If you have been trying to lose weight and have not been successful then maybe you have to apply more will power into your efforts.

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explains that just one act of self-control reduces your ability to have self-control in another unrelated area. For example if you are prohibited to eat the chocolates that you can see right in front of you then your ability to do something else is adversely affected.

In the same manner that when subjects were told to suppress their reaction to a particular movie, they couldn’t solve an easy puzzle. The explanation for this is that you can only apply your will power on one action at a time. This explains why it is so difficult to stop eating and get a regular exercise at the same time. You don’t have the ability to use your will power on both occasions.

Research shows that your conscious mind can only process 50 bits of information per second, while your unconscious mind processes approximately 11 million bits per second. This means your unconscious mind processes information faster than your conscious mind.

The will power research is simply saying that your conscious mind is limited in its scope as compared to our unconscious mind.

Dr. George A. Miller of Princeton University, in his study proved that the conscious mind can only handle 7 pieces of information at a time.

Therefore the key to becoming successful in using your will power is to tap your unconscious mind.
In this scenario you need to get you unconscious mind like the kind of food that is recommended for people who want to lose weight. Here, we will apply the principles of psychology which are:

1. Positive association. This is the principle used by Ivan Pavlov in his experiment with the dog where he used positive reinforcement. He rewarded the dog everytime it was successful in the task given.

2. Priming involves the hints, photos, pictures that lead you to do a particular behavior. For example, very time you see a fast food advertisement, you are receiving a prime or a hint to do an action but this time it is something that is not good for you because it defeats the purpose of your trying to lose weight.

3. Power of ritual. Studies show that it takes 21 days to change a habit. And that is not an easy thing to do. You cannot just change overnight. So initially choose one easy activity that you can do on a daily basis which will help you lose weight. One very easy thing to do is to do some simple exercises in the morning then eat a light breakfast until you get used to that kind of routine.

If all else fails, you can also try hypnosis where you will use your unconscious mind to get what you want done.