 Seconds.”

Eliminate distractions so you’re not tempted by them.

Turning to productivity, we need to remember that doing focused work takes willpower, and the more distractions you have to deal with, the more willpower it takes to focus. So eliminating distractions from your work environment is an essential strategy for reducing willpower expenditures.

While there is much that we can’t control about where we work, many knowledge workers needlessly allow themselves to be annoyed by distractions all day long. The biggest culprit is the smartphone. Most of us don’t need to have our phones on and with us every moment of the working day, but few people turn their phones off, put them away, or put them in airplane mode.

For some people, having a phone present is a steady temptation that must be resisted. The phone, after all, can access all sorts of things that are a lot more compelling than work: games, news, texts, music, social media. For smartphone addicts, trying to get work done in the presence of their phone is like a dieter struggling to choke down a salad while there’s a chocolate cake sitting on the table. If this is you, turn the phone off and put it in another room. Then get to work.

Stop multitasking.

Multitasking is another common behavior that needlessly drains willpower. You’ll probably find it much easier to do difficult cognitive work if you focus on one thing at a time. Baumeister, for what it’s worth, agrees:

“For most of us, though, the problem is not a lack of goals but rather too many of them.”⁴

Lower the bar.

For most people, the hardest part of working, writing, reading, doing chores, meditating, or exercising is starting. Therefore, you’d be wise to make starting easier. You do this by lowering the bar. Instead of saying to yourself, “I have to work out for 30 minutes today,” say, “I only have to do five minutes.”

Your brain will put up less resistance to the prospect of a five-minute workout than a 30-minute one. And you may quit after five minutes … but you probably won’t. You’ll usually find that you’ve developed momentum – and motivation – when the timer goes off, and you will want to continue.

Basically, you’re tricking your brain into being okay with starting by only committing to a small amount of work. This is one of the most effective techniques for overcoming procrastination because it reduces the willpower required to begin. Now, it’s really important that you honor the deal you’ve made with yourself: If you really don’t want to keep going after five minutes, stop. If you force yourself to keep going, your brain won’t believe you next time you try this technique.

Future Selves

Walter Mischel argues that it’s important to see your future self in fundamentally the same way as you see your present self.³ It’s all too common, unfortunately, to view your future self as you view a stranger.³

Because of human nature, we are much more inclined to do favors for ourselves than for strangers, so it takes more willpower to do something to help a stranger than it does to do something to help yourself. Therefore, the more you recognize that your future self is you, the easier it will be to do something nice for your future self.³

I like to take the “future self” idea a bit further and imagine all my future selves – the many moments, days, and years of my experience that lie ahead. Whenever I remember that one act of self-care will benefit dozens of my future selves, it seems to require less willpower to perform the act.

Mentally stepping back from the present to look at the big picture of your life can help you see these future selves and resist the temptation to pursue immediate gratification. When Baumeister tried to test this, “results showed that a narrow, concrete, here-and-now focus works against self-control, whereas a broad, abstract, long-term focus supports it.”⁴

Here’s a technique to help you think long-term from McGonigal:

“View every choice you make as a commitment to all future choices. So instead of asking, ‘Do I want to eat this candy bar now?’ ask yourself, ‘Do I want the consequences of eating a candy bar every afternoon for the next year?’ Or if you’ve been putting something off that you know you should do, instead of asking ‘Would I rather do this today or tomorrow?’ ask yourself, ‘Do I really want the consequences of always putting this off?’” ¹

If-Then Plans

It’s critical that we learn to play offense rather than defense with respect to willpower.⁴ One way to do this is if-then planning: thinking about future scenarios in which willpower will be required and deciding in advance what we’ll do. Here’s Mischel on if-then planning:

“If we have these well-rehearsed plans in place, the self-control response will become automatically triggered by the stimulus to which it is connected. (‘If I approach the fridge, then I will not open the door’; ‘If I see a bar, then I will cross to the other side of the street’; ‘If my alarm goes off at 7 a.m., then I will go to the gym’). The more often we rehearse and practice implementation plans, the more automatic they become, taking the effort out of effortful control.”³

Habits and Routines

Mischel was hinting at the most important willpower strategy: developing good habits and establishing consistent routines. In fact, most people who seem to have superhuman willpower really just have a lot of good habits.⁹ They’ve really learned how to play willpower offense instead of defense.

Once established, habits run on autopilot and require little to no willpower. And the more consistent you are in your routine execution of these habits, the easier they are. It does take willpower to create a habit, but this is strategic willpower use. Targeting one habit at a time, you can steadily transform an unhealthy lifestyle into a healthy one.⁹

When starting any new habit, it’s essential that you lower the bar, as we discussed earlier, and focus on being consistent.¹⁰ You should also get clear on when, where, and how you will execute your new behavior because having to make these decisions every day will needlessly drain your willpower. And you should rely on reminders rather than memory to make sure you do it every day. Forgetting is just one of many reasons you might fail to execute your habit, but it’s a reason you can eliminate completely with reminders. Lastly, don’t start tomorrow; start today. Why? Because, as Kelly McGonigal points out:

“We wrongly but persistently expect to make different decisions tomorrow than we do today.”¹

100% Commitment

If consistency makes the willpower game easier, then complete consistency should be the easiest of all. And it is. Any difficult behavior is easier when we have a 100% commitment to doing it.

This is especially important for substance abuse because of The River. If you’re going to become clean and sober, fully commit to that path for the rest of your life and tell everyone.

A half-hearted, ambiguous commitment to change is no commitment at all. It requires that you make a new decision every time you’re tempted by an unhealthy choice, and these decisions have a heavy willpower cost. Make the difficult choice of 100% commitment today, and enjoy decision-free healthy living for the rest of your life.

Mastering the Prefrontal Cortex

Now, despite the disagreement about how willpower works, there is general agreement about where willpower resides in the brain: the prefrontal cortex or PFC for short. The PFC is right behind your forehead, and it’s the planning part of the brain, the seat of executive function.¹¹

Understanding how the prefrontal cortex works is essential to mastering willpower. If you know how to activate, strengthen, and support the PFC, you’ll have far greater willpower.

Activate It

Since willpower requires the use of the prefrontal cortex, if it’s not active, we’re in trouble. And certain situations actually deactivate the PFC. When we experience strong emotions, such as during a fight-or-flight response, the PFC shuts down and older, more instinctual parts of the brain take over. If we want to make good choices and exercise willpower when we’re emotionally fired up, we have to retake control by activating the prefrontal cortex.

One simple technique for doing this is “name it to tame it.” By simply naming the emotion you’re feeling, you activate the PFC.¹² And by saying to yourself that you’re feeling that emotion, you take a step back from embodying that emotion.

Another technique is to stop whatever you’re doing and give yourself time to think. McGonigal says that we have to “pause and plan” in order to exercise willpower when we’re feeling stressed or anxious.¹ The thinking and planning performed by the prefrontal cortex happen more slowly than the instinctive reactions performed by older parts of the brain,¹¹ so if you react immediately, you’re probably not using your PFC at all.

And while you’re pausing, take some deliberately slow, deep breaths. Taking control of this aspect of your physiology activates the prefrontal cortex.¹ Specifically, slowing your breathing down to four to six breaths per minute immediately increases willpower.¹ Plus, this type of breathing is a calm action that, because of self-perception, reduces the power of strong emotions. Personally, I’m a big fan of microbreaks: closing my eyes and taking three deep breaths.

Build the Muscle

The prefrontal cortex is highly malleable; it can rewire and grow new neurons readily. This means it’s open to improvement. I find it helpful to think of the brain as a bunch of muscles that can be strengthened through use.

“If you want more self-control, you can get more. And you get more self-control the same way you get bigger muscles—you’ve got to give it regular workouts.” –Heidi Grant Halvorson¹³

This means willpower challenges help us develop more willpower for the future. And on this, the researchers also agree. Here’s Baumeister:

“Exercising self-control in one area seemed to improve all areas of life. They smoked fewer cigarettes and drank less alcohol. They kept their homes cleaner. They washed dishes instead of leaving them stacked in the sink, and did their laundry more often. They procrastinated less. They did their work and chores instead of watching television or hanging out with friends first. They ate less junk food, replacing their bad eating habits with healthier ones.”⁴

And here’s McGonigal:

“studies have found that committing to any small, consistent act of self-control—improving your posture, squeezing a handgrip every day to exhaustion, cutting back on sweets, and keeping track of your spending—can increase overall willpower. And while these small self-control exercises may seem inconsequential, they appear to improve the willpower challenges we care about most, including focusing at work, taking good care of our health, resisting temptation, and feeling more in control of our emotions.”¹

There are loads of ways you can exercise your prefrontal cortex in order to strengthen it – skipping dessert, intermittent fasting, volunteering to be the designated driver – but the most well-documented method for training the PFC is meditation. Meditation “increases blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, in much the same way that lifting weights increases blood flow to your muscles.”¹

Here’s McGonigal reporting on the research:

“Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness. People who meditate regularly aren’t just [naturally] better at these things. Over time, their brains become finely tuned willpower machines. Regular meditators have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, as well as regions of the brain that support self-awareness.”¹

Rest and Recover

The muscle metaphor also brings us back to the cautious, middle-ground approach to the willpower debate discussed earlier. Muscles can be strengthened through use, but they can also be overworked to the point of failure.

“If we try to save our energy by becoming willpower couch potatoes, we will lose the strength we have. But if we try to run a willpower marathon every day, we set ourselves up for total collapse. Our challenge is to train like an intelligent athlete, pushing our limits but also pacing ourselves.” –Kelly McGonigal, Ph. D.¹

Rest and recovery are essential. Treat sleep as a priority rather than a luxury, spend time in nature, and take breaks during the workday. Sometimes you have to be your own parent, and put yourself down for a nap. And make sure your breaks from work are real breaks, not just more stimulation. Put your phone away and go for a walk in the park, listen to some relaxing music, or just sit and do nothing for a while.

Oh, and all those little moments of downtime throughout the day – you know, the ones that used to be filled with boredom but are now filled with smartphone activity – use them as opportunities for recovery. Again, airplane mode is helpful here.

If Baumeister is right, giving the prefrontal cortex a chance to rest restores your willpower for the next time you’ll need it. If Baumeister is wrong, then it’s just harmless rest that feels really good.

Keep it Healthy

Lastly, we need to prioritize brain health and PFC health specifically.

The #1 way to improve the fitness of your prefrontal cortex is physical exercise.

Here’s McGonigal again describing what the research has found:

“Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered. For starters, the willpower benefits of exercise are immediate. Fifteen minutes on a treadmill reduces cravings, as seen when researchers try to tempt dieters with chocolate and smokers with cigarettes. … When neuroscientists have peered inside the brains of new exercisers, they have seen increases in both gray matter—brain cells—and white matter, the insulation on brain cells that helps them communicate quickly and efficiently with each other. Physical exercise—like meditation—makes your brain bigger and faster, and the prefrontal cortex shows the largest training effect.”¹

So that’s another reason to include exercise in your morning routine.

It’s also important to dial in your nutrition. Eat a variety of vegetables, especially leafy greens, as well as berries and foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids.¹⁴ Consider incorporating turmeric into your diet¹⁵ and definitely avoid trans fats.¹⁶

Sugar is notoriously bad for the brain. Here’s just one reason, specific to willpower. The prefrontal cortex is highly sensitive to falling glucose levels,¹¹ which is why willpower often takes a dive when we’re hungry.⁴ Hence, it is a good idea to eat what Tim Ferriss calls a “slow-carb diet” that focuses on low-glycemic foods that release their carbohydrate calories slowly.¹⁷ Sugar, being a high-glycemic food, floods the bloodstream with glucose, triggering an insulin response and a “sugar crash.”¹¹ So although it may take willpower to resist sugar, you’ll also improve your near-term willpower if you can manage to avoid it.

Return on Investment

That last point about sugar points to a broader principle of willpower: many things that require willpower offer a return on investment greater than what you put in.

For example, building good habits takes willpower, but the reward is that these good behaviors eventually become automatic and no longer require willpower. Activities like exercise, prioritizing sleep, healthy eating, and meditating all take willpower, but they also increase your capacity for future willpower more than they drain your current willpower reserves.¹

The researchers may disagree on how exactly willpower works, but that shouldn’t stop us from investing our time wisely and approaching willpower strategically. As we’ve seen, there are many ways to improve the brain’s capacity for willpower and to reduce our dependence on willpower in the first place. We know these are good ideas, and we can start implementing them today.

¹ McGonigal, Kelly, Ph.D. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Avery, 2011.

² Swett Marden, Orison. An Iron Will. Wilder Publications, 2007.

³ Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Why Self-Control Is the Engine of Success. Back Bay Books, 2015.

⁴ Baumeister, Roy F. and John Tierney. Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Penguin Group, 2011.

⁵ Engber, Daniel. “Everything is Crumbling: An influential psychological theory, borne out in hundreds of experiments, may have just been debunked. How can so many scientists have been so wrong?” Slate. March 6^th, 2016.

⁶ Job, V., et al. (2010). “Ego depletion — Is it all in your head? Implicit theories about willpower affect self-regulation.” Psychological Science, 21(11), 1686–1693.

⁷ Achor, Shawn. The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work. Crown Business, 2010.

⁸ Millman, Dan. Everyday Enlightenment: The Twelve Gateways to Personal Growth. Grand Central Publishing, 1999.

⁹ Ben-Shahar, Tal. Psychology 1504: Positive Psychology. Harvard Open Course, 2009.

¹⁰ Guise, Stephen. Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.

¹¹ MacDonald, Matthew. Your Brain: The Missing Manual. O’Reilly Media, 2008.

¹² Siegel, Daniel J., M.D. Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. Bantam, 2010.

¹³ Halvorson, Heidi Grant. Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals. Hudson Street Press, 2010.

¹⁴ Aubele, Teresa, and Susan Reynolds. “Have You Fed Your Brain Today?” Psychology Today. September 7, 2011.

¹⁵ Perlmutter, David, MD. “Neurogenesis: How to Change Your Brain.” The Huffington Post. November 2, 2010.

¹⁶ Willet, Walter. “The Scientific Case for Banning Trans Fats.” December 13, 2013.

¹⁷ Ferriss, Timothy. The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat Loss, Incredible Sex and Becoming Superhuman. Harmony, 2010.